Archetypal Branding Series: Volume Three
Brian Fallers
You’ve done the discovery, collected your customer and employee feedback, completed your Paradigm culture and brand assessment (if you’ve partnered with Truelio for your rebrand—sorry for the shameless plug) and finished all your homework. You’ve identified your archetypal DNA and created an authentic brand identity that’s inspiring and captures what makes you special. So, what’s next?
Everything.
While you might assume the journey is over, the reality is that it’s just begun. But the road ahead will be a much smoother ride now that you’ve found your brand’s true north. Here are four ways you can use your primary and secondary archetypes to enhance your day-to-day marketing and ensure you’re getting the most out of your hard work.
1. Maintaining Your Brand Authenticity
If you’re like most marketers, you’ve identified a set of customer personas to guide your marketing strategy. You display them prominently and use Jane, Chris, Taylor and John (or whatever names you’ve selected to personify your target audiences) to drive your strategic direction and messaging. You should do the same with your brand archetypes, as they ground your verbal and visual development and serve as the foundation of your brand strategy. Keep in mind that they’re not exclusive to marketing—they also drive your employer brand and organizational culture efforts. Share them with your HR, Recruiting and Talent Acquisition teams so they can integrate your archetypal key messaging into their strategies and activities. Lastly, your brand archetypes are also incredibly powerful when sharing with your customers (particularly B2B) to demonstrate the origins behind your brand promise and values, as well connecting your culture with your brand story.
2. Establishing Consistency Across Your Brand Experience
When establishing and maintaining brand trust, consistency is key. It’s critical to embrace your archetypes consistently across all touchpoints, from your website to your brand’s social media channels. This will create a cohesive brand identity and establish familiarity and trust in your audience. In many ways, your archetypal DNA works as a mental shortcut to help your marketing team create consistent, engaging and organic messaging and content. Conduct a brand audit to review your marketing and look for inconsistencies. With your brand archetypes to guide you, it should be easy to identify and correct any inconsistencies in your strategy and execution.
3. Grounding Your Visual Strategy
While most view archetypes as exclusive to brand storytelling and verbal strategy, they are equally important to your visual strategy. It’s key that your creative team understands your archetypal color mapping and visual orientation. This includes your photography, iconography and graphics, all of which create visual cues that connect to your archetypes and the emotional response you’re trying to elicit. When used correctly, they are your compass, working with your voice to ensure consistency in your brand experience (which leads nicely to the below).
4. Unifying Your Voice and Tone
Your voice and tone are two of your most important (and most underappreciated) brand components. They may not get the same attention as their visual brethren, but together, they are the key to your storytelling and the foundation of your brand identity. Your voice and tone create an instant first impression and are key to defining your brand personality to your prospects and customers. When clearly defined, your employees, agencies and other third-party partners have a firm understanding of your content objectives and the precise words and emotions to be used. It’s the very reason why Nike sounds uniquely different from Under Armour and McDonald’s from Burger King. Make sure your archetype-driven voice and tone are widely shared to promote consistency in all your content marketing efforts.
Last, but certainly not least, don’t forget the very reason why archetypes have proven successful over the centuries. Leverage your archetypes in your brand storytelling, using them to captivate your audience and create an authentic and memorable brand experience.
Interested in learning more about archetypal branding?
Contact us for a complimentary consultation to find out how we inspire a more authentic, engaging and science-based brand experience.
