Pity and the Begum of Begur (as I call her), have passed on a very broad order for me to fulfil. They think the essentials of marketing can be learned. Maybe they were inspired by the movie Ratatouille, yet I don’t think just anyone can market! I had better, since we’ve made it our busy ness to show people how to. The Begum is dear Lilian. With little regard for my trepidation, they put me on a plane to Ahmedabad, or Amdavad as Pity calls it, she isn’t a native though and absolutely shrieks when she sees sweet dal. Those Amdavadis would have a good ‘saaru che’ at her expense. Mary Poppins said that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, I say pinches of it in daily cooking elevates any dish to a stratospheric gastronomic heaven. I know Lilian will get it! Or ask any Puneri or Amdavadi. It’s the Puneri in me, we own aamras, graciously lent to Amdavadis and beyond, samazhla? Get it??

I was assigned the task of uncovering the brand arche - type of our clients, Moorjani Engineering. Lilian lives and breathes archetypes. She’s a master storyteller and Pity with her magic masala pretty much breezes through this exercise. I, on the other hand, am a jittery mess. My usual self! Our clients were a traditional engineering companywith solid credentials and standing amongst automotive component manufacturers and smart electronics over the past 30 years. I felt somewhat proud that their components sat in some of the best-selling cars in the country and they commanded the smart home market in the NCR region. Hmm, these folks know their bolts, screws and studs! I dug deeper into their company profile. Familiar data around CAGR, Moorjani’s steady penetration into African markets, consolidation in Italy and a commendable 18 % in competitive Germany, as trusted fastener suppliers, made for fascinating reading. I loved the fact that they’d kept pace with the times and had already future-readied themselves as the market veered towards low-cost, lightweight, corrosion-resistant materials and had invested in upgrading their facilities accordingly.

I tried researching Manju Bagga who was to be our point of contact. But other than discovering that she was a graduate of the famous UID and an Amdavadi – her Instagram profile showed her to be a drama enthusiast – I found little else. She had started as a design engineer with the company’s smart electronics division and was now the CTO of their new venture – EV vehicle component manufacturing. She knew dear Pity from their days as IIM chums. Pity as usual had WhatsApp-introduced us and quietly dropped the string on my shaky shoulders. I checked in.

Manju was putting her team together, wanted to build a world-class company and was finding it hard to present the group as an attractive proposition to potential campus hires. She’d shared this with Pity and Lili. So we thought that helping them figure out their archetype would help them create a rock-solid EVP that would attract talent.

We went through a whirlwind of immersive activities – plant visit, EV vehicles 101 sessions, meeting people, watching (colours, shapes etc), listening (to their language and other cues) to round out our discovery phase.

Once that was done, I took them through our deck that detailed all 12 archetypes and what they meant in terms of brand voice, persona, colours and messaging. Since Manju had a 5-member team assembled for this exercise I gave each one of them 15 minutes to assimilate the archetypes and think about how they would relate these to their brand and their audience. They then had to jot down their primary and secondary archetypes of choice and the reason for their choice.

After a gruelling two and a half hours and many arguments (sometimes I feel like a referee in a boxing ring in these meetings, we zeroed down on 70% Creator and 30% Explorer.

Choose a Brand Archetype and personify your brand. It enables you to confer human-like attributes to your brand making it more relatable to your customers.

Brand Archetypes

I wonder if Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson envisioned that brand archetypes would become so popular when they wrote the book “The Hero and the Outlaw”. But it’s really not so surprising considering that humans connect best with other humans. So what better way to connect to your audience than personifying your brand with the very characteristics that your target audience is looking for:

Doesn’t IKEA give you the vibe of being your friendly, helpful neighbour? That’s because their brand archetype is that of the Everyman. Not sure what this means? Read on and all will be revealed!

Your brand archetype is a quick and easy way to define the characteristics you want your brand to reflect. This will then act as a mental shortcut for your marketing team to generate consistent, engaging content that is sharply targeted at your audience.

We recommend that you define your archetype as a combination of two archetypes at a 60:40 ratio. Why? Because we humans are more complex than a single archetype. Using two archetypes makes your brand two-dimensional without making it so complicated that your marketing team pulls their hair out trying to figure out how your brand should behave.

Pearson and Mark drew on Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung’s work on human psychology and philosophy. Jung proposed the existence of universal, recurring symbols and themes in human experience, which he called “archetypes.” He believed these archetypes were part of the collective unconscious shared by all humans and that they influenced our thoughts, behaviours, and dreams. That’s what we are capitalising on here.

There are 12 of them, so here’s a snapshot of all of them together to get your head around them.

PRO TIP

Find your brand of cocktail and go with it. Make sure your brand archetype speaks to your target audience. It would be great if you could give your brand opinions and an outlook on life.

• What do you love and why?

• What do you dislike /hate and why?

• Where do you bring the most value to your audience

• What is the one thing you would change about your industry above all else, and why?

• Why is your market a great space to be in?

• What positives and negatives do you believe social media has brought about in our society? What is the purpose of your existence

• What is important to you for doing business?

• What does your audience need to be protected against?