THE BIG IDEA: All businesses are run by archetypes. Some know it. Most don’t. When you understand how archetypes work, you can better position your business in the marketplace, attracting the right employees and loyal customers.

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Why do tens of thousands of riders flock to Milwaukee for Harley-Davidson’s annual rally?

Why do hundreds of customers camp outside of IKEA’s latest store opening?

Why do over a thousand Motorers drive over 5,000 miles across the United States in MINI’s Take the State tour?

What are these brands doing to create cult followers? And what can it teach us about creating customer loyalty?

Needs: The Biological Drivers of Human Behavior

These unusual businesses—Cult Brands as we call them—achieve this unusual level of loyalty because they do more than just sell products or services.

They help fulfill their customers’ human needs, creating experiences steeped with emotion.

These human needs stem from instincts and operate at the deepest level of our biology.

Much of human behavior is a consequence of our attempts to meet these needs.

As you’ll recall, psychologist Abraham Maslow arranged these human needs in a hierarchy, with higher-level needs less likely to be fulfilled.

These needs, in ascending order, are biological/physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, cognitive, aesthetic, self-actualization, and transcendence.

The lower level needs, sometimes called existence needs, are fundamental and essential to daily life. Humans focus on meeting these needs first.

Higher Level Needs: What Cult Brands Do Differently

While most businesses help customers address lower level needs (as a supermarket provides food and water at the biological level), Cult Brands leverage higher-level needs to develop mutually beneficial relationships with their customers.

Cult Brands like Harley-Davidson, Vans, and Linux play to the esteem needs for freedom.

Nike and Under Armour hit on the esteem needs for dominance and mastery.

Apple supports the aesthetic need for creative self-expression. Oprah champions the self-actualization need for personal growth.

Maslow’s hierarchy helps explain why customers love their favorite brands, but it isn’t the whole story.

Archetypes: The Psychological Drivers of Human Behavior

In addition to the biological motivations categorized by Maslow, there are also psychic influences. In psychology, psyche means the totality of the human mind, including both conscious and unconscious processes.

Psychiatrist Carl Jung observed that the psyche consists mainly of images. Many of these images are of a collective nature. They are found all over the earth in our myths, dreams, fairy tales, and legends. He called these primordial images archetypes.

Archetypes explains consumers’ love for their favorite brands at the level of the psyche.

Archetypes are universal mental images. They set the patterns of behavior for our interaction with the world. We inherit these images in our brain structure.

Instincts: The Forces Behind Archetypes

Jung described archetypes as “instinctual images” or “the forms which the instincts assume.”

Instincts are physiological urges. Our senses perceive them. But simultaneously, instincts come alive in fantasies and in symbolic images, that is, in archetypes.

This means that archetypes and instincts go hand in hand. For this reason, archetypal images trigger set patterns of behavior designed to actualize the images.

No matter what image of the Hero you hold in your mind, for example, certain patterns of behavior and personality traits come to mind like bravery, valor, persistence, and action.

Examples of archetypes include the Mother, Father, Warrior, Sage, Hero, Caregiver, Genius, Outlaw, Magician, Mentor, Actor, Athlete, Philosopher, Peacemaker, Prostitute, Artist, Adventurer, Maverick, Monk, Entertainer, Jester, Villain, and Vampire. But, ultimately, every word or image can represent an archetype.

When you think of archetypes, think of instincts or set patterns of behavior shared by all of humanity.

Archetypal Clusters: Nike and Under Armour

Archetypes don’t operate in a vacuum. Archetypal images tend to cluster together, like a constellation of stars. These archetypal clusters share certain personality traits.

The archetypes of the Warrior and the Athlete, for example, share many of the same qualities, including strength, endurance, courage, and fearlessness.

But each archetype also emphasizes certain traits: The Athlete has a disciplined mindset with a persistence toward a certain achievement. The Warrior, in contrast, emphasizes conviction and dominance.

Both Nike and Under Armour play to this archetypal cluster. In the ads of both brands, you’ll find serious, rugged expressions; Warriors and Athletes aren’t jovial and lighthearted.

Nike predominantly capitalizes on the Warrior archetype by using battle imagery in its depiction of athletes. They tend to use top professional athletes in their campaigns, playing on the projected ideal of the dominant Warrior archetype.

Under Armour hits on the Warrior, but focuses more on the Athlete. Instead of using celebrity athletes, Under Armour uses everyday athletes in their advertisements (which arguably make the brand more accessible to its customers).

Ultimately, customers who buy Nike and Under Armour products associate themselves with both the Warrior and Athlete archetypes, to varying degrees. They are also fulfilling their esteem needs of dominance, mastery, and achievement.

Remember, human needs and archetypes dance together, one supports and uplifts the other.

Long-term Success: Know Your Business’s Archetypes

Knowing your business’s archetypes is like knowing the DNA of your organization. It is from these fundamental symbolic images that all of the desired behavior for employees and customers spring.

Under Armour’s Baltimore, Maryland headquarters houses a 10,000-square-foot state-of-the-art gym that hosts group fitness classes and competitions. Athletic warriors need a training ground. Under Armour is a company of athletic warriors serving athletic warriors. (They call them “empowered athletes.”)

Creating an irreplaceable position in your customer’s mind takes conscious effort and consistency. When you know your archetypes, you can ensure consistency throughout all of your marketing efforts, including product development and communication.

Your goal is twofold:

1. Uncover the symbolic images and emotions that best express what your business is about in the context of your customers’ lives.
2. Determine the humans needs your customers are trying to fulfill when your archetypes are active in their minds.

These are key consumer insights that can transform the future of your business. Once you have these insights, find creative ways to consistently play to and express these images and needs in ways that are meaningful to your customers and your employees.

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P.S. Listen to BJ Bueno discuss the future of retail with SAP’s Global Vice President’s Nancy Case and best-selling author Scott McKain, titled, Retail Relevancy: Distinction Trumps Differentiation.

THE BIG IDEA: In a demanding retail environment where customers shop online more frequently, retailers with physical spaces have an opportunity to create atmospheres where customers want to gather, not just shop.

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You have an hour to meet with a friend to catch up.

Or, you and a colleague want to brainstorm a new product idea outside of the office.

Or, you have a free Saturday out with your two daughters.

Where do you go?

Our primary and most familiar setting is our home. The second most familiar is our workplace. We most often interact in these two places.

The Third Place

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to distinguish a location where people meet and gather outside the home and office.

Neuroscience continues to confirm Aristotle’s observation: we are social animals. Social animals have a need to gather, connect, and interact with one another.

As we’ve learned from Maslow’s work, we all share the basic human need to feel like we belong.

But where can we gather? On a warm, sunny day, we can go to a park. The rest of the time (especially for most urbanites), we end up at Starbucks.

Food and Drink

Starbucks consciously used the third place concept to insert itself into the American urban landscape more swiftly than any retailer in history. CEO Howard Schultz came to the idea after a trip to Italy in 1983 where he was inspired by their coffee bars and the gestalt of the Italian coffee experience.

Third places often involve food and drink. Not only does eating and drinking support basic biological needs, eating and drinking together help strengthen social bonds.

Not surprisingly, many retailers have integrated food and drink into their in-store experience. IKEA sports its own restaurant at numerous locations. Whole Food Market goes a step further, offering juice bars, icecream stations, self-serve hot food with cafeteria seating, and even a wine bar. Numerous retailers, including Barnes & Noble, have licensed Starbucks stores within their retail spaces.

What would your local mall be without a food court? It’s in the space between the mall’s stores that provide an atmosphere to gather, especially if you’re a teenage mallrat.

Creating a third place, however, isn’t just about having food and drink. Costco, Target, Wal-Mart, and Sam’s Club have their own eateries in most locations, but you’re unlikely to want to hangout there.

Panera Bread Company, in contrast, has consciously created a warm, cozy atmosphere with comfortable seating. Their environment invites you to stay, catch up with friends, check your email, or read a book.

A Dark Future For Brick and Mortar Retail?

Will the Internet eventually make retail locations obsolete?

It’s a familiar question to any executive that trudged through the early days of the Internet jungle. Dotcoms were in. Brick and mortars were dinosaurs.

Then, the initial Internet hysteria broke. The future of retail didn’t look so dim. Hybrid terms like “click and mortar” and “brick and click” came into being. Happily, we haven’t seen those terms in print lately. (Until now. Sorry about that.)

But this question on the future of physical retail space seems more relevant now. With total B2C online shopping sales in the U.S. expected to hit $304 billion this year and mobile sales estimated to reach $114 billion (a 60% increase over last year), it’s fair to question the future of physical retail.

Amazon.com’s annual revenue is expected to break $100 billion this year. With free shipping, ultra-fast service, unparalleled product selection, a massive community of product reviewers, competitive pricing, and superior customer service, they are a force to be reckoned with.

A Shining Light in Retail’s Future

With the convenience of online shopping on Amazon.com and the rest of the big box retail family, do customer’s have a reason to enter your store?

For many retailers, the answer is no. Retailers with environments set up solely to convert the next transaction will likely continue to become less relevant to their customers.

Remember that humans need places to gather. Your customers want to feel like they belong. This need represents a tremendous opportunity for smart, customer-oriented retailers.

The Opportunity for Savvy Retailers

When you think of a 65-foot ferris wheel, simulation shooting galleries, roller ball bowling alleys, a 16-gallon saltwater fish tank, sports simulation games, and 24 flavors of homemade fudge, you probably don’t think of retail.

But if you’re a customer of Scheels, living within driving distance of one of their 24 locations, that’s your shopping experience.

With over 200,000 square feet of retail space, you aren’t just entering a big store, you’re entering the Scheels experience. And you’re not doing it alone: You’re taking your whole family. It’s a destination, a really big third place.

Customers travel from far distances with their family to go to Scheels. Sure, they can buy their family’s sporting goods and apparel online or at a local Sports Authority. But why just go shopping when you can see your kids light up on a ferris wheel or mesmerized looking at Nemo’s family in a massive fish tank?

The opportunity for retail may very well be in retail’s real estate. Retailers with physical space have an extraordinary opportunity to create spaces that offer meaningful experiences for their customers.

With thoughtfulness, creativity, and inspiration, you can cultivate a third place where your customers don’t just shop, but also gather and connect.

How are you making your customers feel at home when they enter your space?

Are you creating a meaningful experience for them?

Do your customers have a reason to return to your store again and again?

THE BIG IDEA: How do you build a marketing program that attracts the maximum number of customers while simultaneously fostering loyalty? You start by segmenting your customers based on their commitment toward your business.

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Let’s meet three very different customers: Susan, Lisa, and Stanley.

Susan is looking for a stylish, new fall sweater. She makes her rounds to Target, Kohl’s, JCPenney, Macy’s, Banana Republic, and H&M. Susan is a non-committed shopper. We call her a Nomad.

Lisa needs a new pair of running shoes. She first stops at Dick’s Sporting Goods. If she doesn’t find something she likes or if they don’t have her size, she’ll drive over to Gander Mountain or perhaps Sports Authority. Lisa relates to Dick’s first. We call her an Enthusiast.

Stanley needs a new smartphone. He doesn’t have to research which one to get, he just has to walk into his local Verizon store and pick up the latest iPhone. Stanley loves Apple. We call him a Brand Lover.

Susan, Lisa, and Stanley represent three very different customers for your business: Nomads, Enthusiasts, and Brand Lovers. All three are important, but all three are NOT created equal. All three should not be given equal attention in marketing or product development.

The Customer Loyalty Continuum

To help chief executives better differentiate between different classes of customers, we created the Customer Loyalty Continuum.

Visualize loyalty on a straight horizontal line with less commitment or loyalty toward the left and more commitment and increasing loyalty toward the right.

Nomads are consumers who are not committed to any business in your category, nor are they even exploring a commitment.

Enthusiasts are consumers who have a preference for one or more brands, but have not yet made a commitment to any one particular brand.

Brand Lovers are customers who are unapologetically committed to a brand, because in their eyes, there is no equal.

In essence, the Customer Loyalty Continuum places your customers on a gradient of love, like, and indifference.

Relational and Transactional Mindsets of Customers

You can also classify your customers based on their overall mindset. You have customers with a transactional mindset and others with a relational mindset.

Susan is an example of a customer with a transactional mindset. Transactional shoppers think first. They shop on convenience, price, and location. The commodity, rather than the brand, is the main factor that counts.

Stanley is an example of a relational customer. Relational customers feel first. They have an emotional connection to the brand. They will often purchase from the brand based on how they feel, rather than what they think.

Even in a downturn economy, Apple offers some of the highest priced products on the market, yet this doesn’t dissuade their customers from making repeat purchases. Rationally speaking, it doesn’t make sense. But emotionally, it does.

The farther you go to the left of the Customer Loyalty Continuum, the more transactional your customers are. The farther you go to the right, the more relational they are.

Relational customers are more loyal customers.

How to Best Segment Your Market for Higher Profitability

So how do you build a marketing program that attracts the maximum number of customers while simultaneously fostering loyalty?

You start with customer segmentation. Customer segmentation is the process of dividing your customers into specific groups with similar characteristics.

Common characteristics for customer segmentation include age, gender, interests, common needs, and priorities.

Customer segmentation can help identify target customer groups and underserved market opportunities.  It can be used as a means to allocate resources for marketing and innovation initiatives. It can help you differentiate yourself from your competitors.

But what’s the best way to segment your customers?

The Cult Branding Method for Customer Segmentation

Businesses with a cult-like following tend to focus on their best customers, their Brand Lovers. They learn what drives their best customers’ behavior: what motivates them; what tensions and needs they hold; what they believe; what they aspire to be.

Then, they serve this customer group better than anyone else. Numerous studies highlight that chief executives of outperforming businesses tend to focus on knowing their customers. This customer obsession becomes an organizational focus.

In our work, we’ve witnessed time and again how when you apply penetrating consumer insights about a business’s best customers to a marketing program, staggering growth follows.

Does this mean you ignore the other customer segments on the continuum? Of course not. They are all important for your business.

But you can’t focus all of your marketing efforts on everyone, so why not focus the lionshare of your resources on attracting and serving relational, loyalty-driven, profitable customers (Brand Lovers)?

If you do, you’ll likely pick up more Enthusiasts and Nomads along the way.

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.