Archetypal Branding: Cult Branding 2.0
by Aaron Shields: http://www.cult-branding.com/content/theteam#author_6
Link to Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs: http://www.cult-branding.com/cb101/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs.html
Cult Branding was founded on Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Maslow’s hierarchy offers a simple framework for understanding consumer behavior: Humans have inherent needs (physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization) that they try to fulfill. And, consumer behavior is motivated by the fulfillment of some combination of these needs.
Although Maslow’s hierarchy offers significant explanatory power, it does not provide a complete explanation of brand loyalty.
A more comprehensive understanding of branding involves placing Maslow’s work in the context of the works of biologist Antonio Damasio, psychiatrist Carl Jung, and psychologist Ivan Pavlov.
Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it reads.
Biological Drivers
Antonio Damasio, most lucidly in The Feeling of What Happens, describes four steps that account for how people respond to a stimulus. First, a stimulus occurs. Second, changes happen on the cellular level of the person (the emotion). Third, visible changes happen in the person’s body (the feeling). Fourth, the person notices the changes in his/her body (the feeling of a feeling).
The changes that a stimulus produces can be positive (beneficial to the person) or negative (harmful to the person). It is the recognition, the feeling of a feeling, of whether the stimulus produces a positive or negative response that accounts for future behavior. If the stimulus produces a negative response, then it will be avoided in the future, like after a child touches a hot stovetop for the first time.
Fulfilling Maslow’s hierarchy can be understood as containing the types of behaviors that will produce positive stimuli. Maslow referred to the needs as instinctoid—they operate as the equivalent of an instinct; these needs, then, are conscious ways to categorize the innate biological (emotional) responses to stimuli. In other words, the needs operate at the deepest levels of biology and serve as the foundation for motivating human behavior.
Archetypal Patterns
How these biological motivators manifest in the psyche and become psychological motivators explains how brands derive loyalty, and is revealed by the work of Carl Jung.
Jung developed the concept of the archetype to explain patterns of behavior. These archetypes, in Jung’s words, “are simply the forms which the instincts assume.”
In other words, the archetypes are the ways the instincts manifest themselves in patterns of human behavior. When Jung speaks of the Warrior Archetype, for example, this archetype is all the ways a warrior can manifest, from the general on the battlefield to the athlete. Archetypes organize experience and are tied to the instinctual needs.
Archetypal Need Fulfillment
There are an infinite number of ways the archetype can manifest but only a certain number of responses to it, which are limited by the biological responses described by Maslow. These responses are either positive or negative and can result in fulfilling the need—the winning warrior who both achieves safety through the protection of the self and the members of the group he belongs to, and achieves esteem through conquest and mastery—or result in not fulfilling the need—the losing warrior.
Nike capitalizes on the archetype of the warrior using battle imagery with its athletes to the extreme—only the ultimate champion survives. Remember the silver is for losers campaign?
As archetypes are ways of patterning behavior, every brand will play into some archetypal pattern but it is up to the brand to ensure whether there is a strong relationship between the brand and fulfilling the needs that the archetype supports.
Learned Behavior: Innate, Consistent, Frequent
Understanding how to make the relationship strong comes from the work of Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov demonstrated how a specific response to a stimulus can be learned. Pavlov presented meat to a dog and then rang a bell. After consistent and frequent repetition, the sound of the bell was enough to make the dog salivate.
In Pavlov’s system of learning, classical conditioning, the learned behavior (salivating to the ring of a bell) is tied to a preexisting, innate behavior (salivating around meat).
And, it must occur consistently and frequently—the same pattern has to be executed over and over again—otherwise the association will never be learned.
In terms of branding, this requires linking the brand to the basic underlying biology, which is achievable by tapping into the archetype the brand represents, and doing it frequently and consistently. But, this is where a business often fails: executives don’t understand what their brand represents, and, as a result execute unrelated tactics and campaigns that often tap into a slew of archetypes. Many of these archetypes have no relationship to the needs the brand fulfills: they’re not innate, they’re not consistent, and their frequency leads to confusion and a lack of brand strength.
Linking a brand to an unrelated archetype is exactly what happened when Infiniti released the Q45 with its infamous “rocks and trees” campaign—a series of ads displaying Zen-like imagery. Not only did Infiniti fail to show the car in any of the advertising, but they also failed to attach the product to an archetype that has anything to do with driving. Their campaign tapped into the archetype of the sage and its associated attributes of inner peace and serenity. A vehicle may help the owner achieve a sense of safety that may make driving calm. But, a car helping you achieve inner peace? I think not.
Contrast Infiniti with Nike, an expert at doing it well. Understanding that athletes are a manifestation of a warrior archetype, all of their advertising supports the archetype and its manifestation as a victorious athlete (no one would want to be associated with a losing warrior).
Nike’s advertising is focused on finding creative ways to represent the same (consistent) archetype that is tied to the needs their brand fulfills (innate) over and over again, year after year (frequent). And they’ve done it so often with the swoosh in full view that seeing the swoosh is now enough to recall all the associations of the brand and the biological needs it fulfills.
In short, strong brands, and especially Cult Brands, work at the basic biology of humans, and they achieve this through tapping into the archetype their brand represents and supporting it through every touch point with the consumer on a consistent and frequent basis.
So, ask yourself: “Do I know what my brand’s archetype is? And, how consistent and frequent am I in representing my brand’s archetype across all touch points?
