Brand Archetypes

Brand Archetypes along with the process I run:

Opportunity. Which archetype roles your category already owns, and which are still open.

Character. The open one you can credibly live.

Counterweight. The secondary that keeps the primary honest.

Expression: Expressed, suppressed, or distorted.

Naming your archetype is the easy part. Building the company to live it is the challenge. Episode 8.

Transcript

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Picture a pair of sneakers. Just do it. Black. Nike. Right? Now picture a motorcycle. Rugged, big Harley Davidson. Now the difference between the two isn't separately just the shoe versus the bike. It's the kind of person that each of the brand has agreed to become. The archetype. Nike's a hero. Harley is an outlaw. And those are separate archetypes, not adjectives. So these characters draw from the oldest patterns in storytelling. The best brands in the world use them and it helps them make every decision, from voice to identity and marketing and strategy. Today we're going to talk about brand archetypes. This is probably the most misunderstood framework in branding. Most try to just treat this like it's the gospel and it's the only thing you need, or they just skip it entirely. And really both is wrong. You use it well, and it is one of the strongest tools you'll have. So today I'm going to show you how. Brand archetypes is a recurring pattern that we've seen throughout history, across different cultures. It's essentially the character that we didn't know was there. So let's see what the archetypes are. We have hero, outlaw, sage, lover, caregiver, ruler, magician, innocent, explorer, creator, jester, and the everyman. These are the 12 of them. The idea goes back from Carl Jung and even older still, but the archetype system and the way it's marketed came recently from this book in 2001 from the book Hero and the Outlaw, where Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson talked about it and kind of gave this as a marketing and branding framework. That was foundational text. And so the premise is simple. Humans tell stories the same way across every culture, and you already know the cast, you already know the characters, right? So we have a hero who saves the village. We have an outlaw who burns down the establishment because of what they're doing. You have a sage on the top of a mountain who brings wisdom and insight. And you have a lover who's so passionate that she ends up ruining things or fighting for things. And you've met all of these characters before in every movie, every myth and story and narrative, every bedtime story. These characters are not invented by each of the writers. They're archetypes, they're in our unconsciousness. They are pulled from the shared library underneath the language. Carl Jung called this the collective unconsciousness. But the point is that humans recognize these characters faster than really anything else. And that recognition is a tool for branding. And when brand reads a clear archetype, the customer absorbs it. They remember it more than the brand that's trying to do everything and be everyone for everyone. A brand archetype is not what your brand says, it's it's the character that your brand has agreed to play. It's not so much your positioning in the type of content, it's more who your character is. Archetype is one phase among the brand strategy sequence. It's not the entire sequence. Brand archetype happens after your ICP page when you're building out the category, and in the next phase, you're gonna build out your archetype so that you have a more complete brand system. Archetypes have stuck around from even before 2001, even though there's many competing frameworks, right? And the reason for this is because they short circuit cognition, they're easily remembered. They make brands easier to recognize, understand, and to remember. You watch a commercial and you're you see a story, and your your brain is always looking for patterns, and it matches patterns based off sequences it's seen before, and then it'll match one to a previous archetype. It understands, ah, this is what a hero says. And it understands that character and it ends up trusting that brand more familiar. It looks like, it looks and sounds like a hero, you know, uh, and it knows that type of person and ends up trusting it. Maybe it's the dramatic music, maybe it's the underdog or the cult to action, to call to fight for something, right? The slow rise from overcoming. And that brand never really had to explain itself. The archetype really does the work for them. The shortcut is really the whole game. A clear archetype gets absorbed and remembered and trusted faster. A brand with no single character trying to be everything ends up paying for it longer. So people trust what they can read, they trust what they can recognize. When a brand is hard to figure out and hard to read, they end up just skipping it and rather than trying to put additional intention on what it is or what it couldn't be. So the payoff is similar to what a clear ICP is or good positioning work. You end up having lower acquisition, you end up having higher conversion, you're having better pricing power, better retention, and you have clear differentiation, right? So this is really the point of the brand archetypes and some of the power. So let's go through and we'll just talk about the processing. How do we start from choosing and bringing it to life? Now, the first job in finding a brand archetype is actually to look at the industry and to see what the opportunity is. So look in the bottled water industry, for example, what are the common themes? Well, the common themes is you have a lot of caregivers, you have a lot of innocent, you have a lot of these type of things. Now, how you know, in the common themes of those types of brand archetypes, how do you become a category outlier? Where is the opportunity? So that's the first phase. Figure out where the opportunity is. You pick your character based off of where the opportunity is, not based off of what you inherently like or what you inherently feel safe. If you pick what you inherently like, what inherently feels safe, you end up, you often end up being like everybody else. So the goal in being a category outlier ends up you being able to build a story that really feels different, right? Just a way like liquid death, right? Liquid death ended up being a hero and an outlaw in in an industry that was full of caregivers and innocent uh brand archetypes. First, you look at the opportunity, number two, then you pick your character. And then the last phase is really to do the audit. So the audit can be done externally or internally. Depends if you're setting this up for the first time. And so the audit works in three phases: externally, internally, and then also when you're thinking about internally, I want you to specifically think about your employer branding and what you're using for recruiting and what your HR looks like internally in your company. So that audit is your expression. We put this into three categories: expression, suppression, and distorted. A lot of times people skip this, but this is a way that you end up bringing it further to life. So start with the industry in which you live in, right? So who owns what? Who has the hero? Who has the sage? What is the most common denominator? Who has the ruler? Most categories end up clustering around just two or three brand archetypes, and they leave many and open in plain sight. This is where your opportunity lives. You settle the customer. If you've already settled your ICP, this is also where you can build out, okay, now what is that unique personality looks like. So you say which one is open and which one is end up being credible for you. Now don't confuse this by what's safe because what's safe makes you not become a category outlier. So now you pick your character. Once you pick your character, the character ends up telling you a lot more information. The 12-brand archetypes can be separated and divided by four different categories. The first category would be leave a legacy. The archetypes that do that would be the hero, the outlaw, and the magician. And then number two is pursue connection. The archetypes are lover, jester, and every man. And then number three, there's provide structure. And the archetypes that do that is the caregiver, ruler, and the creator. And then the last one is the brands that seek meaning. And the brands that seek meaning are the innocent, the sage, and the explorer. So you pick the one that you can actually live in and the one that your brand can become. Not the one that you feel the most comfortable with, but the one that your brand can stand through and you find market potential in being different there. Sometimes the most useful archetypes isn't one that your brand's intentionally being, it's the secondary one, which is what we call the counterweight. But let's bring this into life as an example. Tesla talks like a magician, but it behaves like an outlaw, and it sells to people who want to feel like early believers in the future. And that tension is what makes the brand so powerful, but also feels daring. Right now, Disney does the opposite. However, there's similarities. It looks like innocent from a distance, but the operating system underneath is really a magician. The happiness is the surface. The promise underneath is really transformation, the magic of it all. So the moment you land on the archetype, you inherit a profile, and that profile gives you different features and gives you additional information. It gives you a drive, a fear, and what it wants to run away from and the strategy of what it can use to win. So that profile gives you additional strength. So if you think about Nike as the brand archetype, the hero, the brand archetypes already gives it a few key points. Number one, drive. So this is to prove worth through action. Number two, fear. The fear of being ordinary or being beaten. Number three, strategy. Now, the strategy for being a hero is to take the hard assignment first and to be the one to be seen to do it. To be the one that dares to fight against the enemy. Now, we didn't need to invent that. Nike didn't need to invent that. Hero already has that. The character hands it to you by you choosing it, and all those decisions become easier. And so what ends up giving more dynamism is that no one brand survives a pure archetype by itself. So a pure hero can just become like a motivational poster. And so that doesn't give it too much life. A pure caregiver can feel like a hospital ad. So the counterweight is what the secondary character that gives the brand a little bit more edge, a bit more complexity, a little bit more runway. Some call this the shadow character. However, the reason why I like to avoid the term shadow is that shadow implies darkness to it. And it's really the goal isn't to bring darkness to it, the goal is actually to give it balance so that it's not just a hero, but it's also a magician, for example. It's to bring more depthness to it, just the way human beings are. We're not a soul unit all of the time. And most movie characters are like this as well. So Nike's hero carries a streak of the outlaw there, right? Apple's creator carries a streak of the magician. So you pick a counterway that complements your primary, not the one that really contradicts it, but the one that works well with it, the one that feels unified with it when you think about your expression that your brand wants to take. So to do a quick recap, we went through the opportunity to find it in the marketplace. Number two, we picked the character and the character giveaway to life. And number three, we found the counterway, right, to help balance it out. What's the secondary archetype? And then what we like to do as a studio is the audit. And so this is to hold up a mirror one thing and says, okay, what is actually happening? Is the brand being expressed? Is it being suppressed? Or is it being distorted? Now, nobody sees themselves clearly from inside. This reading typically comes from outside, right? There's a famous quote that says, A package can't design itself from the inside, right? A bottle doesn't know what it should look like from inside the bottle. That's why it needs help from the outside. This is a diagnostic that our studio run. Opportunity finds the opening character counterweight names who've you become, and expression audits is whether or not you're actually living this out throughout all your touchborne. Naming the character is really only half the job, right? If you claim this from the outside, then what comes into the inside of the brand? Hold on that. What does that look like from employer branding to internal brand operations to really external? So brands that are expressed are the brands that we all know. You think about Nike, you think about Harley Davidson's. They're the ones that are expressed well and the brands are being recognized and the character is real. The suppressed brands are when the character is true inside the company, but the market really can't feel it yet. The signal is too quiet. And distorted brands are the brands that the characters externally, but the company does not live it internally. Or there's some sort of mismatch between what's inside and what's outside. And so when a brand has uh real strength, it lives what it is on the outside and it matches what's on the inside. Now, naming your archetype is really the easy part. You build a company to live it in the job. So in 2026, think about what Apple is today. Apple talks about privacy and security. Apple works on a need-to-know basis. Third-party vendors are not allowed to ever say the word Apple. They can't. When they are working with Apple on the phone in emails, they are not allowed to use the word Apple. Secondly, employees, when they go out to eat with other employees and they're speaking with other colleagues, they're not allowed to just have a conversation about whatever they're working on. They have an app that has information disclosed about what are the talking points they are allowed to communicate with other Apple employees. Right? So that tells them what they can discuss and what they should avoid talking about. The whole brand is built on an as to need-to-know basis. So in the badges, you know, the badges they stop working. Like not every employee is allowed to go through every door. Projects carry code names. People don't know what the new releases are are going to be until literally the day that they release. Even Apple employees themselves don't know. Suppliers are told to not say the Apple word out loud. They can't say it in conversation, they can't say it in email. So that's an expression, that's the audit. You can see how their external is matching the inside. The alignment between what you say on the outside and what you are on the inside. Apple is such a great example of this being lived out. And that's the whole point of the three. The external brand, what the customers are taught to expect, and the internal brand, what the employees are trained and rewarded and allowed and or forbidden to do. Now, the employer brand is the bridge really between the two where the recruiting ends up happening. When these three components agree, that archetype is real. So if your brand is built on security and security looks like inside the building, well, what does that look like? How are the people trained? How do they have access? Who what gets protected by policy and not just by the language? Where does your differentiator live throughout the proof points? Right? Making it real above and beyond. Now, if it's built on care, what does that look like when nobody's watching? How does a support team handle a mistake? Now, how does the company treat somebody on their worst day? If you're based on care, does that look like how does that look like when you're talking to your employees? Are you also speaking what you're being on the outside? Say the archetype, and then you have a direction, but then you have cascading decisions that echo throughout the brand that needs to be worked on. Enforce it and you have an ownable, distinct personality that is really easily recognized and that it's true and honest to who you are. So that's what a brand archetype exercise includes. You map the opportunity, you pick the character and the counterweight, and then you audit whether it's expressed, suppressed, or distorted until the brand is real and specific. We are the hero brand, is where most companies stop, but they never really end up thinking further on what that looks like on the execution from above and beyond. Right? This exercise doesn't stop there, it goes all the way through the mirror. Now, archetypes are not the gospel, they are not the whole brand, but they are the fastest way to know that you're making a brand legible to other humans in under three seconds and they can immediately recognize what kind of personality that you have. When a brand chose an archetype that's a category outlier, that gives it a lot of persuasive power and future brand potential, right? And it lets it be recognized much easier. Next episode, we move from character to persuasion. Archetypes name who the character is. Persuasion is his execution. So not just the character, but how it's going to win people over, the story it tells, the enemy it names, the stakes it raises, and the language that it ends up repeating over and over again. And that's where we go next. So pick some brand, run the process through for the brand archetypes. We build the brandarchetypes.com, so feel free to check it out. If you land somewhere that surprises you, come and tell me. Strange reads are some of my favorites. And so have fun. Have fun with it. A lot of the fun is actually arguing about it. And if you want a whole library of the 12, it's all there on the brandarchetypes.com. All right, talk soon.