Brand Archetype: Joe’s Expert Strategies for an Engaging Brand Persona

Hey there…

Hope you are doing great!

I am great, too; just excited about how things are unraveling for me. I have a booming Facebook business page, and my website is ready with awe-inspiring blog articles. Not just that. My ebook has received multiple clicks and downloads. I feel all charged up by the constant positive response I receive all over the online arena.

With this initial push, I want to focus on my brand presence. I don’t want to be just any brand but a brand with a distinct persona. I want my clients to have a focused perception of my business when they want to contact me.

So, today I’ll share how I determined my brand archetype and planning to strategize my brand based on it. I’ll dive deep into brand personality traits, brand archetypes, how they can help your business, and how to easily design marketing materials portraying your brand archetype.

What is Brand Strategy

Before discussing branding with archetypes, we’ll understand what I mean by strategizing brands.

If you think that just designing a logo establishes your brand identity, then you are wrong. Branding is more than that and encompasses many elements and factors. To establish your brand identity, you need a perfect brand strategy.

Hence, brand strategy can be seen as a long-term plan involved around your business to make your brand identifiable. It’s like taking small steps toward your sub-goals to reach the primary goal. A brand strategy also considers aspects such as consumer needs and emotions, along with competition. It decides on the right flavor to enhance the personality, cementing loyalty among the clients.

Now to create an emotional connection with your audience, you have to ask yourself:

What story does your Brand have to tell?

To answer this, let’s unfold brand personality, which will help us understand the 12 brand archetypes.

What is Brand Personality

You must first figure out your brand’s character to strategize your brand identity. In this section, we’ll perceive brands as a protagonist with a mission. For that, let’s dive into properly understanding the brand personality.

With brand personality, you are personifying your brand by imbibing human-like characteristics. This paradigm, set around your brand, structures how people perceive and connect. By depicting a personality, you already set a tone, voice, and identity for your brand, determining how it will be strategized and marketed. After all, your brand becomes the reflection of your target audience. Hence it needs to have the right personality, which will be in sync with the target consumers.

To understand this further, check the 5 main brand personality traits.

Brand Personality Traits

Although personalities are uncountable and can be varied, in terms of brand personalities, we have 5 major attributes. Let’s check one by one:

1. Excitement: This personality signifies brands that have a carefree appeal to themselves. They are youthful, spirited, and always ready to jump into an adventure of discoveries. The brands with such a characteristic include Coca-Cola, Nike, Red Bull, and Tesla.

2. Sophistication: This personality is all about having poise and style. These brands are elegant, which signifies class and status. Examples of these brands include Tiffany and Co., Rolex, Gucci, Apple, etc.

3. Sincerity: Brands here are usually compassionate, kind, down-to-earth, and have a strong sense of honesty and bonding. Examples include Disney, Hallmark, Amazon, Cadbury, etc.

4. Competence: Here, we are talking about brands that are hard-working, influential, reliable, and successful leaders. Examples are Google, Volvo, Intel, Microsoft, etc.

5. Ruggedness: It’s about being sturdy, tough, and robust, able to climb up the hardest steep. The brands here include Harley-Davidson, Timberland, Jeep, Marlboro, etc.

You can identify your brand personality and try calibrating the strategies and campaigns. But it does not stop here.

We shall now dive into a more exciting part of brand personality: a brand archetype.

What is a Brand Archetype

Psychologist Carl Jung was a visionary, especially in understanding personalities and character traits. His theory of 12 archetypes is used in almost every domain, even in theories around branding.

Now, what are brand archetypes?

You can have a specific personality as a brand, but how does this determine your brand’s role in your client’s life? This happens by categorizing them into different prototypes called Brand Archetypes.

Why Should You Use Brand Archetypes

Below are the prominent ways archetypal branding helps your business:

Create a More Impactful Brand Strategy

Your brand archetype is an intrinsic characteristic that your target audience readily associates with your brand. Although brand strategy is a big word and encompasses many factors, deciding these factors starts with determining your brand personality and archetype. Your brand’s fixed inherent identity and personality will help you define your brand style, craft marketing messages, and choose visual elements that reinforce your archetype.

Improve Your Brand Perception

Understanding and using your branding archetype while marketing your business helps you create a narrative around your brand. With that, you can establish an impressive brand identity that people emotionally resonate with. If you’re in the early stages of your business, building a brand archetype will help your target audience form a brand perception. The sooner you figure it out, the more time you’ll get to position your brand as a suitable archetype in the niche you serve. So, it helps you generate brand awareness in your business’s early phases and later strengthen that brand recognition.

Create a Stronger Connection 

The roles played by different brands in an individual’s life enhance the emotional connection with these brands.

What are the 12 Classic Brand Archetypes

We’ll dive into each brand archetype’s unique traits and see brand examples that represent them.

What do the 12 Archetypes Mean

1. The Innocent: These brands are associated with youthfulness. They are the archetype of goodness and happiness, having a moralistic outlook. Of many brands, Coca-cola is the perfect example. 

2. The Everyman: These brands are for everyone. Hence they belong and connect to all, setting no hierarchy. One of the best examples would be eBay.

3. The Hero: They are leaders who want to change the world for good. Hence they are characterized by their courage and valor, inspiring the world to make a difference. An example would be Nike.

4. The Rebel: They always challenge conventional ideas and norms because they want to play the game by their own rules. My favorite example would be Harley-Davidson.

5. The Explorer: These brands love discovering new experiences and are willing to take risks like Red Bull.

6. The Creator: The brands here love to create and invent, turning dreams into realities. My favorite example is Adobe.

7. The Ruler: These brands, like Mercedes-Benz, establish their authority through a keen sense of responsibility and order.

8. The Magician: They are all-time enchanters, taking you to a splendor-filled world. A perfect example is Disney.

9. The Lover: Intimacy is their virtue, filling your heart with intense passion and a desire to witness real beauty, just like the brand Victoria’s Secret.

10. The Caregiver: These brands are nurturers, compassionately protecting the world, just like Johnson & Johnson.

11. The Jester: These brands are bright and joyous, aiming to fill the ambiance with laughter and humor. One such mischievous brand would be Old Spice.

12. The Sage: Wise with experience, these brands are visionaries, guiding the seekers toward knowledge and insight, just like our favorite Google.

How to Determine Your Brand Archetype

Follow the below steps to start your journey of archetypal branding:

Consider Your Brand’s Mission, Vision, and Values

Think about the purpose behind your brand and what drives it to go on, and dig deep to clarify what it stands for. These are your brand’s foundation that will help you direct which archetype fits you best.

Understand Your Target Audience

Understand your target audience and their purchasing decisions. Communicate with them to understand their wants, needs, fears, goals, motivations, the specific reason they buy your products or similar other products. Learn about what emotional connection they feel for your brand, your competitor brands or their products. Understanding these from your consumer’s perspective will help you determine your role in their life. Eventually, this will bring out your brand archetype.

Build on the Strong Emotional Connection

Brand strategy starts with understanding your business and knowing your target audience. But, it never begins till you have a story to tell to the world that your clients can resonate with. After all, people do not connect to your product/services, which I am sure many more businesses are also providing. They connect with the emotions around the product/services, feelings that you unfurl with your story, which your clients can empathize with and be a part of. That widespread mutual involvement makes you a brand.

Joe Finds her Brand Archetype

Yes, I am excited to know where my brand fits. To get my brand personified, I delved further into my brand story.

I am a life coach. So my story is to help my clients find their direction in life. My job inspires people and pushes them out of their comfort zones. I encourage my clients to constantly challenge their limitations and counsel them to accept themselves the way they are (even their insecurities).

So, to find my brand personality, I think I fit perfectly in the characteristic that is based on Competence. Because my brand aims to make, its clients understand their truest potential. I’m creating future leaders that can understand themselves as who they are and live a life filled with happiness.

So my brand has a role based on nurturing people, which automatically fits me into the caregiver archetype.

Fun isn’t!

What’s more interesting is that this personification will now give me a clearer direction on how to proceed with my campaigns and marketing strategies. After all, it is all about how you present yourself as a brand and how this impacts your target customers.

After I have found the right characteristics for my brand, I’ll try to sort out all my design documents from DocHipo’s database in advance.

So let’s Jump into the next section!

How to Design Visuals for Portraying Your Brand Archetype

Now that I know my story, which has set my brand’s personality and archetype, I will decide on the visuals. For that, I have this incredible DocHipo platform to save me now and forever!

Let’s check which templates I can choose for portraying my brand as a competent caregiver.

Flyers

I chose this one from the Corporate Flyer Templates:

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After making a few customizations, check out how it looks now:

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Isn’t it amazing! A few changes, like the text and adding my brand logo on the second page, created magic.

Here’s how to change text in DocHipo.

Poster

I plan to start my workshops to promote my brand further. So keeping my brand persona in mind, I designed a poster that I will launch on my Facebook business page soon. 

So I used this elegant poster from the Advertising Poster Templates library:

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Then, I changed the background into something peaceful and meditative. After this, I customize the text to display the appropriate message. Also, I placed my logo in the top-left corner. So, this is how it looks:

Here’s how to create stunning background with DocHipo.

Social Graphic

I find social media graphics important for my business. Especially with the ever-increasing popularity of social media among all age groups, I think this platform is culminating into a potent tool for branding and marketing.

Although I am focusing on Facebook, I plan to expand into other social media platforms, like Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

For Facebook, I picked the below one from the Birthday Facebook Post Templates.

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Then I just changed the text, and voila!

For Instagram, I choose lovely Motivational Instagram Post templates:

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This post template was perfect! Hence downloaded the way it is. 

Even this one is so exceptional!

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For Twitter, I choose this post template:

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Then I just changed the text and background picture to meet the tone of my brand. This is how it looks:

I want to place testimonials for LinkedIn because they are the best way to showcase your veracity. At Dochipo, I got amazing testimonial templates, from which I chose this:

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Since I do not have an actual testimony as of now, so I will customize the text to show you the demo:

Isn’t it fantastic!

Also, I will launch my YouTube channel pretty soon, so let’s make a stunning-looking thumbnail for my channel.

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I just changed the text:

Here’s amazing ways to enhance your text.

Last Words…

Life is good when you have amazing templates to use for free. Once you enter the world of stunning templates, your senses will be flabbergasted with a desire to use it all. I love using these for marketing my brand. Honestly, I know these colorful visuals are helping me enhance my message to all my audiences. So, I feel blessed! What you need to do is sign up to DocHipo now to scale up your business by strategizing an amazing brand personality.