How To Use Brand Archetypes To Connect With Your Customers.
Archetypes encompass your Brand’s overall personality and work as a mental shortcut to help you and your team create consistent, engaging messaging and content.
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Meet The 12 Brand Archetypes
Aligning your brand with identifiable archetypes will help everyone quickly understand what you offer and how to interact with you.
Everyperson
Stewardship, Altruism, Respect, Fairness, Accountability.
What Are Brand Archetypes?
Archetypes convey deeper meaning beyond just the individual words used to describe them. They access something deeper and richer in our psychology.
The modern concept of Archetypes was formalized by psychologist Carl Jung in the early 1900s, although some scholars trace the roots of the concept all the way back to Plato. More recently, the “Hero” archetype and the “Hero’s Journey” as a story archetype were explored in depth by Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces), and then further extended to business and branding by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson (The Hero and the Outlaw) and Margaret Hartwell and Jason Chen (Archetypes in Branding).
Archetypes are especially powerful for branding because they connect deeply with fundamental aspects of human psychology. Chances are that you can easily recognize and understand many archetypes in characters from your favorite books, TV shows, movies, and even in your own life.
This intuitive understanding is exactly the power that we’re looking to tap into.
Find Your Brand / Archetype Alignment
Your brand may align very strongly with a single archetype, or it may be better understood as a blend of two or three. In the case of multiple archetypes, it’s best to think of one as the “dominant” archetype and any additional archetype(s) as “supporting”.
For example, if your company isn’t about comedy or entertainment per-se, but you want humor to be part of your brand voice, you might consider the Jester archetype as a supporting second archetype that only accounts for 10% of the overall mix.
While it’s tempting to want to associate with the appealing qualities of many archetypes, doing so actually undermines your brand by making it less clear.
Click below for an exercise to select your brand archetypes:
How to Create Clear, Consistent Content With Brand Archetypes
Put Your Brand Archetypes Into Action
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