Archetypes vs Personas vs Persons

Imagine this scene.

You’re at your friend’s house party, and he tells you excitedly that Kilian Jornet will be arriving soon. “Who’s Kilian Jornet?” you ask. Fair question – it’s not a household name. Your friend starts talking very fast. Kilian, you learn, is arguably the greatest living mountain athlete. He’s won every major mountain ultra running race, smashed speed records on the world’s highest peaks, and inspired a generation of adventurers around the world. “And,” your friend adds, before bouncing away to answer the door, “he’s bringing salade nicoise.”

You may not know much about the obscure world of mountain ultrarunning, but you know bringing tuna into such a poorly ventilated apartment would be a grave mistake. You lean against the wall, pull out your phone, and Google this guy. You find images of a narrow-faced, dark-haired Catalan with soulful eyes skipping across aretes, scaling cliffs, skiing up high alpine trails, smiling atop podiums. A photo of him from the New York Times looks like Raphael painted Odysseus a la Michaelangelo, with legs so powerful they could pound Ithaca into the sea. Impressive.

You smell fish and look up. There he is: It’s clearly Kilian, but why is he so short? You watch him shake hands with some people near the entrance. He has a shy smile, breaks eye contact quickly. In plain clothes with his legs covered up, he looks slight – narrow shoulders, thin arms. This is not the demi-god you found in the photos. Your friend has left his side to welcome another guest, and Kilian puts his head down and beelines to your corner at the back of the room.

The toothy ginger following him knows who Kilian is. “Congrats on the double this year,” he says. “Everyone was watching D’Haene. You really put him back in his place.” Kilian looks horrified. “Francois is so strong. I was glad we got to share so many miles.” The ginger fan presses on: “Still, winning Hard Rock with him in the field – that must have felt good.” Kilian almost backs into you as he shrinks away. “I preferred 2016. Sharing the win with Jason was so special.”

He turns to escape, and now you’re face-to-face. Perhaps you say something like, “Madre mia, that bibb lettuce looks so vibrant.” Somehow you fall into conversation. He tells you about his organic vegetable garden. You swap notes on compost. When some singing breaks out later that night, you find yourselves arm-in-arm, belting out the chorus. You exchange phone numbers, stay in touch, meet each other’s families, gather the kids for playdates. (This is complete fiction.) Leading up to big races, you see how obsessively he follows the competition’s training logs, including Francois D’Haene’s. (Please understand that I don’t know this person at all.) You notice that he buys multipacks of potato chips – so many chips – and have to chat about what that does to the environment. (But if you got to know him, you might discover some character traits that don’t fit with his public persona…) You share your fears and feel accepted. (…you might even come to know Kilian in a way no one else does.) You witness one another fail, let each other down, and forgive each other entirely.

What a friendship, and it all began at a party with an uncoordinated spread and an uncouth pianist who just played loudly enough to draw the room together.

Understanding Your Audience

You just met Kilian as archetype, persona, and person. (While I tried to represent his public persona accurately, I should say once more that I don’t know Kilian the man, and the final part of our intro scene contains no real info about him.) Don’t worry if you didn’t recognize the shifts – I’ll refer back to them. You probably do recognize the terms. If you spend time working in or adjacent to marketing, you’re sure to encounter them. The tools they refer to have devotees and derisive critics, and there’s plenty of opportunity to misunderstand the terms and misapply the tools. My goal with this piece is to help you avoid either mistake and improve your toolkit.

In marketing, both personas and archetypes are sketches, summaries to support strategy development or to help your people connect to your strategy. Even if they convey only facts about what they represent, they’re so incomplete that they can’t be more than useful fictions, but I’ll argue that they can be useful – like Kilian – if you understand their limitations.

Archetypes

In the first two paragraphs of our opening scene, you experienced Kilian Jornet as the archetypal mountain athlete. Before you pictured those soulful dark eyes on your imaginary phone screen, Kilian was just an idea, some amalgam of the concepts of exploration and athleticism composed of whatever you associate with those words. The list of his exploits in paragraph two makes him seem superhuman.

In straightforward, everyday English, we say something is archetypal when it represents the very “essence” of a thing, as Kilian does mountain running. We might say John Wayne was the quintessential or archetypal cowboy because he had all the essential qualities of a cowboy, and cowboys with different qualities are less cowboy-ish than John Wayne was.

Archetypes are used in branding. Of the tools this article discusses, they present the most pitfalls, and we’ve watched our own clients misapply them in ways we didn’t anticipate or warn them against. Some people, like Marty Marion, think you’d be “literally insane” to use them. So why is such an intuitive concept so controversial?

Carl Jung and a Brief History of Archetypes

Carl Jung (1875-1961), the Swiss psychiatrist who developed the concept of archetypes, meant a bit more by the term. Like misty wraiths drifting over the surface of a bubbling primordial soup, Jung’s archetypes are innate, universal forms or “potentials,” rising from our “collective unconscious,” seeking expression in human behavior, and taking shape in the mind via an individual’s experience. Jung’s brand of nativism was, in part, a response to the theory of the blank slate, a metaphor used to describe the human mind at birth. To illustrate the concept, here’s John Locke in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”:

“Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? … To this I answer, in one word, from experience.”

Not so, thought Jung. In his essay “Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious,” he writes

“From the un­conscious there emanate determining influences which, inde­pendently of tradition, guarantee in every single individual a similarity and even a sameness of experience, and also of the way it is represented imaginatively. One of the main proofs of this is the almost universal parallelism between mythological motifs, which, on account of their quality as primordial images, I have called archetypes.” (Further reading 1.)

We should spend about as much time on Jung’s metaphysical claims as he did on digital marketing, but my hope is that describing his work in context will help you understand this: His discussion of archetypes is worlds away from the discussions that happen in boardrooms and creative spaces today. Jung was engaging with the founders of experimental psychology and criticizing his contemporaries, including Sigmund Freud.

So how, you might be wondering, did so many people in our industry get from these ideas to archetypes in branding?

In “The Development of Personality,” a collection of his papers on child psychology and the development of the mind, Jung writes, “Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman… The image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or ‘archetype’ of all the ancestral experiences of the female…”

If you’ve ever breastfed a baby, Jung believed you were actualizing the archetype of the mother while being shaped into a mother by your experience. When he killed those Jedi younglings, Anakin actualized the shadow, and when Darth Vader threw the Emperor off that bridge, perhaps he actualized some combination of father and protector, sovereign and rebel. For Jung, our identities are forged over time by our unique life experiences and “universal” archetypes. (Further reading 2.)

Is this sounding more familiar?

Enter Carol Pearson, a scholar focused on Jung and the application of his theories, and Margaret Mark, a branding consultant. In their 2001 book, “The Hero and the Outlaw,” they build directly on Jung’s ideas, describing archetypes as “ancient, psychic imprints … demanding to be fully realized and deployed.”

Their central claim is that archetypes “mediate between products and customer motivation by providing an intangible experience of meaning,” and they offer 12 archetypes to help brands manage that meaning, including some you may have heard of, like the caregiver (or mother), the explorer, the jester, and the hero. We’ve got the data to prove this works, they said.

Carol Pearson, Margaret Mark, and Some Confusion

A little industry emerged in Pearson and Mark’s wake. Toolkits like Margaret Hartwell and Joshua Chen’s “Archetypes In Branding,” which adds 60 “sub” archetypes to the 12 brought forward by Pearson and Mark, were created. You can find wheels and guides and questionnaires online, many of which promise to help you “discover” your archetype. Creative professionals started showing up to brand identity development meetings with decks of archetype cards, leading sessions that felt like tarot readings and upsetting Marty. (Full disclosure.)

In our experience, very few of these creative professionals have read Jung, and you now know enough about Jung’s work to question if it’s a strong foundation for your business strategy. 🙂

Pearson and Mark anticipated your legitimate questions. Aside from Jung’s name, their claims rest on a study that Mark conducted with some colleagues at Young and Rubicam and on their observations of various large brands’ marketplace experiences.

Young and Rubicam had built a significant database of consumers’ attitudes towards a number of large brands. The authors describe Mark’s analysis of that data, which involved superimposing archetypal characteristics onto it, but the details are very thin, and what has been included makes the authors seem highly susceptible to confirmation bias. (A note for the nerds.) At most, this study seems to suggest that cohesion and consistency can lead to engagement (as would, presumably, the recognition and familiarity those things can generate).

Pearson and Mark also support their argument with anecdotes from many familiar brands, but none of those brands self-report having deliberately used archetypes in their brand identity development or promotional efforts.

“How did Starbucks convince people to pay over two dollars for coffee?” ask the authors. “Simple: The explorer archetype, artfully expressed in every detail–the product, the packaging, the shops, the logo, the name, and the very experience of placing an order. Such is the power of that archetype.” In his books and interviews, however, Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ storied former CEO, credits the quality of the product and experience Starbucks was able to offer. We don’t believe he mentions archetypes.

The Apple logo “suggest[s] Adam and Eve’s disobedience in eating from the Tree of Knowledge,” claim Pearson and Mark – like the Rebel archetype. But Rob Janoff, who designed the logo, says he just included the bitemark for scale. If you read Holden Frith’s CNN article on the topic, you’ll find him mourning the mark’s more romantic myths, as if they need to die with the origin story. And this brings us around to what I think is the great wisdom of “The Hero and the Outlaw.”

Though the foundational theory is as concrete as Plato’s world of forms, though their research methodology may have been shaky, and though the big brands they discuss seem only to resemble archetypes by coincidence or construal, not by design, Pearson and Mark call for narratives filled with distinctive, recognizable characters. They underscore the importance of appealing to intuition and emotion. They argue for cohesion and consistency. These are powerful principles for resonating with inconsistent, partially rational human beings, and the authors provide a wide range of starting points from which all of the above can be gained.

An Approach to Archetypes

Many brand identity development processes incorporate brand personality. It’s more common in product branding, but we’re increasingly seeing B2B companies make some attempt to enliven their brands with personality in industry-appropriate ways. Archetypes, or personalities wrought by any other means, do not replace the process required to strategically shape a brand identity. You still need clear goals, quality inputs, leaders with vision, values that your whole organization owns, a brand platform, and more for a strong brand identity to emerge and brand image to be established.

At Magneti, the terms “identity” and “personality” aren’t synonymous: A brand identity system can come together without an articulation of personality, including all the elements required to mark (“brand”) your stuff. But we address personality by default, and when we don’t, we find something else will typically fill the void: the status quo, the personality of an influential leader, a strong company culture – something that provides a pulse.

Creating a compelling personality gives brands another way to signal to their target markets, “Hey, this brand is for people like you.” And that’s the job. Archetypes can help.

We think archetypes can be to brands like genes to a species. A baby’s brain is wired by its world. Its relationships and culture will shape its concepts and behavior over time. But for it to be delivered viably into the world, it needs some intrinsic qualities.

Archetypes package qualities that are simultaneously coherent and generic, specific enough to seem intuitive to many people, flexible enough to be wired to a brand’s specific world, its context and its customers. Toolkits like Hartwell and Chen’s, which Magneti has utilized in its process many times, provide enough options to respond to a wide range of contexts and strategies and can fuel brand-specific, robust creative direction that has limitless potential beyond the archetypal templates it provides. Such frameworks cultivate pop culture references for you, provide word banks you can draw on to meet your needs, and ask questions to help you personify the abstract, like, “how would a brand with this personality manifest a ‘dark side’”?

Archetypes can provide the building blocks of brand personality, can deliver forms that seem so foundational they’re almost – yes – primordial, sticky with millennia of stink. That form won’t be grown up. It still needs to get dressed. It might not be attractive to your market yet. But there’s a skeleton that’ll hold together. There are personality traits that can be developed. There’s a pulse.

Speaking of Archetypes

Having understood some of the history with Jung, some of the uncertainty with Pearson and Mark, and some of the limits of archetypes as a tool, I hope that…

When you hear a line like this:
Our archetype is the jester.

You might say something like this:
How did we decide on that? Has our audience experienced us that way? If so, has it helped us accomplish our goals? If not, what could lead us to revise our articulation of the personality we’re aiming for?

When you hear a line like this:
Our personality is the jester.

You might say something like this:
Have we articulated all the personality traits we need to appeal to our audience? Could we add any that might help us win over time?

When you hear a line like this:
Do we even know our archetype?

You might say something like this:
We didn’t base our brand personality on any particular archetype, but we do think we have the tools we need to provide consistent, coherent creative direction, and we know our audience is loving this content.

When you hear a line like this:
“That’s not ‘on-brand.’ It’s just not ___ (caring, heroic, rebellious, etc. – pick your archetypal adjective)”

You might say something like this:
What’s at stake here? Adherence to an archetype, or the outcomes that consistency is meant to produce? If those outcomes don’t seem to be directly at risk, perhaps we can make an exception or add to the picture, like a real person might.

Personas

Coming up in part two – personas, including

• Kilian Jornet’s deeply lovable (and not at all fishy) persona
• Another visit with professor Jung (this time, truly very brief, I think…)
• Some confusion (this time, upsetting Rand Fishkin)
• How we use personas at Magneti