29 Apr A MUST IF YOU WANT TO CONNECT: Identify your Brand’s Archetype
A brand’s meaning—how it resonates in the consumer’s heart and mind—is a company’s most valuable competitive asset. And today, brands are not merely functional, but they are meaning and value. They don’t rely simply on the quality, performance, or visibility they attain. Instead, they depend on creativity, nourishing, and continuously reinterpreting a unique and compelling identity or meaning.
Archetypes are firms or images of a collective essence. In marketing, archetypes are the heartbeat of a brand because they provide the missing link between customer motivation and product preference. All marketers know that they need human motivations, needs, and desires to sell a product or service. And an archetypal brand identity aims directly at the deep psychic reasons on why to buy a product, imprinting it with a sense of recognition and meaning. Archetypes convey a meaning that makes customers relate to a product as if it were alive somehow; they have a relationship with it and care about it. Each brand archetype slots in with the familiar narratives we see and regularly experience in our culture.
Understanding and leveraging archetypal meaning is an intelligent resource to find a unique essence and language for a brand to build an effective marketing system. There was a time when successful brand building required nothing more than creativity to leverage its main difference, and brands were built on those differences. Today, it is not enough. In increasingly crowded and highly competitive categories, the cases in which brand differentiation could be based on clear product differences became almost nonexistent.
How to use archetypes for brand building and marketing communications? Archetypes are helpful in:
- Identifying the brand’s strengths and weaknesses related to its business purpose.
- Providing direction in marketing and communication actions to overcome any weaknesses in perception.
- Charting a path on the possibilities of strengthening a superficial brand personality.
- Maintaining focus in communications, from topics to approaching storytelling, language, tone and style.
- Opening possible paths for the evolution of the brand over time.
- Evaluating our concepts, content, and graphic proposals.
By identifying the specific archetype that a brand embodies, marketers can tap into what that brand’s clients consciously, or unconsciously, desire to experience. At their very essence, archetypes are story characters whose symbolic or personal significance evokes emotional reactions in the listener.
We use story archetypes to craft compelling content that aligns perfectly with our client’s brand personality. Still, we also go beyond the traditional story archetypes to develop our own.
Contact the team of brand-building experts at DMH Americas for communication strategies that drive business results and, in the meantime, get a little fun with this Jungian archetypes online test.
https://www.psychologistworld.com/tests/jung-archetype-quiz
SOURCES:
The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes.
Visual Capitalist: Brand Archetypes That Marketers Use to Get Your Attention.
Ebagdesign: Brand Archetypes: The Ultimate Guide with 48 Examples