You Can Call Me
Queen Bee
DATELINE: BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
Not for the first time, I’m on a Billboard! You might recall from last time, when Blackboard Fridays had a Billboard thanks to Valley Edge, that I said “for our small business, we may not do it again”. So what happened…?
Nothing quite as flash as my previous incarnation. Our daughter’s school was looking for Movie Night sponsors, and as the only parent with a Guinness World Record for movie watching I felt beholden to splash some cash. In exchange we scored the Como logo on some fliers, and the school billboard.
It wasn’t deliberate, but what 3 things did I learn from being on a Billboard for a second time?
- The ROI still doesn’t seem great for a boutique service business.
- 5 year old’s can’t be trusted to take marketing photos (see below – and you thought my selfie lens flare was bad!).
- We’ve loved rolling out Como branding, but need to go deeper into our Brand Strategy. Which is perfect timing for this week’s Blackboard Fridays episode, see below!
Blackboard Fridays Episode #72 – What’s Your Brand Archetype
In Blackboard Fridays episode 63, we looked at Positioning your business using the market matrix. We talked about how in modern society, we are also completely overwhelmed by advertising. A figure I shared was 5,000 advertising messages a day that each of us are bombarded with – and if you can’t count all of those, then that’s just further evidence of how much we ignore so much of the advertising that hits us.
Today we’re going to talk about one critical element of neuromarketing, a way that you can position your brand in the marketplace to leverage your potential customers’ own brain to help reinforce the value that you can bring. And we’re using the framework Brand Archetypes.
Take the Online Brand Archetype Quiz
I’m going to recommend at the end of this that you head over to Brandonian.com and undertake their brand archetype indicator.
So what’s your Archetype? And why is this valuable?
As you prepare to take that quiz, or if you want to compare your ‘gut feel’ with the results you score, let me walk through the different archetypes your business is … or needs to be.
Here’s the concept behind Brand Archetypes.
We as humans are hard-wired pattern recognition machines. If you’ve been to see any of the Star Wars movies you know that when somebody shows up dressed in white, that they’re the good guy, and when somebody shows up dressed in black, they’re the bad guy. Our brain connects those messages on such a fundamental level that the filmmaker doesn’t need to explain it anymore.
Brand Archetypes takes that power by positioning your business at a specific point where it can be clearly and immediately recognised, and therefore resonate.
This is achieved by breaking down two different, competing human needs.
Part of our Brand & Marketing project –
aligning your Brand delivers a greater ROI when investing in marketing
The Up-Down axis looks at Mastery, Stability at the top, and at the other end Risk, trying something new. We as humans are compelled to want both of those things at different times. We want stability in our life and we want to take risk. We innately recognise and connect with those drives.
The other axis, Left-Right, tracks our desire to Belong to something with our desire to be Independent, an individual. Again, human needs want both of those things.
When we align each of the combinations possible from those two axes, like points on a compass, we end up with 12 points on the matrix. Each of these twelve points represents a fundamental balance within your brain. So when we position a character, an archetype, at any of those points you instinctively have an emotional relationship with the archetype already.
What Are the Twelve Brand Archetypes?
If you do some searching for “what are the different Brand Archetypes” you will find many Lists. This is a fundamental mistake many practitioners in the Brand space make – they understand the Content, but not the Context – they don’t know why Archetypes work the way they do. And so they think just having different characters (including others not on this compass) will work just as well!
It’s essential when defining your Brand using this neuromarketing approach that you understand why it works so powerfully.
So having marked each of those twelve points, we can develop exactly what each signifies. Take the very top – that’s Stability, not attempting to take Risks, and balanced between Belonging and Independence. At this point the real need is control, power, to rule – and this is known as the ‘Ruler’ archetype.
Microsoft is a fantastic example of a Ruler Archetype that is a little bit too big for its boots – they stabilised the PC market to the point where they were actually tried for anti-competitive practices!
At the other end of that spectrum, sitting at the bottom in a Risk space, trying something new, is the 1980s and 1990s version of Apple. This is the Apple that smashed the IBM Big Brother in the famous Super Bowl ad of the early 1980s and then in the 1990s challenged the Microsoft PC hegemony by suggesting that we could have coloured computers!
Rather than the Ruler, this Archetype is the Hero to help you to try something new. And of course you can see with the Apple example how these things can change in a business over time, how Apple is now one of the most valuable companies in the entire world, they themselves have become a ‘Ruler’ within the smartphone market.
So these are just 2 of the Brand Archetypes, to help you understand the concept. Next week I will explore all 12 Brand Archetypes in more detail.
Before you watch that video, remember to head over to Brandonian. Not only can you complete an indicator that will give you an idea of where your business sits in these different archetypes but you can read a little bit more about it these differences, about what makes each one special.
And then you will start to appreciate how so many businesses, perhaps even yours, blur these compass points. They blur the concept of resonating, and as a result fail to pinpoint that one clear mark that allows them to cut through into their marketplace.
With love,
Jacob Aldridge
International Business Advisor
WhatsApp +61 427 151 181
