Why Understanding Your Archetype is Critical for Customer Experience

Understanding your brand archetype is critical in engineering cohesive and positively delightful customer experiences.  It’s important to clearly understand which customer experiences make sense for your brand personality and which ones – despite being ‘on-trend’ – you should stay clear of.

Customer Experience is not about trends – it’s about revealing and bringing your brand to life – to build trust with your clients and customers.

What is an archetype?

Throughout history, the same types of characters have consistently shown up in myths, folklore, in art and even blockbuster movies. It’s no coincidence.

Our brains love to organise things that are “alike” together, giving us a sort of “compass” to understanding others. Once we group these characters or archetypes together, it gives us a shared meaning and understanding of each other.

So, knowing what your brand character or archetype is, is really important (find yours here). Especially when making decisions on what customer experiences you should invest in – and which ones you take a hard pass on.

According to psychologist Carl Jung, 12 archetypes or characters have served as a compass to understand human behaviour and are imprinted psychologically in each of us.

You see, each of us craves a connection with people – not products or services – so when your brand adopts a clear and consistent archetype, it becomes familiar, more human-like and trustworthy. In short, we recognise it, and it makes sense to us.

Expectations and Experiences

When someone presents as “The Hero” (one of the 12-archetypes) in a movie like Wonder Woman, for instance, we understand her character and what she represents.  Because of our inbuilt compass, we also expect her to behave in a certain way and can typically anticipate her action to overcome evil and prevail.

Your Unique Brand Personality

In short, it makes sense to us because our brain categorises these characters automatically – without even realising it. When you show the world your archetype through an expression of your branding – you’re really showing them your brand personality.

Just like people, there are certain experiences that work well for some archetypes and others that just confuse and frustrate your customers.

Now, just imagine in your group of friends, the jokester, normally he arrives late, always dressed casually or even silly – possibly with props and makes everyone laugh with his colourful stories. Imagine after knowing him for years, he turns up to your birthday party in a suit acting all “Wallstreet” to present his latest multi-level marketing investment deal to you and your friends?

Confusing and annoying right? In archetype terms, you’ve always experienced him as a solid “Entertainer” (one of the 12 archetypes), but now all of the sudden he’s shown up to your party as “The Royal” or “Magician” archetype.

The same scenario plays out in business as well; expectations are there and experiences need to match and play out in real-life scenarios – like in-store, on the phone, on your website and content, by your staff or socials.

How customer experience can go wrong

Most often, there are two ways in which customer experience can go wrong.

Brand Strategy lacks a consistent compass – an archetype

1) First, you may not have a consistent brand archetype, to begin with. In essence, you may be showing up as split personalities all over the place (website, social, content marketing, advertising and your customer experiences). In addition, your customer experiences may be furthering the confusion because they are trying to appease everyone. If you feel this is the case I suggest booking in a FREE Experience Assessment. If you’re not that consistent then your Quiz results may be skewed and will need to do a deeper dive.

Often business owners and retailers have a lot of “shiny things” or opportunities. Without a clear and consistent brand archetype, you may be confused about what you should adopt and those you steer clear of.

Brand Archetype is consistent but lacks support to your customer experiences

2) Secondly, you may have a really consistent brand archetype and personality in a traditional branding sense (look, tone, feel) but your customer experiences are not congruent with your archetype. You see an experience that “speaks to you” and instead of reflecting on your unique brand archetype, you choose it because it’s trendy, new technology or personally just think it would be cool. Experiences are not about trends.

Having a congruent customer experience highly engages your customers and creates bottom-line growth. According to the Rosetta study,

“Highly engaged customers buy 90% more frequently, spend 60% more per transaction and have 3x the annual value compared to non-highly engaged customers.”

The downside to getting your customer experience wrong is;

• lost sales opportunities
• constantly discounting because people don’t recognise your value
• reduced profit (see above)
• decreased ability to keep customers – they defect easily/churn
• increased marketing budgets (constant need for new customers)
• low ROI marketing

Archetypes are like a secret compass

Depending on what yours is, you can say NO to “shiny objects” that don’t make sense for your brand archetype and YES to ones that absolutely do.

Without this clarity, many businesses and retailers find themselves investing in customer experiences that do not add value to their customers or build trust with them.

Using archetypes as your compass, you can appeal to your customers’ psychological triggers and utilise your own brand strengths to build a real connection with them.

Our Background and Expertise

After a 14-year career in executive marketing roles and then later owning a Good Guys store for 11 years, I realised psychology-driven experiences and customer events were driving strong sales growth (24%) and increasing visitation (35%) in our store with a nearly double-digit increase in profitability (9.7%). In just a couple of years, we grew from 24m per year to 38m in turnover.

While the growth was great, bespoke customer events and experiences were also extremely resource-hungry, requiring additional staff and expertise in customer experience, brand and event management which thankfully I had and managed in-house.

After selling my store, I wrote a book called The Retail Experiment, which outlined all the research and the experiments I ran inside the store that worked.  Later, I founded Retail Rockstars and started doing psychology-driven experiences and events for other retailers in Australia in 2015.

What we do

We are psychology-driven (think archetypes) customer experience strategists, specialising in retail and brick-and-mortar businesses.

By utilising our clients’ unique archetype(s) we design irresistible experiences and events that build trusted customer communities and drive discovery, engagement and sales.

Want a little more? Here are some ways we can help, download the first 3 chapters to my Book, The Retail Experiment, 5 proven strategies to Engage and Excite Customers through in-store experience. Or buy the book – direct through our site or through Amazon or Booktopia.

Or you might like to book a free Experience Assessment, a 45 minute, 7-point assessment of your brand experience across your website and digital landscape and we will give you 3 easy to implement experiences that will drive sales.

Alternatively, if you’d like to discuss your upcoming Brand or Experience project, just email me or book in here.

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