Strategies
Design for Engagement
Engagement represents the degree to which a meaningful bond, both rational and emotional, has been established between an organization and its customers.
In order to build relationships and create Fully Engaged Clients, you need to have a great Brand Identity, a Living Brand Identity. Brand Identity for an organization is like the persona for an individual. In astrology you can think of it as your Rising Sign or your Ascendent, it's the image you present to the world, your personality.
A brand has the potential to come to life because it’s greater than the sum of all its parts, which gives it the power to TAP into hidden energy fields and underlying patterns. It has physical artifacts, but it is fundamentally an Idea, a set of principles and feelings first, a physical expression of those values second.
The visible manifests from the invisible. Materialists would have you believe the opposite. Getting clear on what the Ideal and Purpose of your brand is first, and then using those values as your North Star for making future business decisions, is the key to alignment. The universe conspires to help you when you’re clear and in alignment on what your ideal and purpose are for doing what you’re doing.
In order to design memorable experiences that connect people with the overarching Idea of what your organization stands for, you need to have a compelling Brand Identity. Compelling brands have meaning, and that meaning is the brand’s most valuable asset. Meaning speaks to the feeling/intuitive side of people. It creates an emotional connection, which then allows the audience to hear the more rational reasons for doing business with you.
The most compelling brands TAP into something universal and present in all of us to some degree or another. These are the archetypes. Archetypes provide an intangible experience of meaning. Archetypal Meaning is what makes brands come alive.
Clarify Your Message
We need to clarify what your heartfelt message is and develop communication frameworks around it that are easy to remember, powerful, and consistent. What is your message? Can you say it easily? Can your whole team describe it simply?
The essence of branding is to create simple, relevant messages we can repeat over and over to literally brand yourselves into the public consciousness. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What can you say that’s of benefit to them? In a way that they recognize it quickly and notice you in a crowd?
Filtering your message through the lens of your Story is very powerful. Story is a sense-making device. Story is a filter to sift out the noise. Nothing holds attention more than a story. Story is the weapon we have against the noise. Story makes music out of noise. (Like Orpheus). The brain remembers music and forgets noise.
Archetypal Brand Positioning
Archetypes are timeless, universal patterns. Imprints, hardwired into our psyches that influence the characters we love in art, literature, the great religions of the world, and contemporary films. This is why we intrinsically resonate with these patterns. Archetypes illuminate the most ancient grooves in our mental architecture.
Plato called these imprints “elemental forms” and saw them as the idea structures that formed a template for material reality. Psychiatrist C.G. Jung called them archetypes. In the marketing world, we have no comparable concept or vocabulary. Yet brands are, in truth, among the most vibrant contemporary expressions of these deep and abiding patterns.
Archetypal Identities reflect values and values are what customers buy into. Customers are unconsciously biased towards particular archetypal elements. There is a nascent power here that can be skillfully tapped into.
For a Brand Archetype to be compelling, it needs to be simple and easy to recognize. This means that brand identities are forged best by identifying solidly with one archetype, or one with a secondary at most. The archetype within the brand serves as a beacon for the corresponding motivation in all of us.
Understanding and aligning the Archetypal Core of your values, your organizational culture, and your Brand Identity - and having a logic and a language to help you do so - allows you to manage meaning in a way that can inspire employee and customer loyalty. Archetypes can facilitate Brand Relationships by aligning what the brand says it is, with what it does, with how it is perceived and known.
When the business decisions come in and take over, which they inevitably will, you need something to guide those decisions to keep your company consistent with your Brand Meaning. This is your Brand Archetype. An endless repository of goodwill between you and your customers that you can leverage. Without fixed and steady reference points, we are almost certain to become hopelessly lost.
The goal is to Identify and Create an Archetypal Identity, nourish it, and use archetypal meaning as an ongoing driver for development.