Brand Archetypes: Straightjacket or Springboard for CX?

In this episode of The Intuitive Customer, Professor Ryan Hamilton is joined by guest co-host Ben Shaw, Chief Strategy Officer at MullenLowe, to explore the enduring role of brand archetypes in marketing and customer experience. They revisit the origins of archetypes in Jungian psychology and the influential book The Hero and the Outlaw (Pearson & Mark), before debating how useful the framework remains today. Together, they discuss the power of archetypes to create consistency, unlock creativity, and guide internal decision-making while also recognizing their limitations, risks of rigidity, and occasional resemblance to horoscopes. The conversation ranges from brand strategy in B2B to the impact of AI agents on future purchasing, highlighting how archetypes can still be adapted, evolved, and made practical for modern brand building.

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🔑 Key Takeaways

• Archetypes as tools, not rules: Archetypes provide a shared language for teams and a lens for decision-making, but they shouldn’t become a straightjacket.

• Sub-archetypes unlock creativity: Going beyond the 12 canonical archetypes helps brands avoid sameness and find distinctiveness in crowded categories.

• Accessibility matters: Archetypes are most effective when they make complex strategy simple and relatable—otherwise they risk losing non-marketing stakeholders.

• Playing against type: Some of the most disruptive brands (e.g., Liquid Death) succeed precisely by defying category-expected archetypes.

• Archetypes in B2B: While not always necessary, they can still be useful to express human needs like trust, security, or freedom, even in highly functional categories.

• AI and archetypes: The rise of AI agents in commerce could challenge the role of storytelling in decision-making, but also presents opportunities for brands to encode their archetypes into machine-readable signals.

• Healthy ambiguity: Like many frameworks, archetypes work best when used as a catalyst for debate, inspiration, and consistency but not as a rigid formula.

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📚 Resources Mentioned

• The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes — Carol Pearson & Margaret Mark

• Carl Jung’s theories of archetypes and collective unconscious

• Example brands: Liquid Death, Old Spice, Superman, The Beatles

• Applications of AI & Large Language Models in creative brand strategy