The Alchemic Role of the Archetype to Conjure Your Brand
There is a magical moment in the invention and development of a brand where you define your audience at an elemental level, and the seeds of sustained business growth are sown.
As we know, a brand does not exist except in the consciousness and perceptions of its consumers. So the act and art of crafting a persona is one of near god-like power, as it is the first step of literally conjuring up a living, breathing entity from tiny shreds of truth. This must be entered into with great care, sensitivity, and, above all, empathy.
In the efficiency age, many organizations applied systems thinking to audience definition. It makes sense to deploy militaristic processes to the acts of manufacturing and even marketing. These require organization of functions and physical matter that benefit from speed and scale. But the germination of a brand is a highly fragile, near-miraculous process in which speed, scale, and efficiency have no place. In fact, these elements have a knack for killing the magic.
Rather than treating this phase like a production line, which won’t yield the spark required to animate a brand into existence, instead think about this more akin to how an artist, director, or famous chef begins to bring a great work to life. Their job is to use feeling, love, and imagination to will their muse into existence. When they fail, it is clear to all. Because creativity cannot emerge from a process that doesn’t care about humans.
When we help brands with their archetypes, we begin by borrowing processes and techniques from the masters of emotion and truth. A director wouldn’t cast a character without seeing her truly inhabit the role. So why should a brand define its audience without a full-bodied immersion in its muse? This is the seed from which your whole world grows. Your brand, your product strategy, your voice, your hiring brief. So poor nourishment and reflection at this phase will produce a stunted brand that will never live up to your expectations.
Your job as a brand parent is to bring into the world the strongest and most compelling child that can grow and flourish. As with the best modern parenting, your kids don’t turn out that well when you project manage, segment, dictate, and target. But when they are inspired, nurtured, animated, encouraged, and given agency for imagination, fully rounded entities emerge. The same is true for brands.
Businesses spend billions of dollars trying to build entire lines, categories from forensically designed ‘segments,’ yet they rarely touch the human at the core of these decisions, instead opting for arms-length methods that segment, define and gingerly observe ‘targets’ from such a clinically safe distance that you will never smell their breath, hear their inner thoughts or feel their true desires.
Furthermore, the job of building archetypes so often refers to the multibillion-dollar segmentation industry, where the mission to essentially reduce marketing wastage inadvertently segregates consumers into disconnected groups. This artificial faux-science completely misses the truth about humans: That we cosplay different roles from one moment to the next. We try on and take down identities like outerwear. Enduring brands know that you aren’t separating or balkanizing people, you are uniting them through shared, universal primal desires. So the job for your research practitioners isn’t to merely observe behaviors, but to connect to the human condition that underpins that behavior.
If you want to understand a human, you need to embody them. Feel their fears, sense their souls. Isn’t this how a great storyteller or artist would do it? Wouldn’t she get into character or force you into it? Wouldn’t the best performer inhabit the role through method acting?
People feel other people. The best brands have that feeling etched into their souls.
This is how we reveal the essence of our human archetypes. Not by sealing them into neat little segments and suffocating them with sterile labels and impregnable definitions. But by releasing them, animating them, making them perform, sing, and fly off the page so that their true soul and inner desires hit you in the heart. When you trigger the human to show up, you have a powerful dynamo at the core of your business that helps your brand thrive for generations.
Here are three ways you can build an empathetic muse and reenergize your brand.
Role play & personification: Asking participants to ‘dress up’ either as brands, imagined consumers, or even other versions of themselves to more laterally articulate their feelings is a great way to map where they are perceptually.
Inversion. Freud used this trick in the early 20th century to understand sexuality. But it’s sometimes much easier to define who or what something is by eliciting what it isn’t. This immediately generates momentum from which participants gain energy for a more poetic and thorough definition of what something is.
Music and metaphor bypass logic and allow people to express from the gut. Ask participants to build a soundtrack for the brand or write a poem from the perspective of the audience. These creative acts reveal the inner world of the archetype in ways that feel raw & real. And they reveal a layer of humanity that verbalizing struggles to capture.
At the end of the day, brands don’t live in spreadsheets or presentations; they live in the hearts and minds of feeling humans. The more you honor the artist behind the audience, the stronger and more authentic your brand will be.