For an existing business, knowing who you are helps assure consistency in communication at all touchpoints by all staff. If you advertise as being something it makes a promise about what a customer should expect of you. If they subsequently call to place and order or work with customer service and don’t experience that promise satisfaction will drop. Repeat with not occur. Word of mouth about you will fall.
There are very detailed, sophisticated attribute modeling methods with trade-off and rank priorities; things like conjoint or discrete choice approaches. If you have lots of time and big bucks, we can go after these more intricate solutions. It might be worth it … we apologized to one client for charging tens of thousands of dollars for only a quarter of a percent model predicted improvement but they said they were thrilled because since they spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising ant quarter percent performance improvement was huge.
For the rest of us, those who are in the stratosphere with advertising and promotion spending, is there anything we can do? Yes, a slimmed down approach is to recognize the four basic human desires noted below. For each of these core desires there are three general ways or archetypes in how they are played out by people.
Desire: Create Order
Desire: Find Paradise
Desire: Connect with Others
Desire: Change the World
All that is great. But how does it help me? Do I just guess which archetype my company should position themselves as? And what does it mean I should do or project to my customers?
First, watch this video for an overview!
For brievity, below you will find the ‘attributes’ associated with each archetype. This gives you the ‘de-coder’ ring in terms of what is expected in the nature of people or organizations rallying around that given archetype. In practice, what you will do it prepare a list or wall charts with all these attributes, ideally randomlly ordered rather than grouped as shown here. DO NOT ASSOCIATE THEM WITH THEIR ARCHETYPES as you conduct this exercise. Get your organization leadership into a room or send it to them to fill out individually and return. They each should get a dozen sticker dots or voted they can place behind attritutes they believe reflects your organization. You can let them put two or three dots behind the same atrtibute if they think it super high priority but don’t ‘stuff the ballot box’ with more than three on a single item
You will collect all the votes for each item and associate them as counts in the de-coder grouped list below. Out will pop the highest scoring archetype that represents most fully who you are. Don’t be surprised if you have some high ranking individual attributes in other archetypes show up as well. Use your dominant archetype but acknowledge the other strongly scoring attributes as your organization’s personal twist on how you present it.
You can refer to the video in how you might further translate your personality archetype in your advertising, your phone script, your customer service procedures, even in how your product or service enhances over time. And clearly, you will want to consider this in the segmentation and targeting deployment of how you seek customers.
Nurturing, Compassionate, Soothing, Helpful, Altruistic, Comforting, Kind, Protective, Generous, Caring, Understanding, Supportive
Controlling, Successful, Leadership, Bossy, Responsible, Order, Harmony, Manipulative, Differentiator, Stable, Productive, Unforgiving
Insiring, Unique, Imaginative, Vibrant, Expressive, Artistic, Visionary, Creative, Diverse, Innovative, Influential, Do-it-yourself
Happy, Fearful, Faithful, Optimistic, Pure, Good, Integrity, Nostalgic, Virtuous, Simple, Naive, Idyllic
Adventurous, Daring, Curious, Ambitious, Independent, Resilient, Pioneering, Exciting, Liberating, Rugged, Resourceful, Autonomous
Practical,
Sophiticated,
Objective,
Cutting-edge,
Enlightening,
Scientific,
Analytical,
Smart,
Insightful,
Knowledgeable,
Informed,
Expert
Light-hearted, Fun, Entertaining, Spontaneous, Exciting, Witty, Energetic, Outgoing, Playful, Loud, Funny, Gregarious
Friendly, Hard-working, Humble, Charming, Loyal, Down-to-earth, Modest, Unpretentious, Relatable, Trustworthy, Welcoming, Good-natured
Desirable, Sexy, Passionate, Provocative, Alluring, Romantic, Enticing, Indulgent, Intimate, Luxurious, Pleasurable, Sensual
Mysterious, Revealing, Transformative, Dynamic, Amazing, Visionary, Intuitive, Spiritual, Powerful, Transcendent, Mystical, Magical
Vengeful, Disrupting, Shocking, Radical, Outrageous, Loner, Outsider, Non-Conformist, Freedom, Independent, Destructive
Worthiness, Masterful, Strong, Competent, Arrogance, Courageous, Helpful, Dutiful, Obsessive, Moral, Truthful, Family