What drives a person to get a brand tattoo?

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.

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No matter how the technological and commercial landscape may change, your goal remains the same: to create customers.

More specifically, your goal is to build relationships with customers that translate to repeat business and positive word of mouth.

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.

Our culture, and every modern culture since the Age of Enlightenment, praises reason above all else.

Reason and logic became the salvation of mankind and ushered in the industrial, technological, and information ages.

When humans praise one thing, they have a tendency of doing so at the expense of something else.

In this case, the rise of reason brought a bias against its supposed opposite: emotion.

The Emotional Life of Your Customer

In praising reason, we forgot that human beings are, first and foremost, emotional creatures.

Our reasoning strategies evolved within a vast network of emotions and feelings.

This cultural bias towards reason can keep us from understanding our customers (as well as our employees and ourselves). It gives us a false picture of who we’re trying to serve, for our customers are predominantly emotional, not rational, beings.

In the final analysis, we’re all more alike than we are different. Our emotional lives are what bind humanity together.

Tools for Exploring Your Customer’s Psyche

Unconscious processes operate millions of times faster than does our conscious mind. As much as 95% of our brain processes that result in decisions, behavior, and the motivations behind that behavior, are not conscious.

To get to better know ourselves and to get on pulse of what truly drives our customers to make decisions, we need to go below the surface. We need to somehow access and uncover the motivations in the subconscious and the unconscious mind.

Archetypes, images, symbols, and stories are gateways into these deeper realms.

Used consciously and correctly, this group of tools can provide penetrating insights into our customers’ lives that transcend even the most technologically-advanced research-gathering methods.

Archetypes are the Roots of the Soul

Psychiatrist Carl Jung observed that the psyche consists mainly of images. Many of these images are universal, found throughout the earth in our myths, dreams, and fairy tales. He called these universal mental images archetypes.

Archetypes are deep patterns embedded within each psyche.

We don’t create these archaic images or the patterns of behavior they embody. They come pre-installed in our operating systems; we inherit these images within our brain structure. They lay dormant within us until activated.

Activating an archetype is like opening an app on your smartphone. Tap it and the archetype starts running.

Symbols are the Building Blocks of Thought

Symbols are triggers of archetypal images. A symbol is a visual image that represents an idea. Water, for example, symbolizes the feminine life-force and the unconscious. The sun symbolizes the masculine life-force that surrounds us as well as our conscious mind.

Jung saw symbols as the building blocks of thought itself. Symbols, then, are shortcuts to reaching deeper levels of your customer’s psyche.

Every image—everything you can see with your eyes and in your mind’s eye—has symbolic counterparts.

When you see a ladder, your conscious mind sees a tool for climbing to higher places. Symbolically, the image of a ladder serves as a reminder of a psychological climb toward self-awareness or a spiritual climb to a higher truth.

A triangle represents a hierarchy.  The eagle is a dominant bird of prey. Both the triangle and the eagle are age-old symbols of power.

Symbols can come in the form of visual images like in a logo or product packaging. But they can also come in the form of metaphorical language.

Symbols can be used as a signal to your customer of what your brand represents.

Stories Bring Archetypal Patterns to Life

Story is perhaps the most powerful way to express archetypal patterns. Every story has a cast of characters that represents expressions of various archetypes.

The hero, the villain, the friend, the wise old man/woman, the trickster all represent characters within each of us. They each possess certain behavioral patterns, values, and perspectives that carry their own truth.

Each of us is faced with a series of challenges in life designed to help us grow. The hero’s journey, for example, represents the journey to mature adulthood—the path to personal transformation.

When we listen to a story, we enter the story. When we watch a movie, neurons fire in our brain as if the story is happening to us. Stories, then, awaken and speak to the archetypes within us.

Brands that tap into the power of story can connect and influence their customers in ways their competitors can only dream of.

Emotions Give Images Life

A symbolic image alone doesn’t evoke any meaning in your customer. An image alone is lifeless.

Emotion is what gives the image life. When an image combines with emotion, the archetypal force is activated within your customer’s psyche.

It is this living archetype that defines a brand. It’s what drives a customer’s choice of which brand to associate with.

And so it is the emotional life of your customers you must turn to if you are committed to understanding them so that you can serve them better than anyone else.

Here are eight steps you can take to begin building brand loyalty.

Step 1: Focus on your best customers

Build your business around your best customers—what we call Brand Lovers—instead of trying to aimlessly drive sales. Over time, your return on marketing and innovation efforts will rise.

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