The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes

Heros and Outlaws should be a new marketing classic. Among the dozen or so marketing books I have read in the past year, this one ranks highest. Don't go searching for just one "kernel" in this book, you will want to read every word. Heros helped me, as an entrepreneur, begin to re-position my twelve year-old firm. I feel fortunate to have read it before I began the redesign of my company's web site. If you like Joseph Campbell's work, this book will help you translate those concepts into marketing your firm. I am recommending it to the local university's head of the marketing department as an auxiliary text.

...he could not have written a more interesting treatise on the subject of branding. It is the single most interesting book on advertising that I have ever read. (And I'm a bonafide nerd, folks...I've read plenty!)

Lord of the Rings. That was the first thing I thought of when I read the synopsis about The Hero and the Outlaw.I was somewhat doubtful about their premise, I must admit. Archetypes are powerful and they sell, undoubtedly, but that's for books and movies. But marketing?Yet, books and movies are marketed and sometimes quite successfully. Steven King. Tom Clancy. Star Wars.So, perhaps interweaving some of Jung's ideas and marketing is not such a bad idea, after all.When I combined these very ancient concepts with some of the more modern strategies suggested in Michael levine's Guerrilla pR: Wired, I did see an impact.Perhaps, despite claims to the contrary, we should not look to the future for marketing success, but to the past, for ideas that have a proven track record as ageless and as timeless as our dreams.

This book marries one of the most fundamental elements of psychology to market positioning and brand strategy. Using the Jungian archetypes, the authors simplify the development of solid brands. They are replete with wonderful illustrative examples. Since the archetypes are subconscious, it has been difficult for us as marketers to understand how they operate in brand development and giving meaning to brands. The authors offer a very simple method to analyze the brand's archetype and where it fits within the competitive product category.Even if you are not a marketing person, you will enjoy reading the archetypes, trying to figure out what most appeals to you personally - and no surprise those are usually your favorite brands.Well written and calls upon many ancient and modern authors who understand how people behave and why.

For those marketers who have always had a secret predilection for using their intuition, who've harbored a belief in the hidden power of the right 'fit' in a message - The Hero and The Outlaw reads like a long, drawn-out ahhhhhhhh. Like scratching an itch. Like constant light bulbs going off in your brain, one after another. It drives to the central question behind all the 'buzz' about branding - in what exactly, and where exactly, resides the buried power of a brand? What is its hidden deep source? How come a brand 'pushes our buttons?' The simple, graceful and very fitting answers are given by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson in their new book The Hero and The Outlaw - Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes. When a brand taps into one of their twelve major archetypes, and does so in a way that feels right and appropriate, then the brand 'works.' Consumers respond, a channel of understanding is opened, the message is received. The twelve archetypal categories which Pearson and Mark use for their analysis are: Creator, Caregiver, Ruler, Jester, Regular Guy/Gal, Lover, Hero, Outlaw, Magician, Innocent, Explorer, Sage. For instance: Williams-Sonoma is a 'creator' brand, and so is going to carry meaning and resonance for consumers who want to craft something new in their lives. Ivory Soap is the 'purest' example of the Innocent archetype. And if Nike is a Hero brand, you can be sure that the Harley-Davidson brand is an Outlaw archetype.While all the right brain, intuitive marketers are delighted to consider such a workable and insightful way of thinking about branding, rest assured, their more left brain associates have not been 'left' behind. In an wonderfully holistic way, the archetypal wisdom of Jungian author Carol Pearson is met, like yin with yang, in the rigor, testing and real world measurements of Margaret Mark during her 16-year career at Young & Rubicam's senior levels. Like a one-two punch, Pearson and Mark support intuition with quantitative reason, and round out data with connected imagination.I learned from this book. Advertisements look different to me now, and I can better perceive when a brand is being true to its self and effective in its message (and sometimes, I now know why). Pearson and Mark's idea that using archetypal patterns can be a more morally responsible way of branding, is a small but intriguing thought, offered almost parenthetically. Very few business books lead me to what feels like an 'epiphany.' (Tom Peters' Search for Excellence did when I first read it in 1989; so did Sally Helgesen's The Female Advantage in 1990, and Margaret Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science a few years ago.) To me, this book feels as though it contains the same sort of breakthrough thinking, but in terms of how to communicate, with power, in an information-saturated world. I highly recommend it. [475 words]Cathy Brillson ...the idea [email protected]