The 12 Brand Archetypes: A Complete Guide for Women in Business.
From the Hero to the Jester. What each one sounds like, looks like, and sells like.
If you want the short version:
There are twelve Brand Archetypes. Each one represents a distinct personality, a specific way of seeing the world, a natural voice and visual language and set of values that runs through everything the brand makes and says. Your business has one, probably a primary, a secondary, and a tertiary, layered together in a combination that is specifically, unmistakably yours.
When your brand is built on your actual archetype, it sounds like you. Attracts the right clients. Makes content easier to create and more effective to publish. Turns visibility from a performance into a conversation.
When it isn't, it feels like wearing someone else's clothes.
The longer version, including why archetypes work, where they come from, and what to do once you know yours, is in our What Is a Brand Archetype guide. This post is the reference piece: all twelve archetypes, in full, for women in business.
Read them. Feel which ones land. Take the quiz at the end.
(And if you find yourself reading one and going very still and thinking 'oh, that's me', that's the archetype recognising itself. Pay attention to that feeling. It knows things.)
How to use this guide.
You have a primary archetype. The dominant personality driving your brand. And usually a secondary that adds dimension, and sometimes a tertiary that runs as a quieter undercurrent through your best work.
As you read, notice which archetypes make you think 'yes, that's me' and which make you think 'absolutely not, never, who is that person.' Both are useful data. The ones that feel like a performance when you imagine inhabiting them are almost certainly not yours. The one that feels like relief is almost certainly your primary.
The shadow side of each archetype matters too. That's the version that goes wrong. The over-expressed, under-expressed, or distorted form of the archetype. If you've ever looked at your brand and thought 'this is technically in the right territory but something has gone off'. The shadow section is usually where you'll find the diagnosis.
The 12 Brand Archetypes
A complete guide for women in business
A note on combinations.
Very few people are a single pure archetype. Most brands. Most people, operate from a primary archetype with a secondary that adds dimension and sometimes a tertiary running underneath.
Flourish, for reference, is a Lover primary. The devotion, the specificity, the full attention to the specific woman rather than the general market. The Jester secondary is why this blog post uses the phrase 'as it happens' when talking about our own archetype, and why we use caps asides and made-up words and plausible-deniability innuendo in professional documents. The Magician tertiary is what happens in the actual work. The transformation that takes place when someone stops dividing her attention and builds a brand from who she actually is.
The combination is the brand. Not the individual archetypes but the specific layering of them.
If you're not sure of your combination, take the quiz. It's designed to give you all three layers, not just a primary, because the nuance is where the useful guidance lives.
