How to Attract Your Ideal Customers with the Right Brand Archetype

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct tape marketing podcast. This is Sarah Nay, and today I am stepping in as host for John Janz. And we're actually doing a ladies takeover of the show because I have Jane McCarthy as my guest. Really excited to talk to you, Jane. Jane is a brand strategist who has worked with clients such as Sweet Tarts, Southern California Edison, and Pilot Pen. She is the author of The Goddess Guide to Branding, Helping Female Entrepreneurs Create an Abundant and Authentic Feminine Brand. So welcome to the show, Jane. Thank you, Sarah. I'm so happy to be here. Well, let's dive on in.

0:45One of the things that I know that you talk about a lot are the concept of goddess archetypes. And so for our listeners today, can you give me an overview as to what are goddess archetypes and how do they relate to brands and business in general? Yeah. So let's start with archetype. Okay. So many of us are familiar with archetypes from Hollywood movies. Think about the hero of an action film or the outlaw of a Western, the comic who plays that role of giving a little bit of comic relief in a film. We are familiar with these characters. They're played by different actors. They wear different costumes.

1:23But at their essence, it's a character we know. And that's what's considered an archetype. And this concept was developed by Carl Jung, who is, you know, one of the famous psychologists, like psychoanalysts of the 20th century. And he developed a set of 12 archetypes that can be utilized as like base characters in the human experience. And if you think about Star Wars, that was a film that was really based on the knowledge of archetypes from Carl Jung. And in marketing, branding folks started to realize that we can use these characters to create a brand that feels like it has a personality people can actually connect with, a sense of humanity.

2:13And so I, in my career as a brand strategist, and I've worked in advertising for over 15 years, have loved using archetypes. And I found that when I get to that central character with a business, we immediately understand the voice. We have a sense of the feel. Even the colors and the symbols start to become clear. And so I've utilized Carl Jung's archetype throughout my journey as a brand strategist. However, one thing that I noticed is that a lot of those archetypes tended toward the masculine. So you have the hero, you have the everyman is what it's called in that system, which is like the guy next door and the explorer.

3:02And that's great. But then the more feminine ones were the lover and the caregiver. And I thought, wait a second, there are so many variations on the archetypal character from the feminine lens. And that led me to the work of Jean Shinoda Bolin, who is a Jungian analyst. And in the 1980s, she wrote this seminal book called Goddesses in Every Woman. And she mapped the psyche of women along archetypal lines, utilizing the Greco-Roman goddess system and the goddesses. And I thought this is an amazing source point to bring to branding and to say, let's look at which goddess energy. If you want a more feminine energy brand, what goddess energy are you?

3:49And that's how I got to the goddess archetypes for branding, which is like Athena, the free, the huntress, or Demeter, the love, the mother, or maiden Persephone, the goddess of youth and magic and fantasy. And so it's just been really fun to outline these. I have eight goddess archetypes that you can utilize to inspire your brand based on this Jungian work. And so you touched on a few of them, but can you quickly go over what are the eight different archetypes that you have identified? Yeah. So Athena is the goddess of wisdom. She's very much about education, working within the system to create credibility and legitimacy.

4:32She works toward justice. Another example is Hestia the Sacred. She was the goddess of the hearth and she's very much about like light and purity. So I associate her with healing and with, you know, products that are about wellness and about sacred space and quiet and almost, She's almost the zen kind of energy. And then we have Hera. You know, she got a bad rap as being Zeus's jealous, venomous wife. I think I see her as the regal energy. And she's the goddess of tradition and partnership. She is the queen energy. You know, I rewrote her story a little bit for this book. So those are some examples of the goddesses and how much fun it is to work with mythic archetypes.

5:26And then think about how that translates into brands today in contemporary life. That's great. So if someone is listening today and they're working on their branding and they're looking for clarity and direction, how would they go about identifying what goddess they might align with as a company? Yeah. So if you look at this set of eight archetypes, you're going to see that there are dominant gifts that each goddess has. So, for example, I mentioned Diana the Free, the goddess of the hunt. So she inspires adventuring. She inspires confidence. She inspires going out beyond the known. And so if you're a brand that's about exploring new territories, then you can look to Diana to inspire you.

6:18So it's a lot about what is the energy that you want to infuse your band with and also the gift that you have. And so then another gift is Venus, the goddess of beauty and pleasure. And so if you're bringing the energy of pure joy, recreation, playfulness, and you can be a Venus archetype. So it's thinking about like, you can think about the gifts that you want to bring to your customers through the brand experience, and that will bring you to your archetype. Among others, I have a bunch of different exercises, but that's one. That's one. It's interesting to hear you talk through that, especially because I took the assessment that you have available on your website that I found, and it identified myself as Diana the Free.

7:04And I've been at Duct Tape Marketing for about 14 years now. And people have always looked at us as a marketing firm to be one step ahead of all the changes and evolution that's happening in marketing. And so when I got that specific archetype, that aligned very nicely with what I've been in the position to do over the last 14 years. I love that. And I have to admit that I saw your quiz results and I saw that some folks at Duct Tape, a lot of you guys got Diana. And I thought, oh, OK, this is a team that's aligned. Yes. And so, yes, this is the goddess that is the innovative goddess and is one step ahead of the curve.

7:46And a lot, by the way, a lot of female founders have Diana as their core archetype. So you're hitting on something too, which is a brand has an archetype, but then your person can have one. And of course, that's what I took them from. I took them from a Jungian analyst who was talking about people. And so we tend to all have one core archetype that defines our personality. I, for example, am a maiden Persephone. And so I'm all about imagination and feeling into possibility and fantasy and myth, which actually makes sense for why I ended up doing what I've done here. This can be very informative as we think about our own mission and our own purpose.

8:31And then if we are at the heart of our business and we're the face of our business, like you are, you know, the host of this podcast, then who you are is going to inform the energy of the brand, the energy of the business that you're driving. So who you are and your archetype is potentially linked, not always and doesn't have to be, but potentially very linked to the archetype of your brand. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that's actually a reason that I was interested in having my team take the assessment as well after I did. Because I think we've established duct tape marketing as a brand over the years.

9:06But one of the things that we're always hiring for when we're hiring new people are people that are up for change and up for a challenge and that want to be seen as leaders. So it wasn't a surprise that we had a bunch of Dianas on our team because of what we've built as a brand and who we've hired for. And so I'm just curious in your experience, Like this is all a really important conversation for building the brand and putting yourself out there and resonating with clients. But in your experience, does it help with, you know, hiring and attracting the right type of candidates to join your team as well?

9:37Well, I think this is a really intriguing idea. And I don't have tremendous experience with team building based on archetypes. so I won't make a objective statement, but I will tell you that, you know, I'm really interested in personality types in this whole world, and I have been for some time. And I was up at Esalen in Big Stir taking a workshop on Enneagram types. And the Enneagram, I also mapped the Enneagram to the goddess archetypes, and I utilized that system as well. And I remember talking with a guy who is a very successful CEO of a essential oils company. And he told me that when he was hiring, he did an Enneagram personality test on every applicant.

10:25And he only hired number two, which is called the helper in the Enneagram system for people who were going to be working on the floor in stores. And he was just looking for that natural helping personality to be frontline because we all know that if you have a brand or a business where you're interacting with people in real life on the human level, that service experience is essential. And you can have the right colors. You can have the right symbols. You can have the right products. But if everything falls down at the service level, that's a disappointment. So I think I have that anecdotal story of somebody who applied personality types to position in company effectively.

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11:51That means if you spend$5 ,000 on TV ads, you'll get an additional$5 ,000 to spend. Head on over to adcritter.com. That's adcritter.com and get started. Yeah, we've done a number of assessments over the years. So that's why I was curious in relation to yours. Well, let's dive into some. I love hearing about examples like the one you shared there. But can you identify any brands that you would say embody one specific type of architect and why and how they identify that way? Okay, yes. So since we're talking about Diana the Free, we'll just continue on that path. I think she's a goddess. She's the huntress.

12:32She's running through the wilderness. She has no interest in cocktail parties on Olympus. And if you think about Wonder Woman and the Wonder Woman film from 2017 that was so great, her name is Diana. So this is Diana or the Athena archetype. And I interviewed for the book, The Goddess Guide to Branding, a CEO named Caitlin Bram. And she has started a hard cider company called Yonder, which is based in the Pacific Northwest. and they have a tap room now in Seattle and then she has distribution throughout the region. And I think eventually she wants to go national. But her brand is called Yonder and it's all about the wild and wandering spirit of a Yonder brand.

13:21And if you think about Diana as being this goddess of the wilderness, she has this wild and wandering spirit that has to do with Yonder. And on her can is a wolf howling at the moon. and she said, I can't tell you how many people ask me for more merch that has this wolf. They just love this wolf. And so you could think apples, fall festival, that it's not necessarily where you would go with a cider brand, but she went to a wild spirit, a wolf spirit, or in my case, in my book, a Diana spirit, in order to get at this adventuring spirit, first of all, so that people would think about trying something different because most people are not familiar with hard cider.

14:07But also to deal with any issues around, I think this cider is going to be sweet. Her products aren't sweet. She focuses on making hard cider that tastes more like a cocktail. And so through her brand story, she combats any naysayers around, oh, this is going to be sickly sweet. I don't want to try it. So you can see how the wildness energy appeals to people on a visceral level, but then it also helps with tell the product story in a way that will be appealing. And that's totally Diana. It's about adventuring forward. Yeah. Great. Can you give me another example? I really love hearing, you know, use cases like you just did there.

14:45So can you talk through just one more example of a different brand? Another one. So I love talking about the women in the book because they're so awesome and they have, you know, fairly new companies. And so another brand in the book is Alice Mushrooms. Alice Mushrooms is a functional mushroom chocolate brand. And they deliver the goodness of functional mushrooms in a chocolate square. And so you can take your daily dose of functional mushrooms through chocolate. And so then what they did with the brand, this is Charlotte Cruz and Lindsay Goodstein. These are the founders. They decided to use what I call a maiden Persephone archetype.

15:28And so they took a functional mushroom chocolate and they made it delightful. They made it the energy of magical, fantastical, Alice in Wonderland world. And if you go onto their website, when you use your cursor, little stardust follows your cursor. So the whole thing is delightful. And interestingly, in that category, a lot of the functional mushroom products are doing 70s psychedelia. So they really do like, and I love the Grateful Dead, but it's kind of like tie-dye Grateful Dead energy. And so they completely did something different. And they went to Maiden Persephone energy, the goddess of delights and youth and sweetness.

16:14And they created a functional mushroom product. It's very feminine, very elevated. They found an archetype really inspired by Alice. And I would think of this as made in Persephone that differentiates them in market and appeals to people in a wholly different way compared to having a functional mushroom tea. I love it. Thanks for sharing both of those examples. I'm gonna have to go check out their website and see the fairy dust now. You intrigued me. My next question to you is, let's say someone's listening today and they just overall feel like their branding is tired, it needs a do-over, it needs a relook, how would you encourage them to approach this whole topic and just brand strategy in general?

16:55Yeah, so I think this is a really intriguing thing to take on because what I want to caution is you never want to walk away too quickly from something that you're known for. It takes time to establish credibility, legitimacy, and connection with customers. That takes a lot of time. So if you've been in market, first you want to look at what do people love about you and really, really savor that and make sure that you build on that in a fresh way rather than throwing everything out. So I'm always cautioning against a full reboot. And I think an evolution and the word evolution is nice. And so then thinking about what people love about you and then what is the credible impact you can have on their lives starting from there, I would then say look to the archetype who delivers that and get really rooted in the meaning that you bring.

18:02get really clear about it, and then come up with all kinds of fun ways to do things new and different. That's in the creative expression, right? That's in the tactical imagination. But strategy-wise, don't be too quick to walk away from what you've developed. Figure out what's best about what you do, what people love about you, and then amplify that. And if you get the book, you can figure out which archetype you are. And I have a system for thinking about how to evolve. But that's my big suggestion is don't be too quick to walk away from what people love. Instead, come up with fresh ways to deliver on that.

18:43That's great. And one last question I was going to go to today. So I'm glad that you mentioned your book there. What can people expect if they do grab a copy of your book? What are they going to learn? Obviously, learning what archetype makes the most sense for them, but what else can they get out of that book? Yes. So figuring out your archetype is the first step. And in a lot of ways, it can unlock other keys to what I call your brand blueprint. But in the book, I walk you through this, a full extra set of exercises to get you to a complete brand blueprint. And so for me, that's not just the archetype, but we also share how you figure out the heart of your brand.

19:23So what is that core motivation, that driving energy. Many of us who are into marketing are familiar with Simon Sinek's idea of why, like why you're doing this and what is that raw passion behind your business. So we get clear on that. And then the, what I call the gift. So what is the central emotion that you want your brand to help amplify in people? And so what is the takeaway feeling that they have after they've had an experience with your brand. So we want to get clear on once you know the feeling you want to give people, you can come up with a million different ways of delivering on that feeling.

20:01But we want to figure out what is that positive impact you want to make and an emotional level. And then the style piece, which I think of both the iconic elements of your brand. So your colors, your symbols, the words, the voice, those are things that are true throughout over time. And then we have a couple of exercises to start to think about how you then live that brand day by day, that brand identity day by day in terms of the dynamic actions. So what's happening this month in the social media calendar, etc. So you leave with a complete brand blueprint that I think boils down the essentials of what makes a brand identity.

20:43That's great. And a lot of those components are elements that John and I have been talking about the importance of marketing right now with everything that's evolving. It's becoming more and more important to connect with your clients on an emotional level and to tell the story of why and to represent the brand in a positive light. Those things are gaining importance in marketing. So I'm glad that you touch on all of those in the book. If anyone wants to connect with you online, where can they find you, Jane? So I have a website goddessoffice.com and then I'm also on substack goddessoffice.substack.com and I would love for you to reach out.

21:19Thanks so much for being on the show Jane I really loved learning from you and speaking with you and thank you everyone for listening to the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast we'll see you next time.