Strong brands blend multiple personalities.
How do you identify yours?
Preview of a talk hosted by: CIM South West
Speaker: Richard Gillingwater
03 March 2022 13:00
New research into the fields of Archetypes, Design, Narrative and Brands (RADNB) helps us see, in richer detail than ever before, how and why brands use archetypes to tell their story.
Storytelling has become extremely important for brands in recent years.
We’re all hardwired to learn how to survive and thrive through stories. Brands tap into this by telling stories of their own: stories designed to promote a product, ignite emotions or drive behaviours that make us feel a better version of ourselves. The use of a personality, or archetype, makes these stories more believable, distinct and emotionally engaging for readers. But just as you and I are complex expressions of many different personalities and behaviours according to what we’re communicating and who we’re communicating with, so too are brands. We’re not monolithic or unchanging in the way we express ourselves and neither are brands. Like us, brands use blends of different archetypes that help tell their stories in more powerful ways.
3 insights from this new research:
- A brand is not one character, it’s a complex story told through multiple archetypes.
- The right narrative, at the right time, in the right place.
- Create tension in your storytelling
New research gives credibility to the field of archetypes.
Understanding how brands strategically use archetypes is key to understanding a brand’s strategy and how it emotionally engages with people. The challenge for those researching or working in the field of branding is the perceived validity of archetypes, not just at C-suite level but across marketing and creative communications generally. This is partly because of the vague and often varied definitions that exist for each archetype. And partly because audiences also find it hard to identify all but a few of the better-known archetypes in a brand’s communications. This lack of clarity holds back our understanding and development of brands. RADNB takes us a big step closer to resolving this problem by identifying, for the first time, a common visual language for 60 different archetypes based on real brand examples.
3 key insights:
- A brand is not one character, it’s a complex story told through multiple archetypes. Brands use archetypes because they help tell their story. Audiences quickly identify each archetype with a set of emotional needs that they can relate to in their everyday life. By blending different archetypes brands can express, just like in a movie with multiple characters, a wider range of emotional needs to communicate more complex stories.
- The right narrative at the right time in the right place. Advances in technological (internet, social media, etc) mean that brands can now afford to tell much richer stories. Brands are now communicating different and often opposing aspects of themselves, such as being fun and frivolous while also being concerned about social justice. They may in one moment look to sell a product or attract the best employees. In the next encounter they may try to make you laugh or inspire you to change your life. All these complementary, contradictory or parallel strands inevitably make their stories and their brand more complex.
- Create tension in your storytelling. If you think about it, the most interesting people are a rich blend of qualities. Some of these qualities may complement each other, but often they appear contradictory. This contradiction creates depth, interest and nuance. It gives their stories a balance, a poise - a tension that makes them human and mirrors the nuanced emotional needs in all of us. Just as great actors create characters with many layers, so brands blend archetypes to make themselves more real, compelling, credible and able to communicate increasingly complex narratives in ways that resonate with the needs of real people in the real world
In the talk Richard will look at how the following brands blend multiple archetypes to help tell their story: Telefonica, De Beers, Harley Davidson, Barbour, Harvard, London Business School, i.e. Business School, saucony, adidas, McKinsey & Company, pwc, EY, accenture, and KPMG.
RADNB is a new brand mapping tool and visual dataset of almost 2,000 brands. Each brand’s visual language is mapped through the lens of 60 archetypes. Helping us see, in richer detail than ever before, how and why their stories engage.
Richard Gillingwater