Brand archetypes: an introduction (part 1)

The first of a three part series that introduces the concept of Brand Archetypes (parts 1 and 2) and explores how to apply it to DAOs (part 3)

How does Brand relate to Purpose?

Today, there is an increasing acknowledgement that purpose defines both the direction of the organisation and its course, rather than simply messaging.

Going forward, we can expect purpose to only increase in importance as people look for greater meaning, greater understanding, and greater clarity on the organisation they work for, the organisations they engage with, and the brands and services they use.

Rather than fitting a brand around a product, the strongest brands of tomorrow are building capabilities around a brand truth – the overarching promise or positive ideology that the brand has the credibility to enact (a credibility derived from the authentic expression of the organization’s purpose).

Under such an approach, the brand effectively acts as a central organizational principle – the truth which brings everything together (therein lies the link between purpose, brand, and organisational design).

In sum, without a deep understanding of your organization’s purpose (DAO or otherwise), as well as how to authentically express it (mission / vision / guiding principles), it is impossible to effectively communicate your brand truth; this in turn compromises your ability to build the most authentic product.

Rephrasing and synthesizing the above:

To communicate effectively, it is essential to first engage in enough self-reflection to identify who you are, what you value, and what you want to achieve in the world.

The next step is to recognize the archetype that best captures your inner allegiances and develop marketing strategies congruent with those allegiances. This congruence is what will draw people to you.

The importance of meaning

The meanings held by the most enduring brands are like primal assets that must be managed as carefully as financial investments.

Big, enduring brands become icons – not just of corporations, but of whole cultures. Coca-Cola not only has one of the most recognized logos in the world, but the logo has become a symbol of the American way of life.

Today the brand is a repository, not merely of functional characteristics, but of meaning and value.

The meaning of a brand is its most precious and irreplaceable asset. Whether you're selling a soft drink or a presidential candidate, what your brand means to people will be every bit as important as its function – if not more so – because it is meaning that tells us "this one feels right" or "this one's for me." This is especially true in an open source world where everything is freely copyable.

In a nutshell, meaning speaks to the feeling or intuitive side of the public; it creates an emotional affinity, allowing the more rational arguments to be heard.

What are Brand Archetypes?

Brand Archetypes can be thought of as the first system for the understanding and management of meaning for brands – be they products, services, organizations, or causes.

They were first written about 20 years ago, in the seminal book: the Hero and the Outlaw. And are in fact founded on Jungian archetypes.

Forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as individual products of unconscious origin
– C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion

These are imprints, hardwired into our psyches, that influence the characters we love in art, literature, the great religions of the world, and contemporary films.

Plato called these imprints elemental forms and saw them as the idea structures that formed a template for material reality. Jung called them archetypes.

The theory, as applied to branding, goes as follows:

• Anyone associating meaning with a product has already moved onto archetypal terrain (whether they are aware of it or not).

• Archetypal meaning is what makes brands come alive for people. Put another way, archetypes are the heartbeat of a brand because they convey a meaning that makes users relate to a product as if it actually were alive in some way.

• Brands that become truly iconic are archetypal through and through. And the best archetypal brands are – first and foremost – archetypal products, created to fulfill and embody fundamental human needs.

List of Brand Archetypes

Here is the list of the 12 possible archetypes, along with a one sentence description of how the Archetype in question helps people, followed by an example.

Archetype : Helps People : Example

Creator : Craft something new : Tesla / Apple (under Steve)

Caregiver : Care for others : Unicef

Ruler : Exert control : Hugo Boss

Jester : Have a good time : Old Spice

Regular Guy : Be OK just as they are : Ikea

Lover : Find and give love : Godiva

Hero : Act courageously : Nike

Outlaw : Break the rules : Harley Davidson

Magician : Affect transformation : Dyson

Innocent : Retain or renew faith : Dove

Explorer : Maintain independence : North Face

Sage : Understand their world : BBC

Why are Archetypes so effective?

Joseph Campbell and other students of mythology maintain that the various myths and archetypes found all around the world are basically expressions of the inner human drama.

We can understand them as different expressions of an eternal impulse to find a human meaning in the mystery of creation.

We recognise them because we have been programmed to do so.

If you have only a few seconds to get your message across – as with an ad, tweet, or web page, you can do so more effectively if your message taps into the stories we all know already.

In the view of Jung, Campbell, and others, we come into life instinctually resonating to these archetypal stories because of the very ways in which our minds are configured.

Practically speaking, this means the meaning of a product can be communicated very quickly simply by evoking a story or a concept that calls forth the viewer's instinctual recognition of some fundamental recognizable truth.

Put another way, Archetypes are the "software" of the psyche. One archetypal program or another is active and engaged at all times.

For example, some people live constantly from the perspective of the "don't fence me in" Explorer, or the "my way or the highway" Ruler. These archetypes can be seen as the default mode for such individuals.

Brands that are associated with each of these archetypes will feel right and comfortable to the people who express them and lend meaning to their lives in some interesting way.

Another thing worth noting here is that archetypal stories bear repeating. You can tell them over and over, and people will not be bored. That's what it means to tap into an archetypal story pattern.

The best archetypal stories operate across different levels of understanding. For example, embedded in every great fairy tale is an emphasis on character that is recognized easily by a complex person, even though someone who is more shallow and underdeveloped may miss it.

e.g. Cinderella is not only loving, but has the capacity for virtue and hard work. The prince is not only charming; he also has enough soul and perseverance to search throughout the kingdom for a woman he met only once.

Examples from the entertainment industry

Celebrities in film and entertainment, and the agents who manage them, understand that their continued popularity does not hinge simply on the quality or success of the films they make or the visibility they attain.

Rather, it depends on creating, nourishing, and continuously reinterpreting a unique and compelling identity or "meaning".

Madonna changes her lifestyles and hairstyles but she is always the outrageous Rebel. Offscreen and on, Jack Nicholson is the bad boy Outlaw. Tom Hanks imbues every role he plays with the spirit of the wide-eyed Innocent.

These identities are not only consistent, they are compelling. Love them or hate them, you can't help but notice them. In fact, we can't help but be mesmerized by who they are and what they implicitly stand for.

News stories that really grip public attention always have an archetypal quality. Similarly, films that are box office hits almost always have archetypal structures. Sometimes the writer, director, and producer simply intuit the archetype. Sometimes they are guided by a conscious system.

The Star Wars series holds endless appeal, in no small part due to Joseph Campbell's influence on George Lucas – Lucas was especially marked by the ideas contained in the book The Hero with a Thousand faces' which clearly outlines the rich and evocative stages of the Hero's journey.

The popularity of each episode is derived in large part from the way Lucas consciously crafts the entire series to convey archetypal characters and mythic plots.

Interestingly, products grab – and keep – our attention for the same reason as characters in a film: they embody an archetype. Or so the theory goes.

Quantitative evidence

In a seminal paper from 20 years ago (The Hero and the Outlaw, pp. 26-30), Young & Rubicam's analysts discovered that the strength of a brand's association with an archetype makes a significant difference in at least one fundamental indicator of true economic worth: asset valuation.

They explored changes in Market Value Added (MVA) and Economic Value Added (EVA) for a set of 50 well-known and highly regarded brands (American Express, Disney, Kodak, Heinz, Harley Davidson, The Gap) between 1993 and 1999.

The analysis showed that the MVA of those brands strongly aligned with a single archetype rose by 97% more than the MVA of confused brands (those with a strong secondary archetype). They also found that the EVA of strongly aligned brands grew at a rate 66% greater than that of the EVA of weakly-aligned brands.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is what the data revealed about the importance of a single coherent archetype in successfully determining identity and influencing performance.

This defied the conventional "pick some characteristics from column A and some from column B" practice of creating brand identity at the time.

How to leverage them?

Successfuly organisations are so generally because all the archetypes are expressed somewhere within them. Yet, for a brand identity to be compelling it needs to be simple and easy to recognise. This means that brand identities are forged best by identifying solidly with one archetype (even though there may be other undertones present).

Organizations tend to do best when they are explicit about the archetype that is truest to their values, mission, and vision – and allow that archetype to shine and draw others in.

Importantly, and perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, there needs to be a strong congruence between contributor culture and brand identity.

Archetypes are strange attractors of consciousness. You attract people when your message is congruent with an archetype that is either dominant or emerging in their consciousness. So the archetype you settle on needs to both feel true to you, and be rooted in something that's at least emergent within your public's consciousness.

To quote from the Hero and the Outlaw:

Brand identity for an organization is like the persona for an individual. It is the image we present to the world.

When an individual's persona is too different from the reality of the self, he or she becomes neurotic. So, too, with organizations: if their brand identity and their actual internal culture, policies, and procedures are discordant, they become unhealthy. As a consequence both contributor morale, and credibility with consumers and stakeholders begin to plummet.

Once you've settled on an archetype, much of what you do should then re-inforce that archetype.

In a sense it should begin to serve as a magnet to organize all the information users, stakeholders, and contributors have about the organization; their own internal filters will likely discard the rest – unless the information is so blatantly antithetical to your avowed identity as to call attention to the discrepancy (think Gitcoin's Shell fiasco).

Your archetypal identity should be expressed not only on social media, but in product design and placement, as part of your organizational identity, on your website, in the talks you give, in your contributor policies, and in your orientation programs for new contributors. The resulting congruence is what will attract both users and contributors to you.

As an added bonus, the strongest shield against unflattering images coming from the media, competitors, or other groups is a strong archetypal personality. You can think of this as a superpower that can help you weather dramatic negative publicity.

In part 2 I'll cover a couple of Archetypes in depth to give you a better feel for what this means