🌟 Using the 12 archetypes in marketing

Successful brands such as Apple, Microsoft, Too Good To Go and Patagonia show us: With the right archetype, brand identity becomes tangible. But how do they work?

Florian Schleicher

Dec 09, 2024

∙ Paid

Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading along 💚

Is your brand Hero, Ruler, Lover or Creator?

I read 48 books this year.

Some of them good, some okay and some extremely exciting.

But one of the best books I've read this year is “The Hero and the Outlaw” by Margaret Mark & Carol S. Pearson.

The two consultants describe the model of the 12 archetypes that can make up a brand, which is already familiar to many. I have been working with it myself for a few years, but since reading the book, I have been inspired by it once again.

Snapshot from a client workshop with brand archetypes

So today I would like to take you on a short journey through this strategic system of brand development and show you how brands - especially sustainable brands - work with it.

1️⃣ What are brand archetypes?

2️⃣ What do the archetypes stand for?

3️⃣ How can you work with brand archetypes?

4️⃣ Sustainable brands and their archetypes

5️⃣ Finding your own archetype

1️⃣ What are brand archetypes?

Marketing sometimes seems complicated:

So many decisions every day. So many possibilities. And at the same time, less and less attention for your own topics. There is now so much content that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep your brand “ahead” of the competition and keep up with all the simple entertainment.

What is needed is a clear marketing strategy and this includes an emotionalizing vision at its center. Our marketing strategy must focus on one direction (not several), because we want to be remembered by our target group with a stringent image.

After all, the world rewards specialization.

Instead of going broad and drowning in a flood of generalists, we want to be number one.

Specialization as a strategy is a bold statement. It says: We know who we are, what we stand for and where we create unrivaled value.

In a world of infinite possibilities, we should be the only choice for a unique problem of our target group.

And this is exactly where the 12 brand archetypes can help:

“Marketing without a system for managing meaning is analogous to ancient navigators trying to find port in treacherous seas on a starless night. What they need is an enduring and reliable compass - a fixed place that illuminates both where they are and where they must go. For marketers, the theory of archetypes can act as this compass.”
Margaret Mark & Carol S. Pearson

2️⃣ What do the archetypes stand for?

The 12 archetypes can be categorized according to what they express, what feelings they convey to their target groups, what they stand for and what they want to achieve: