Your brand is not your logo, your identity or your product. Your brand is a gut feeling about you that lives deep inside of each of your customers.

Like all feelings, they are extremely complex. To meet the needs of your customers, you need a brand strategy to translate the complexities of your brand in an overtly simple, clear and highly relatable way.

That strategy is the brand archetype.

Brand archetypes embody the universal stories and journeys that all human beings share: the story of the Alchemist within the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin, the Hero’s journey in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the explorers surrounded by the unknown in Lewis & Clark.

Very simply, brand archetypes can reveal how your brand ‘shows up’ in the real world and facilitates the relationship between you and your customers.

The archetypal approach gives you a common place to work from and helps affect the gut feelings of your customers. The goal is to help people see your brand as a force that creates true affiliation, provides ongoing validation and enhances their identity.

In short, brand archetypes help facilitate a meaningful relationship between you and the real world.

What is your brand’s archetype? How do you express it in the real world? How is it being received?