Embrace your personality to grow your brand

If you run a business, you likely don’t need to be told of the importance of branding. You know that your brand is the first step your prospective customers take towards forming a relationship with your business. 

But despite your sincerest efforts, your brand may not quite be getting the traction it deserves with your target audience. Without understanding the psychology that governs how consumers identify with brand storytelling, you may not get the best out of the consumer/business relationship, no matter how much market research you carry out. 

That’s why I’ve created a resource for entrepreneurs who want to improve their brand storytelling. Mostly, they want to connect authentically with their audiences who they work so hard to cater to. 

A free gift from me to them that will help businesses to get to know their audiences better by getting to know themselves better. A resource to help them discover their brand archetype… 

The power of archetypes- What’s it all about? 

For years, I wanted to create a gift for people visiting the Branding Collective Website. After all, who doesn’t love free stuff? And as with any worthwhile freebie, I wanted it to be useful and inherently valuable to all who receive it.  

But, while I was determined to create a free resource of quality and value, I was stuck in a creative rut, found it challenging to get outside of my head, and take action. I kept having conversations both in my head and hubby (sorry darling, thanks for bearing with me as always). 

What am I going to create that represents the business, our vision, and what we believe? How can it accurately represent our services and the way we love and want to help our clients?

With so many freebies in the digital realm, who was going to pay attention to our modest offering? How could I be sure I was creating something handy and beneficial that wouldn’t just end up in the digital trash can of someone’s laptop. 

These were all ego-driven thoughts, so I turned to my heart, looking for answers. I asked myself what I love about the branding process? What excites me? What could serve as a useful tool and an introduction to the soul of Branding Collective? 

The answer was clear… A quiz about brand story archetypes! Quizzes are fun and a great way to learn about ourselves.

But my business is unique! Why should I embrace archetype? 

Many business owners get a little jittery around the notion of archetypes because they worry that aligning their brand with an archetype will diminish the uniqueness of the brand that they worked so hard to build. But understanding your brand story archetype can make for much more compelling brand storytelling. 

It’s important to differentiate between archetypes and stereotypes. While a stereotype can diminish your uniqueness, embracing archetypes can actually enhance it. Think as your archetype as a cultural shorthand that allows your branding to make faster and more effective headway in engaging your target audience. 

Your consumers already understand and embrace archetypes. Don’t believe me. Just look at what’s showing at your local multiplex. Here you’ll find that the movies that make the best use of archetypes are invariably the most successful. Archetypes provide a framework of familiarity in the characters, plot formula, and narrative / stylistic tropes of any given genre.

An archetype is an integral part of the language of storytelling. And if it works for every franchise from The Avengers to Annabelle, it can work for your brand. 

Archetypes don’t exist to put your brand in a box. They exist to help you to know yourself better and emerge from that box fully formed and utterly proud. 

Why Brand Story is essential… and why archetypes improve Brand Storytelling 

We all gravitate towards stories. Ever since we’ve huddled around the fires outside our caves, we’ve been using stories to make sense of the world around us and make the decisions that help us get from one way to the next. 

As you can imagine, your brand’s story is essential in resonating with your target audience. It prevents your business from being seen as a series of processes and transactions. It helps to give it a personality that people can relate to, like, and fall in love with. 

It makes you unique and noticeable, building a bridge between you and your audience.  

But do archetypes really make that much of a difference? Sure they do! Archetypes have been around for as long as humanity itself, long before Jung popularized them and made them easy for us to understand. 

They work as a model of human behavior and identity, opening the doors to the imagination through the language of visuals. So, it’s easy to see why their dynamic visual language lends itself so well to brand development. 

Archetypes unlock your Unique Brand Value (UBV) 

Your UBV is intrinsically tied to your mission statement. An understanding of archetype can help that UBV to come across in a way that resonates strongly with consumers. It helps to establish your personality and to avoid the cookie-cutter marketing approaches that can doom your brand to obscurity.  

They form a skeleton that you can flesh out with your own unique story, life lessons, and experiences. Of note, don’t be surprised if your brand is a combination of several archetypes. They’re a blueprint, not a bible! 

Knowing your archetype is an essential step towards better self-awareness, helping you to understand yourself, the people who make your business, and the people all around it. 

Beyond the results of the quiz, your brand story archetype, I also provide guidelines on how this is manifested in effective branding, following the pillars of the Branding Collective signature system:

1- Storify – BE!YOU 

Know yourself in the light and the shadow. Love both so much as they are part of you and an essential part of your personal brand, and how you present yourself to the world.

If you’re self-aware, you know your strengths and weaknesses, what your triggers are, how you make decisions. The effect they have on others inside and outside your enterprise.

2- Beautify – BE!EXPRESSION

Express yourself through your brand. Through the language of visuals, colors, fonts, and photography. This language is how your brand communicates with the people who make up your audience (who are most probably not that different from you).

3- Mystify – BE!CONNECTION 

Through your communications and content, you define your connection to your audience, enchanting them through your interactions on social media.  

In this way, you can create an aligned business that impacts lives positively while giving you the wealth, abundance, and fulfillment that constitute your personal definition of success. 

Pretty neat, huh? 

I hope this quiz will help you to discover, re-discover or reassure you with useful information about yourself, your business, and your tribe. Are you Wise Glow, Soulsmith, Joyful Creative or Wild Heart? Curious? Take the quiz here and get to know yourself better and start infusing your magic into your brand!

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