Scott Jeffrey

THE BIG IDEA: Archetypes are at the core of effective marketing. They provide the most powerful way to attract the right customers. But archetypes are often misunderstood. This week, we examine the archetypal power of one of the world’s strongest brands.

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A line of mindless drones in identical colorless uniforms march in unison through an underground industrial tunnel. The atmosphere is cold, lifeless, and gray.

They enter a large auditorium, sitting down in front of a movie-sized monitor. On the screen, Big Brother celebrates the anniversary of the “Information Purification Directive” that put an end to contradictory thought.

A woman with striking blond hair and an athletic build with bronzed skin charges toward the screen. Dressed like an Olympian in sharp red shorts and a white tank top, she is pursued by the Thought Police who wear riot uniforms and helmets.

As Big Brother declares, “We shall prevail!” our heroine hurls her Thor-like hammer at the screen, which explodes with a flash of light.

The voiceover reads: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”

Steve Job’s Vision

This famous ad that debuted as a 1984 Superbowl commercial alludes to George Orwell’s novel 1984, where a futuristic totalitarian government controls its citizens through propaganda, surveillance, and brute force.

This totalitarian regime represents the status quo, the convention, the suppression of new and different ideas. The blond Olympian represents the outlier, the Trailblazer, someone who defies the odds and dares to be different.

Apple isn’t for people who accept the status quo. It’s for Trailblazers and Luminaries committed to changing the world, just like Steve Jobs was.

Here’s to the Crazy Ones

Apple’s 1997 Think Different campaign highlighted the same message with a different approach.

The spot highlighted footage of luminaries including Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon with Yoko Ono, R. Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Martha Graham, Jim Henson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso.

Richard Dreyfus’s voice-over pays homage to the Trailblazers and Luminaries:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Apple has become a symbol of creativity, self-expression, originality, and nonconformity. Apple’s marketing team has exhibited a masterful ability to communicate the company’s core idea through images and symbols.

To better understand why Apple is so effective, we need to first understand how images and symbols influence the human mind.

The Power of The Image

Images affect us in ways we don’t consciously appreciate. Images excite emotion. Images can bind us together. They can also tear us apart.

When you learn how to effectively use images in your business, you have a powerful means to influence your customers, trigger emotions, establish trust, and inspire loyalty.

If you don’t have this knowledge, it is all but guaranteed that you will dilute your brand and weaken your position in the market over time.

What is an Archetype?

For psychologist Carl Jung, archetypes are the fundamental units of the human mind.

He pointed out that every civilized human being is still an archaic man in deeper levels of his mind. And within this ancient level of the mind, there are archetypes.

Jung describes archetypes as the forms or images of a collective nature that occur all over the earth. These images find their way into ancient religions, myths, legends, and fairy tales.

Their symbols are everywhere in our daily lives. We find evidence of archetypes in our own dreams, fantasies, and behavior.

We can observe archetypes in the characters in the stories we read, the films we watch, and the plays we attend.

Archetypes are pervasive throughout the arts, media, advertising, and pop culture. They silently influence our relationships with family, friends, and colleagues.

Archetypes are everywhere, even if only a select few know how to identify them.

The Archetype of The Apple

It’s just a simple piece of fruit, right?

Even something as commonplace as an apple is ripe with ancient symbolism and embedded meaning. (Sorry, we couldn’t resist the pun.)

The apple has always been a symbol of knowledge and freedom.

In the Garden of Eden, Eve is tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This act of rebellion leads to their expulsion from the garden.

The moment that Adam and Eve bit into the fruit, “the eyes of the two of them were open.” They became aware of their nakedness for the first time. With the loss of innocence, they wake up, setting the evolution of humanity in motion. The image of a bitten apple symbolizes this acquisition of consciousness.

The apple is also commonly associated with teachers, the bearers of knowledge. A student gives an apple to the teacher as a token of gratitude for this knowledge.

Apples were also considered a food for the gods. In Greek mythology, it is a symbol for Aphrodite, the supreme goddess of love and beauty.

In Celtic tradition, the apple tree is a symbol of creativity.

How Apple Capitalizes on Archetypal Symbolism

Apple (the company) didn’t have to create the association of an apple to awakening, creativity, knowledge, and freedom. Its customers were already hardwired with that information (on a subconscious level).

Apple just had to link its brand with the symbol.

The 1984 commercial did this effectively by retelling Orwell’s classic story in 60 seconds, positioning Apple as the company for people who wanted intellectual and creative liberation.

In the Think Different campaign, Apple associated itself with existing symbols of Trailblazers and Luminaries by simply paying homage to contemporary recognized bearers of knowledge and creativity.

The Apple Logo Makes You Think Different

The Apple logo is now one of the most widely recognized images in the world, associated with creativity, self-expression, innovation, and nonconformity.

In fact, an empirical study published in the Journal of Consumer Research substantiates this association.

The researchers exposed participants to imperceptible images of brand logos for Apple and IBM. Prior to the exposure, participants reported feeling similarly about both brands except for creativity (Apple’s perceived strength) and competence (IBM’s perceived strength).

After the exposure, the participants were asked to describe as many uses for a brick as they could. Results showed that most participants described common uses such as doorstop or paperweight.

The Apple-primed subjects, however, gave an average of 30% more answers. Independent raters also deemed their answers as more creative. The IBM-primed subjects were strikingly uniform in their answers.

Overall, subjects exposed to the Apple logo demonstrated greater creativity compared to participants exposed to the IBM logo.

Through consistent messaging of its brand’s archetype, Apple has seeped into our collective mind. It has established itself as a harbinger of change, creation, and inspiration.

What’s Your Archetype?

Determining what archetype best represents your brand is a worthy endeavor that many national brands undergo. When you know your archetype, you can develop powerful messaging and product innovations that consistently attract the right customer.

Self-starters can begin the process by using a book like Mark and Pearson’s The Hero & The Outlaw. These authors provide 12 different archetypes to choose from.

Based on our research, we take a different approach. Although we maintain a database of over 3,500 active archetypes, we don’t select an archetype for a business.

A brand’s archetype already exists in the customer’s mind (even though they don’t know it). The goal is to probe your customers’ minds with questions designed to measure their unconscious associations to your brand.

Then, the archetype reveals itself.

A long time ago, humans started telling stories.

Our first stories were drawn on cave walls. We started sharing stories even before we developed language.

Humans have been obsessed with stories ever since.

Stories teach us. They bring order to our lives. In many ways, story define who we are. Stories give us meaning.

Marketers and advertisers have learned that storytelling is a powerful medium for engaging and moving customers. Brands like Coke and Apple are masterful at winning the story wars with their competitors.

But the power of stories goes even deeper.

Stories hold the key to uncovering penetrating insights about your customers. These insights can help you not only generate sales, but build lasting relationships with your customers.

Our Brains Love Story

If you asked the average person why we love stories—in novels, films, or TV—she will likely point to escapism. Stories help us momentarily escape from the challenges and stresses of our lives.

But neuroscience reveals a different truth: if you observe a person’s brain as he watches a story in an fMRI machine, you’ll see that his brain doesn’t look like a spectator, but like a participant.

Even though we know stories aren’t real, the unconscious parts of our brains process them as if they are real.

Stories hook us because our brains make us experience what’s happening in the story.

The Grand Narrative of Storytelling

The great scholar Joseph Campbell loved stories so much that he made studying them his life’s work. His field is called comparative mythology.

He studied the stories of cultures around the world, from different periods in our evolution, spanning thousands of years of storytelling.

While most of his contemporaries focused on the differences between each culture’s stories, Campbell focused on the similarities.

He found many such similarities in various stories from around the world. He encapsulated these similarities in what’s become known as the monomyth, or the hero’s journey.

The Hero’s Journey

The hero starts out in an ordinary world before venturing into a special world.

He meets friend and foe. He undertakes quests. He faces challenges.

Winning a decisive victory, realizing his final goal, the hero returns from the adventure, transformed, bearing wisdom and new powers from his journey.

This hero’s quest is age old. It can be observed in many religions including the stories of Gautama Buddha, Moses, and Jesus Christ.

To better appreciate the commercial power of the monomyth consider: It’s the formula for every modern epic adventure including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and Star Wars.

George Lucas, a good friend of Campbell’s, modeled the original Star Wars film precisely around the monomyth structure Campbell provided in his A Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Adjusting for inflation, Star Wars is the second highest grossing film of all time domestically (behind Gone with the Wind). The Star Wars franchise accounts for four of the top twenty highest grossing films of all time.

No wonder The Walt Disney Company announced the release of the sequel trilogy as soon as it purchased LucasFilms in 2012. Star Wars: Episode VII will be released in December 2015.

Most of the major film franchises in the top 50 highest grossing films of all time follow a similar story structure.

So what’s going on here?

The Power Behind the Hero’s Journey

Why is this monomyth so powerful and pervasive in ours and many other cultures? Why is this structure so effective in storytelling?

Remember that when we engage in story, our brains make us participants, not spectators.

The hero’s journey is ultimately about us. And we are fascinated with ourselves.

We identify with the hero, the protagonist, in the story. We are the hero in our own life adventure.

And your customers are the heroes in their own adventures too. They have their own stories to live and tell.

Your role is to support them in their quests, to provide aid when needed.

To do this effectively, you need to know what fuels the adventure.

The Primary Ingredient Behind Every Hero’s Journey

Compelling stories come down to one thing: problems.

The protagonist faces a problem and tries to overcome it. This is the essence of drama and the key to good storytelling.

Without problems, without troubles and tensions, there’s no story. There’s nothing to engage us.

The hero must face his problem, surmount his fear, resolve his tension.

Great Businesses Help Their Customer’s Win Victories

What’s your customer’s primary tension in relation to your brand, products, or services?

How can you help your customers win a decisive victory in their own lives?

Apple helps their users win the war against the mundane, arming them with tools for creativity and self-expression. Many humans are starving for this.

Nike helps its customers transform into warriors, allowing them to improve their physical conditions and master themselves.

Harley-Davidson helps free its riders from the tyranny of an oppressive, conventional world, if only for a Saturday ride.

Star Trek helps trekkies embrace a utopian, futuristic society, free from the insanities of mankind’s current stage of development, if only for a weekend convention.

Brands like Oprah and The Life is good Company counteract widespread pessimism and negativity with optimism and hope.

The Key to Penetrating Consumer Insights

The purpose of consumer insights is to understand the role your business plays in the lives of your customers.

Your goal is to understand their desires, motivations, emotions, and beliefs that trigger their attitudes and actions.

To accomplish this difficult task, decode your customers’ stories. Learn the adventures they are on and the tensions that drive them.

If you do, you’ll be better prepared to provide vital aid on your customers’ quests and become an unlikely ally to them.

And if you do, you’ll win a special place in their hearts and minds.

Tobacco. It’s one of the most addictive substances on the planet.

Back in 1987, smokers were first told that it is easier to give up heroin than cigarettes.

Today, the CDC reports that nearly 20% of American adults smoke. Nearly one in five. That’s pretty bad.

In Thailand, the numbers are worse: 27% of the entire Thai adult population smokes and 46% of adult men. That’s nearly every other guy you meet!

Thailand’s government is very interested in reducing the numbers of people who smoke.  They used a video campaign that draws on one of the most important psychological forces that influences people’s behavior: cultural narratives.

Every Cultural Narrative Holds a Tension

The video begins with images of people standing outdoors, smoking. A small child, not even yet into his teens, asks for a light.

In every instance, the adults refused to light the child’s cigarette. In fact, the vast majority of the adults went on to tell the child why they shouldn’t smoke at all.

One woman told the child how cigarettes contained insecticide, while another man talked about diseases associated with smoking. Still another man talked about not being able to play and have fun if they smoked.

All of these adults, the ones who are refusing to light the child’s cigarette, are sharing a contemporary cultural story with them.

In this narrative, tobacco plays the ultimate bad guy.

Cultural Narratives are Alive Within Us

The adults take on the role of wise adviser or guru in this tale. It’s their job to prepare the child with the warnings and wisdom they’ll need to prevail over the looming peril of addiction.

When we watch the adults telling this cultural tale, we see that they’re really invested in telling the story. They feel compelled to not only share this story, but to share it in the most effective way possible.

Think about the man who talked about the child not being able to play any more.

He doesn’t tell this kid, “Someday you’ll experience decreased cardiac function if you keep this up!” Or “In 30 years, you won’t even be able to think of taking the stairs!”

These statements would be meaningless to the child.

Instead, the adult focused on the benefit that would matter most to the child. He did this intuitively and automatically, reacting to the child’s request within seconds.

Connect with Your Customers Through Cultural Stories

This is a powerful demonstration of the power cultural stories have upon us. These narratives surround us, making up the subtle cultural background of our lives.

The role of the cultural story that smoking is bad, especially for children, is so pervasive that these adults felt compelled to reinforce the narrative—even though they were smoking at the time!

As business leaders, we need to understand which cultural narratives affect our customers the most. We also need to know how our customers see themselves in relation to that cultural narrative.

And to see why, let’s go back to the commercial.

After hearing the adult’s reasons for refusing them the light, the children handed the adults a note, and then quickly left.

The note read, “You worry about me, but why not worry about yourself?” along with a helpline number.

Many of the adults threw their cigarettes away. All of the adults retained the brochure. The helpline experienced a 40% increase in calls.

Empowering Your Customers as Heroes of their Adventure

In Thailand, as in much of the world, the cultural norm is that we tell instructional, moralistic stories mainly to children, not vice versa.

By placing the child in the counter-intuitive role of the wise adviser, the subconscious mind of the recipient and the viewers are shocked into a new state of awareness and receptivity.

The adult who was not aware they were being taught, find themselves overwhelmed by the wisdom of the lesson they received.

This cognitive shift is accompanied by the realization that one’s role in relation to the cultural story has changed.

The adults who were, in the first version of the tale, the wise adviser, can now see themselves in the child’s role: as the hero-in-training, preparing to fight off tobacco’s addictive powers.

The call to be a hero can transform a life, especially if it comes at the right time. We don’t know how many of those helpline calls resulted in someone giving up cigarettes for good, but we feel safe in saying that it’s more than a few.

Understanding the subconscious mind and leveraging that understanding to create effective messaging can do amazing things.

If this knowledge can be used to break consumers free of one of the most addictive substances on the planet, what can it do for your business?  That’s something well worth thinking about.