Reveal Your Brand With Archetype Power!
Are you a sage? A rebel? A magician?
These may sound like superheroes, but they’re actually just a few of the branding archetypes that can offer you a quicker path to your authentic brand voice.
Here’s how.
The Importance of Branding
Branding helps you create an authentic message that resonates with your ideal clients. It’s everything that expresses the distinct personality of your company. It’s about the language you use, your logo, the color palette of your website, and more.
Having an intentional branding process that clearly defines the values, mission, and vision of your business is crucial. But there are an overwhelming number of paths your branding journey can take. Your brand personality could be like the helpful next-door neighbor, the dangerous bad boy/girl, the nerdy scientist, or so many other things.
To help our clients find the path most likely to lead to their most authentic, effective brand, we have them take our brand archetype quiz.
What’s a Brand Archetype Anyways?
Brand archetypes are 12 personality types common to both people and organizations. They are based on Carl Jung’s work and recently made popular in marketing by Mark and Pearson. Each brand archetype tends to have specific motivations and attitudes. Sage is common for educational businesses while companies focused on the arts often use a Creator brand.
Archetypes are signposts pointing to your brand. Knowing that you’re a mix of Hero and Sage doesn’t give you a brand, but it tells you what direction to go.
Will the Archetype Approach Help My Business?
Archetype approaches work best for solopreneurs and small and mid-sized companies that haven’t worked extensively on their brand. Large corporations like Coca-Cola do use elements of archetypes in their brands but they use a lot of other branding disciplines as well.
Here are some indications that the archetype approach could help you:
You’ve heard about branding, but you’ve never done anything to consciously define yours.
You’ve mostly focused on the visual aspects of your branding, like your logo and website colors, but not on your message.
You’ve had a hard time narrowing down a few values that are really important to you in your business.
People have indicated that they don’t understand what you do.
You’re struggling to define your ideal client.
You attract people who are a wrong fit for your offerings.
You have trouble getting outside your own head.
There’s never a bad time to work on your brand, but a popular time to do so is during a website overhaul. It’s a perfect time to consider not just a new design but a new, more powerful and consistent approach to messaging.
How We Use Archetypes
When we work on revealing your brand, we have you take our free archetype quiz, which will determine your top 3 archetype results. We then discuss the archetypes and ask if the results resonate with you.
This check-in is very important. Some marketers who aren’t fans of the archetype approach complain that businesses don’t fit neatly into a single archetype, that a quiz oversimplifies the process, or that the approach doesn’t focus enough on the actual needs of potential clients.
And if we just had you take our quiz and built your whole brand based on your single top archetype, they’d be right. You wouldn’t even need us - you could just take the quiz and do it all yourself!
But archetypes are just a tool, one of many we use during the branding process - a jumping-off point that leads to deep conversations with our clients.
There are Many Ways to Find the Path
Some people take the quiz and have a eureka moment. They exclaim, YES, this describes me perfectly! But honestly - some don’t.
We had one client who took the quiz twice, got entirely different results each time, and said he thought he was probably all the archetypes. And this is fine; some businesses may have elements of a half dozen archetypes within them. But the quiz always gives us a starting point before we dig deeper and learn more about your business, your values, your goals, and your ideal clients.
Take the First Step to Reveal Your Brand
If you haven’t taken our short, fun and FREE quiz yet, now is a great time. If you’ve taken it and want to learn how to unleash the power of your results, hop into the nearest phone booth and give us a call!