Few business leaders appreciate exactly how important imagery is in connecting to the hearts of their customers. Most marketers want to create imagery that will attract everyone. That’s impossible: when you try to be all things to all people, you become nothing meaningful to anyone.
Imagery will attract certain people and repel others. Cult Brands not only realize this, they capitalize on it.
Think about the blazing eagle tattoo of your typical HOG (Harley Owner Group) rally attendee. Does seeing that image excite you? Or do you think to yourself, “No thanks.” The point is that you’re either a lover of the Harley-Davidson brand, or you’re not.
Every image signals to consumers whether or not your brand is especially for them.
Symbols, Archetypes, and Your Brand
Why do images have so much power? Our logos and marks are symbols.
Symbols are triggers of archetypal images—energy patterns that rest in our subconscious mind. These primordial images are not personal to each individual, but are aspects of the “collective” of all of us. Eminent Swiss psychoanalyst Dr. Carl Jung highlighted that these archetypal images are the building blocks of thought.
These subconscious, archetypal images lay the foundation for the experience customers are going to have with your brand. The images you create in your logos and marks—the symbols—are a signal to the customer of what the brand represents.
In Man and His Symbols, Dr. Jung included an old Volkswagen advertisement with an aerial view of Beetle toy cars forming the shape of the Volkswagen logo. He noted that the advertisement “may have a ‘trigger’ effect on a reader’s mind, stirring unconscious memories of childhood. If these memories are pleasant, the pleasure may be associated (unconsciously) with the product and brand name.”
Archetypes: Connecting to Your Customers’ Hearts
Indeed, there is a science to connecting to the hearts of our customers. Marketers must find ways to positively influence customers through the use of powerful imagery. Only by understanding the images in our customers’ hearts can we create images that will connect with their minds and drive them to choose us more often than our competitors.
Business leaders must come better understand the meaning behind the energy patterns that give meaning to the forms we represent through our imagery. And they understand them, our communications must constantly support the meanings our customers find.
If you betray the image that’s connected to the customers’ hearts, you’ll quickly repel the cherished customers you’re trying to build long–lasting relationships with.
A critical power of branding lies in your ability to creatively associate your brand in highly relevant ways to your customers. Your marks, logos, and images have to be associated with a deep aspect of your customers’ hearts.
Take time to understand what’s meaningful to your customers—to comprehend what’s in their hearts. Only then can you hope to connect with your customers on a deeper, more meaningful level and create a powerful brand that’s irreplaceable in the hearts and minds of your customers.
The key to any successful retail marketing strategy comes down to understanding the end customers. Only after you understand your target customers can you formulate effective strategies for attracting them.
Learn What’s Important to Your Customers
Here are some of the questions you can explore to better understand your customers:
What are the primary needs and wants that your customers have which you hope to fulfill?
What are the problems or tensions your customers have that your products or services can resolve? (What problems can they resolve now? What could they resolve in the future?)
At present, how do your customers currently resolve these problems or tensions? Where do they go? Who do they go to? What do they do to solve these problems?
How can you do a better job resolving these problems or tensions for your customers?
Where do your target customers spend their time? How can you reach them? Are they online? Do they commute to work? Do they read magazines or e-zines? Can you engage them on social media?
The fundamental idea behind this line of questioning is to get to the hearts and minds of your customers. The goal is to learn what’s important to your customers. You want to understand their motivations and to better appreciate the role your business can and does play in their lives.
The Value of Customer Psychology
Perhaps it isn’t abundantly clear why this line of questioning is so important for effective retail marketing. After all, you’re just trying to sell people stuff, right?
Well, it turns out that if you want to sell people stuff in a competitive marketplace you need to understand why people buy your stuff in the first place. If your competitors have this knowledge, they will outpace you. If you possess this knowledge, you can effectively compete. It’s that simple.
Businesses that just focus on generating the next transaction shy away from mining too deeply into customer psychology; they are mainly interested in converting the next sale.
In contrast, brands that take a relational mindset to their customers and value cultivating long-term customer loyalty tend to appreciate customer behavior and seek to better understand it.
And perhaps it goes without saying, but brands with customer loyalty have a better chance of being in business a year from now or twenty years from now. Understanding consumer psychology is important for any long-term effective retail marketing strategy.
A positioning strategy is a way of positioning your retail products and services in the mind of your customers.
As marketers, we aspire to build stronger positions—to create a place in the mind of our prospects and customers where our products are positively recalled. We hope to trump our competitors by finding the right words and the perfect tagline to complement our strengths while highlighting our competitors’ weaknesses. A classic example from Avis: “When you’re only No. 2, you try harder.”
The Death of Positioning
The idea of positioning a brand has ruled marketing for over 30 years. We put our hopes into positioning because it offers a formula for building a bridge from our corporate meetings to the sale of our product. What we generally end up with, however, is a string of words that is irrelevant to customers.
Here’s why: What a person perceives is that person’s reality and perception is unique for each individual. We each hold different perceptual filters based on factors like our beliefs, values, behaviors, experiences, and senses. Two potential customers can see the same billboard ad of a woman holding a beer bottle and have completely different responses. One person becomes stimulated; another becomes enraged.
The unfortunate reality is that no marketer has the power to position anything in the customer’s mind, which is the core promise of all positioning strategies. The notion that positions are created by marketers has to die. Each customer has their own idea of what you are.
Positioning is not something you do, but rather, is the result of your customer’s perception. Positioning is not something we can create—the act of positioning belongs to the customers.
A New Approach to Positioning Strategies
Behind your positioning statement is your intention—how you desire your business to be represented to customers. Once the real role of positioning is understood, having a positioning statement can be useful by clarifying your brand’s essence within your organization.
By examining the essence of what you are and comparing it with what your customers want, the doors open to building a business with a strong positioning in the mind of the customer. Why? Great brands merge their passion with their positioning into a tagline that captures the essence of both.
Famous Taglines From Major Retail Brands
A few famous examples:
Walmart: “Always low prices. Always.” This was not just a tagline; it was Walmart’s battle cry for all their buyers, merchants, and everyone who touches the customer.
Apple: “Think different.” Apple communicated to the world that you can think different with every single one of their products.
Nike: “Just do it.”
Strong positions can last many years. Nike has waved the just do it banner for over 30 years. They continue to find new and amazing ways to say it repetitively without boring their audience. Their position gives them permission to express something that is powerful. “Just do it” belongs to the customer—people love that. To be able to “just do it” makes you want to jump hurdles or sprint a marathon.
But, positions can also change. Walmart retired “Always low prices, always” after 13 years in 2007 and replaced it with “Save money. Live better.” The new positioning reflected the changing desires of their customer base: they were starting to think not just in terms of deals but what else that deal enabled them to do in their lives.
How to Effectively Use a Positioning Strategy
Positioning statements aren’t just about taglines: that’s just one expression of it that’s easily able to be understood by your customers.
Positions should penetrate everything your company does.
To fully integrate your positioning statement within the customers’ minds, you must start from within your business. Every member of your organization that touches the customer has to be the perfect expression of your position. And since everyone touches the customer in some way, everyone should be the best expression of your position.
Now comes the hard part: Put up everything that represents your brand on a wall. List all your brand’s touchpoints—every point of interaction with your customer. With a critical, yet intuitive eye, ask:
How can I more fluidly communicate my brand’s desired position?
Does every touchpoint look, say, and feel like the brand I want my customers to perceive?
Most marketers don’t have the clarity and conviction of following through on their words. Without certainty, they default to the status quo.
Turn everything you do into an expression of your desired positioning and you can create something special. This takes courage: to actively position your brand means you have to stand for something. Only then are you truly on your way to owning your very own position in the minds of your customers.
If you were to conduct an immediate survey right now, this very instant, of all of the leadership of all of the companies you interact with, in one form or another, over the course of any given 24 hour period, I can say, with a pretty high degree of confidence, that they’ll all tell you they listen to their customers.
Some of these companies are telling you the truth.
Others, not so much. It’s not an intentional deception, mind you. These organizations think they’re tuned right into their customers. They point to tall, towering, extremely expensive piles of market research and demographic data with pride. All of this accumulated information must prove they’re listening to their customer.
Then we watch these companies in action. Inevitably, a point arises where it becomes clear to the uninterested observer that there’s a significant disconnect between the company and the customer. When that disconnect reaches a critical point, the brand suffers serious damage.
Although they’ll apologize out of necessity, internally they’ll blame it on a changing consumer environment that’s produced uber-senstive consumers. After all, how could all of their research have led them astray?
Yet, this phenomenon of misreading customers isn’t anything new: there’s just more eyes out there to catch companies when they’ve misread what the customers want.
All of these companies thought they’d been listening to their customers. Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of “Do you listen to your customers?” we should be asking, “Can you listen to your customer?”
Customers First: What Do You Need to Listen to Your Customer?
Gathering information about your customer is not the same thing as listening to them. You can accumulate data all day long, only to discover that you’re not protected from making the mistakes that you saw other companies make but never believed you could.
You have to be able to listen not only to what your customers say, but what they mean.
One of our favorite stories comes in the early days of social media: before anyone changed their outfits on TikTok, before anyone filtered a selfie on Instagram, and just two years after Twitter launched and Facebook expanded beyond the college market.
The year was 2008 and epic fails just started becoming a thing. Motrin took an iron-heavy approach to babywearing that proved that if Mama’s not happy, nobody’s happy.
It’s safe to assume that at some point, via market research or focus groups, Motrin figured out that being a good mom was important to a good portion of their market. So far, so good. In fact, marketing data often shows that this desire to protect and provide can influence a range of consumer choices, including the search for a good new crypto to buy in hopes of securing a stable financial future. The need to nurture is what we call a universal driver. The compulsion to care for the next generation is a pretty significant asset for the species that wants to stick around for a while. There’s a caregiver instinct hardwired into our psyche.
Motrin, of course, is also very interested in talking to people with backaches.
When you put those pieces together, you get this ad:
There’s even an explicit call-out to the “be a good mom” message. It blew up in their faces in a magnificent way because they didn’t know how to listen to their customer, completely and in a meaningful way.
It’s important to the customer to be a good mom. What, then, does being a good mom mean?
It sounds like a simple question. It doesn’t, however, have a simple answer. We all have our own personal definition of what it means to be a good mom, based on our own experiences, but that’s not where the story should end. We need to understand what being a good mom means for the customer. The definition varies by community and culture. Within each group, you’ll find that being a good mom comes with its own set of expectations and norms—a set of rules to be followed by anyone wanting to be seen and acknowledged as a good mom within the group.
Some of these rules are overtly articulated, while others are conveyed via subtle social pressures. The customers begin internalizing these rules from the moment they’re born and continue to do so throughout their lives. Becoming a parent and having small children pushes these rules very prominently into consciousness; this is all information that is highly useful and relevant to have as they navigate a new experience.
As an organization, you really need to know what those rules are. You need to respect and honor the importance of these core beliefs in your customers’ lives. Motrin went wrong because the ad campaign violated two major, if unwritten, laws of American motherhood:
All parenting choices are made in the best interest of the child.
Mothers do not experience physical pain or exhaustion.
By suggesting that some mothers chose babywearing in order to follow the whims of fashion and that this could cause backaches, Motrin introduced a tension into their customers’ lives. It may be entirely true that a customer chose to wear their baby in a sling because they thought it was a cool, trendy way to carry the baby, and that it was that exact choice that contributed to their back pain—but it is equally true that to admit to these sentiments go directly against powerful cultural norms. This tension can be experienced wholly on the unconscious level, but it is powerful enough to make the customer uncomfortable.
It is human nature to avoid the uncomfortable. Rather than confront the validity of cultural norms, especially in relation to our own personal experience, it’s easier to avoid the brand that introduced the tension into our lives. Anger and hostility are common responses to the tension as well, as evidenced by the heated response to the Motrin babywearing campaign.
Had Motrin known what their customers meant when they said they wanted to be a good mom, they could have easily avoided violating these rules.
Delving deeper into your customer’s behavior and experiences makes it easier to develop a more comprehensive understanding you can use to connect effectively and efficiently with them—without any of the headaches Motrin experienced. That’s the value of really listening to your customers and putting your customers first.
If marketing is a discipline, consistency is the ultimate marker for success.
More importantly, if you want to get the edge over your competitors and retain loyal customers, a consistent customer experience is vital.
As you know, making your customers happy in a single transaction simply isn’t enough. You need to meet and exceed their needs across the customer’s entire journey.
There are three key areas of consistency that we’ve found to be critical for cultivating customer loyalty and increasing revenue:
Consistent Emotional Anchoring
What are the primary emotions your best customers experience and associate with your brand? For example, does your brand evoke feelings of joy, love, wonder, energy, hope, optimism, or strength?
Knowing your brand’s target emotions is the first step.
Next, you need to ensure that a critical mass of customers are experiencing these emotions consistently when they interact with your brand.
Consistent Messaging
Consistent messaging has two vital components: highlighting your brand’s promise and demonstrating that you fulfill that promise.
Do your customers know what they expect when they interact with your business? And do they perceive that you meet or exceed that expectation consistently?
Consistent Customer Experience
Every way in which your customers touch your brand must be consistent.
From a first-time purchase to repeat buying, from customer service issues to interactions on social media, every aspect of the customer’s journey must be a continuous, positive experience.
Providing a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints in our multi-channel, multi-touch world is more challenging than ever.
Companies that succeed at this herculean task of consistency throughout the customer’s journey, however, win market share from their less adept competitors and cultivate legions of loyal customers.
Fairy tales are some of the oldest stories in existence. In one form or another, these stories have been told time and time again—admittedly to entertain, but also to teach.
The details vary from culture to culture—Europe gave us Hansel and Gretel using their wits to get away from a ravenous witch, whereas Brer Rabbit and his tricky antics originate in the antebellum American South—but the underlying messages remain the same: there is no obstacle that can’t be overcome if we’re smart, steadfast, and not above being strategically committed to objective truths.
Why Fairy Tales Are Important
Fairy tales are, at their core, heightened portrayals of human nature that reveal, as the glare of injury and illness does, the underbelly of humanity. Both fairy tales and medical charts chronicle the bizarre, the unfair, the tragic. And, the terrifying things that go bump in the night are what doctors treat at 3 a.m. in emergency rooms. We use cultural stories to help us understand life experiences. We also use these social stories to guide our actions to better navigate what life throws at us.
Brand Lovers and their Cultural Stories
Another way to refer to fairy tales, and other old, eternal narratives, is as cultural stories. In Brand Modeling, we focus on understanding the cultural stories that influence our Brand Lovers.
Although we seldom articulate our connection to cultural stories, cultural stories connect people to their ideal selves. These are symbolic road maps we use to navigate our way through life; they are strategic touchstones to reference as we move forward from where we are to where we want to be.
Cultural stories provide the framework we see ourselves in—as individuals and in relationship to others. This is where cultural stories guide purchasing behavior.
What are the stories that most influence your Brand Lovers?
You can’t manage what you can’t measure.W. Edwards Deming
Businesses have become obsessed with metrics. More metrics are treated as producing greater the results. And, the better the metrics, the better the results.
This metric fixation is the byproduct of an unhealthy obsession with outcomes—the movement of a nonexistent needle—that ends up conflating measurement with progress.
To serve the desired outcome, metrics often become as manipulated as the quote that opened this blog: one of the most widely used quotes in favor of the metric mentality was never written by Deming. In fact, Deming wrote quite the opposite: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it—a costly myth.”1
It’s not that metrics aren’t important. The problem occurs when businesses obsess about outcomes.
This outcome obsession has resulted in measuring the what and often ignoring the why and how. As Deming writes, “A numerical goal accomplishes nothing….What counts is the method—by what method?…If you can accomplish a goal without a method, then why were you not doing it last year?”2
Outcomes are byproducts of methods operating in complex systems. An improved outcome doesn’t necessarily indicate that the complex system is functioning. By just looking at an outcome, a broken system could appear to be functioning properly.
Without understanding the why and how, disaster can be lurking around the corner or a business may not be actually taking full advantage of its potential capabilities. The systems and methods that produce the outcomes are what really need to be evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, not just the outcomes.
An evaluation must look at the whole picture rather than an arbitrary outcome—much less a single outcome.
Are you paying too much attention to the outcome and not the systems and methods?
Psychiatrist Carl Jung considered archetypes the fundamental units of the human mind.
Archetypes are like software programs that come preinstalled on your computer (mind). You may not know they exist, but they are always either running in the background or ready to run after a single click.
Archetypes are images of a collective nature. They are universal symbols. Archetypes are personified in the characters and roles of religions, myths, fairy tales, and modern storytelling in the form of films and video games. Every character in a story represents an archetype.
How Archetypes Work
Jung described archetypes as the forms which our instincts take.1 That is, archetypes trigger set patterns of behavior.
No matter what image of the Hero archetype you hold in mind, for example, certain patterns of behavior and characteristics come alive, like bravery, valor, persistence, and action.
It doesn’t matter where in the world you go, the Hero archetype is the same. Archetypes transcend culture and time.
Connect with Your Customer’s Emotional Life
Archetypes, Jung wrote, “are pieces of life itself—images that are integrally connected to the living individual by the bridge of the emotions.”2
Emotion is what brings archetypes to life. An image is dead if it doesn’t evoke true feelings. Without emotion, an archetypal image cannot speak to us.
Although modern culture focuses mainly on the external world of material things, humans also have an inner world. This inner world is the home of our fantasies, imagination, and emotional life.
It is from our inner world that we find personal meaning, value, and life’s richness.
Our outer worlds and our inner worlds are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps you know someone who is financially prosperous (outer) but emotionally poor (inner). You probably also know people who have very little financially, but seem to live rich, joyful lives.
One of the reasons we love watching movies is that they bring certain archetypes to life in our minds. We feel what the characters feel. For the duration of the movie, the archetypes in our psyche get to live out an adventure.
When businesses use archetypes effectively in marketing, these archetypes evoke powerful emotions and related images in the minds of their customers. This effort results in customers instinctively gravitating to these businesses.
Great Brands Capitalize on Archetypes
The first step to using archetypes in your marketing efforts is to identify the archetypes hidden within your business.
This is both an art and a science. There are thousands of archetypes and isolating the most relevant ones is no simple task.
Apple plays to the Creator archetype, associating itself with free-thinking, creativity, self-expression, originality, knowledge, and nonconformity.
Nike plays to the Warrior archetype, associating itself with the goddess of victory, strength, endurance, courage, fearlessness, conviction, and dominance.
The second step is to create associations between your archetypes and your brand in the minds of your customers. This requires creativity and consistency as well as a thoughtful, disciplined approach to marketing and advertising.
Is it worth the effort?
There’s no single better way for big businesses to position themselves in the hearts and mind of their customers.
Think about what the term “branding” really means and you’ll have a better appreciation for the importance of the psychology behind brand tattoos.
The tattoo is a powerful symbolic image. Symbolic images activate patterns buried in our unconscious. These unconscious images are what Carl Jung referred to as archetypes.
Archetypes, in Jung’s words, “are simply the forms which the instincts assume.”1
Archetypes serve as the foundation for the way the psyche interacts with the world. We associate specific symbolic images with specific feelings, values, and beliefs. We are not generally aware of these associations; they are below our conscious awareness.
Brand Tattoos Fulfill Social Needs
Symbols are tied to our instincts, which feed our human needs. We all have biological needs as well as social needs. Brand tattoo serve our social needs.
How? The mark or image of a brand represents a specific set of ideals, aspirations, beliefs, values, and worldviews. We all have a need for love and belonging. Brand tattoos are badges that symbolize membership into a social group. They makes us feel like we belong.
Brand tattoos help customers bond with others in the same social group who share special interests and common values. Brand tattoos send a message that they belong to a unique, personally meaningful community. You only “get the message” if you’re part of that group.
Brand Tattoos Represent Meaningful Associations
Victor Frankl attributed the success of his bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning to the title of the book. To him, millions of people bought the book because of their own lack of meaning in their lives. And, the need to fill the meaning deficit has only grown through the present day.
Some people have discovered their meaning in the values they project onto brands like Apple, Harley-Davidson, Nintendo, Nike, and Coca-Cola.
The brand tattoo is permanent badge with special meaning. It creates a powerful recall cue for the memories, experiences, emotions, and other positive associations they have with the brand. A single image, as represented by the tattoo, can encapsulate a complex matrix of meaning.
Brand Tattoos Symbolize Ideals
Beyond the social needs of humans, brand tattoos are reminders of the customer’s ideal life.
Brands can become associated with specific ideals, as Apple has become inextricably linked to creativity, beauty, and self-expression. Customers see the brand’s mark as both a reminder of and identification with these ideals, allowing them to draw strength from the image.
For customers to identify with your brand, your brand has to constantly and consistently be associated with a particular archetype. Then, if that image resonates strong enough in your customer’s psyche, they just might want to brand their skin with your image.
Marrying Customers to Your Business
Customers instinctively look for meaning. They naturally look for something to rally around. They crave an emotional payoff from their interaction with the brands they love. Brand tattoos create a permanent physical connection between the customer and the brand.
In a world where most businesses focus exclusively on growth and sales, the opportunity for businesses to serve customers on a deeper level remains open and waiting.
The doorway to the customer’s unconscious mind is open to those brave enough to venture inward.The results can be magical, with extreme loyalty—and growth and sales—following suit. follow suit.
This challenging feat is, in large part, accomplished through branding: using a set of practices to get customers to associate specific emotions and images with a company.
When a group of customers associates desired emotions and images to a brand, that brand has “equity” it can leverage in order to grow.
Southwest Airlines, for example, offers warm, friendly service to its passengers in an industry notorious for subpar customer experience.
Their brand has become the “heart of the sky,” symbolized by a heart on the belly of its airplanes.
The Strategy: Focus On Your Best Customers
The secret ingredient to profitability and creating a loyalty-driven enterprise is what we call Brand Lovers: the customers who love you the most.
Brand Lovers emotionally connect with what you do and want to celebrate who you are. Their connection with your brand is so strong that they often don’t consider doing business with anyone else, and if they do: they always consider you first.
Apple’s Brand Lovers, for example, don’t consider purchasing a PC. To them, there is no alternative to Mac.
Your Brand Lovers choose you more often than your competitors. For many companies, the best customers drive most of the business’s profitability. Yet, these businesses often know very little about these customers.
Identify Your Brand Lovers
How do you find your best customers?
Actually, they often find you. They might hang out in your stores, repeatedly comment on your social media, send you e-mails, and call from time to time to tell you how great you’re doing.
Some customers might even blog about your products or services, or create videos and post them on YouTube. These special customers might mention you on their social networks.
On the financial side, if you maintain a customer database, you can sift through and determine who purchases from you with the greatest frequency and for the longest time span.
Know Your Brand Lovers
Your goal is to form a stronger relationship with your best customers. To accomplish this, start by getting to know them better.
Talk to them. Find out why they keep doing business with you. Don’t be afraid to ask. And, listen carefully.
Conducting online surveys can be helpful, but finding ways to directly talk to your customers provides deeper insights than any survey can. Sam Walton would often tell his executives: “If you don’t know what to do, go ask the customer. If it’s not happening in the store, it is not important.”
Look for the intangible clues that make you unique in your customers’ eyes. Uncover the emotional effect you have on them.
General market research doesn’t uncover the true drivers of choice for your best customers. These drivers are always below the surface in the subconscious realms.
Serve Them Better Than Anyone Else
There are always ways to grow your business by embracing your best customers.
Once you understand why your best customers love doing business with you, you will be better prepared to serve them. The answers don’t have to be complex.
How can you show them that you genuinely care about them?
For World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), offering free meatball subs before their shows increased the love among early participants.
What problem are you helping your best customers solve? What need are you helping them fill?
Skaters were ostracized by most businesses, but Vans listened to its customers and developed products aligned with the skater lifestyle.
What are meaningful ways to celebrate their loyalty?
Are you grateful for your best customers? Do they know it? What are some ways to acknowledge your appreciation for their business?
You don’t necessarily have to give them a gift; sometimes a simple “thank you” will work wonders.
As a leader of your enterprise, your role is to create the future today. This requires you to know what your customers will want tomorrow. The only way to anticipate the future needs of your customers is to understand who they are. Then, you can create the future together.
