An interview with Kaye Putnam (Podcast) đ
In this episode, Arek Dvornechuck interviews Kaye Putnam and we talk about using archetypes in branding.
Listen here đ or find it on your favorite podcasting platform.
Follow Kaye on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and check out her Website.
Also check out her brand archetypes course â âBrandfluencyâ
Table of Contents
Please note: as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.
1. What Are Archetypes?
Arek Dvornechuck:
Whatâs up branding experts? Arek here at Ebaqdesign. And welcome to On Branding Podcast, the only podcast where I interview branding experts to give you actionable tips on everything branding and beyond. And in this episode, I interview Kaye Putnam and we talk about using archetypes in branding and Kaye is a psychology-driven brand strategist and her formal degree is in marketing with a psychology minor. So, she has worked with hundreds of clients from international corporations to solopreneurs. She developed her own method of branding by using the power of archetypes. So Kaye works with students in her brand incubation program and also with clients one-on-one to help them with branding their business. So, Kaye is an expert when it comes to psychology-driven brand strategy and thatâs why we really wanted to have her on our podcast today to talk about using archetypes in branding. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us on our podcast.
Kaye Putnam:
Hello, hello. Thank you so much for having me.
Arek Dvornechuck:Thank you. So basically you pitch that a brand is so much more than just design, right? And you strongly recommend that we should start by uncovering the psychology of our brand first and use those beliefs and personality and timeless archetypes to help us define our brand and only then we can jump into the design part, right?
Kaye Putnam:
Exactly. Design is really the tip of the iceberg. I like to say that we want to build our brands on truth, not trends. So we donât want to just look at our competitors or look at our industry to see who looks good and do something similar to them because that can place us in a commodity position in the marketâs mind. So instead we start from inside. We start from who we are as a company and identify what our unique point of view is, what our values are, what our personality is and then once we know what that is and we get crystal clear there, then we can be ready to make some design messaging.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Right. So awesome. So I wanted to make this podcast actionable for our listeners and talk about the archetypes but also about your framework that you use with your clients, right? To help them harness the power of archetypes. But before we talk about framework, letâs just start with the basics because maybe not all of our listeners â we just need a reminder of what are archetypes. So letâs talk about what are archetypes and why we should use them in branding, OK? So maybe you can just talk about your journey. What is psychology-driven brand strategy and then how you came across archetypes and why we should use them in branding?
Kaye Putnam:â
Sure. I will start with what archetypes are. So psychology tells us that our brains naturally are looking for categories. Itâs naturally grouping like things together and recognizing patterns. So archetypes are those patterns. Theyâre cross-cultural, timeless categories or types that show up across movies, across stories, across brands and youâre welcome because now that you understand what brand archetypes are and when you get to know each of the 12 or more and other peopleâs frameworks, you will start to see them everywhere. So you will see them when youâre watching Netflix. You will see them when youâre walking down the aisle of a grocery store or through a mall. Theyâre literally everywhere because theyâre connected to their universal human desires and again those categories that our brains are naturally seeking. So I will give a few examples just to get you acquainted.
Arek Dvornechuck:â
Sure.
Kaye Putnam:
Iâm not going to go through â maybe all 12, we can do that if you want to. But just as an example, Nike, the apparel and athletic company is a very quintessential hero archetype brand whereas the Wall Street Journal which is a newspaper in the finance industry is more of the sage archetype. So all of these big brands, big agencies have been using brand archetypes for decades and my work has been really centered around making it actionable for smaller entrepreneurs, so people who donât have million dollar marketing or branding budgets and helping them add more humanness into their brands by leveraging the archetypes. I discovered the brand archetypes because I needed them. So when I first got started in online marketing and in building my personal brand online, I was really awkward. So I was looking at all of these successful entrepreneurs who have gone before me and my first assumption was that I should just be like them and I will be successful. I just need to follow their strategies, their steps and model their success and I will see similar success. Well, like spoiler alert, thatâs not what happened. I was trying to piecemeal all of these different personalities together. None of them really fit. None of them were really in alignment and I probably ended up scaring away more clients than the ones that I attracted. So when I came across this website, it was â it looked like it was built in 1995. It was no frills, super basic site and all it did was listed these 12 archetypes. It wasnât even in the context of branding. It didnât really give any attribution. It just described these 12 archetypes of caregiver, creator, entertainer, explorer, et cetera. As I was reading through them, I suddenly could start to see each of these successful entrepreneurs that I have been trying to model where they fit and I realized that the most successful ones, they were only embodying one, maybe two of these archetypes, not all 12 of them like I was trying to do from my onset. So I immediately needed to know which archetype I was. Back then, you know, I think this was four, five years ago now. There wasnât a really great tool that I found online with a quick search. So I set out to build my own. So I created my own brand archetype quiz. It has now been taken over 100,000 times and have been obsessed with magic of archetypes ever since.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Yeah and I took the quiz and itâs awesome. Itâs really comprehensive. So just to sum up for our listeners, so archetypes â maybe itâs vital to mention that they originally come from Carl Jung, a psychologist. You gave us two examples, Apple and Nike. Nike and so other examples.
Kaye Putnam:
Wall Street Journal. Yeah.
Arek Dvornechuck:
And Wall Street Journal which is sage and the Nike is hero, right?
Kaye Putnam:
Uh-huh.
Arek Dvornechuck:
And yeah, so basically archetypes identify those patterns that you mentioned in human behavior, right? And we can see them across movies, stories and of course brands. And also you mentioned that you were all over the place, trying to like take some of the best practices of â from other successful entrepreneurs. But it didnât really work. So maybe itâs vital also to mention to our listeners that, you know, archetypes help us identify those partners. But we should speak to one core and maybe some secondary archetypes but not just like cherry-pick personality traits from all of them for example because then we are all over the place and it just doesnât hold up, right?
Kaye Putnam:
Exactly. Theyâre most powerful when you use them as a tool to filter yourself and to focus yourself. We donât want to try to be all things to everyone. Thatâs the kiss of death for branding. We want to take a very particular position in the market and archetypes can help us do that.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Right. So since we know what are archetypes and why we should use them in branding, now letâs talk about how we can actually use them. OK? So I know that youâve developed your own framework that is called Clarity CODE which is the process that helps you develop a psychology-driven brand, right? And archetypes would fall into the first step of your framework. So in Clarity CODE, CODE is an acronym in which the first letter C stands for character, right?
Kaye Putnam:
Exactly.
2. Brand Character
Arek Dvornechuck
So can you talk to us about that first step of your framework and how we can use â once we identify our CODE archetype, how we can use that to define our brand character?
Kaye Putnam:
Yes, and this is intentional because most people start building brands by looking outside of themselves. They start by looking at the market and being like, âOK, this is my ideal client,â or this is the assumption that Iâm making that I think my ideal client is and I think this is what they might want from me and we end up again trying to be all things to all people and itâs an ineffective message. So instead of starting on the outside, my framework helps us identify who we are first, our unique strengths, what I call your innate advantage that youâre bringing to the market and archetypes help us to do a lot of this. So it can help us decide the stories that weâre going to tell. It can help us shape our brand origin story. It can help point to words that have a very emotional resonance with our ideal clients and that reinforces this identity that we have chosen by choosing our top two archetypes. So all of these elements of the brand identity can be inspired and helped â the archetypes can help us find it, right? We donât have to just choose from random places. We can have a more educated decision about what that is. Then the rest of the branding process, it kind of waltzes over into marketing territory a bit. So C is character. Itâs who we are as a brand. O is what weâre offering to the market. So itâs the value that weâre bringing. Itâs what weâre selling. I would argue that this is in fact part of your brand because again, weâre building a brand from the inside out. If we have a fantastic product thatâs differentiated in the market, thatâs going to reinforce our brand message. D is all about demand. So itâs how weâre being our brand through our content, through our messaging, through our stories and sales messages. Then finally my wildcard in my Clarity Code process is the entrepreneurial energy or what I like to call your energetic influence. The reason why I include energy into this equation is because Iâm typically working with entrepreneurs who are either building a personal brand or the â maybe have a corporate name for their business. But their genius, their personality, their values are what is driving the business forward. If we as an entrepreneurs donât pay attention to how charismatic and magnetic weâre being in our business, we can fall really flat even if we have everything else figured out. So we pay attention to how youâre embodying the energy thatâs going to attract your ideal clients as the final step of the Clarity Code process.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Now we are going to take a quick break here but we will be right back. Listen, my mission is to help people design iconic brands. So whether you are a business leader who wants to be more intentional with branding and all of its aspects or you are a creative who wants to attract powerful clients and surely be able to help them with branding, then you need to start with a discovery session and then develop a strategy that will inform all your creative work and everything you need to learn how to do that, you can find in my online courses at www.ebaqdesign.com/shop where I share with you my worksheets, case studies, video tutorials and other additional resources to help you feel safe and strong about your process. And now letâs get back to our conversation with Kaye Putnam. Right. So we used your framework to help us implement that knowledge, right? But I know that you have discussed Brandfluency on your website and basically you go into details about each and every archetype, right? So perhaps can you give us some â more examples of â so we can like â maybe some of the famous brands? So we can relate and we can understand. I know you gave us a couple of examples. Maybe you can come up with a few more. I can just get you started, maybe like you know Harley-Davidson is an old archetype we can all relate because we all know this brand. So itâs about being rebellious, you know American-loving, freedom-seeking personality. Do you have â can you just give us some more examples?
Kaye Putnam:
Yeah, for sure. So Campbell Soup is a very popular Caregiver brand here in the states. Thatâs a canned soup brand. We also have brands like Adobe or Sharpie that are Creator archetype brands. Brands like Jeep or North Face are very standard or typical Explorer brands. Entertainer brands are a lot of fun. Theyâre the ones that typically have the very funny like Superbowl commercials. So brands like Old Spice like the body wash and deodorant company. Or also, Doritos and Pepsi have a very Entertainer-esque brand. Girl/Guy Next Door, I donât know of this one is very â I donât think this one is worldwide, but we have a financial advising company called, Charles Schwab, their slogan is âJust ask Chuckâ or something similar to that. A very guy next door, also like Allstate is an insurance company thatâs Girl/Guy Next Door. We talked about Hero. Innocent brand that we tend to get a lot of like children-focused brands, but we also have the grocery store whole foods which is all about bringing foods back to their natural state. Do you want me to keep going, Arek? I had more.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Oh, I can add a few examples maybe, like I also came across this brand, Innocent juices.
Kaye Putnam:
Yeah.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Thatâs already the name suggests you know. So they are all about this Innocent archetype, right?
Kaye Putnam:
Mm-hmm.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Unprocessed, cold press you know without any preservatives and stuff like that, additives. So itâs about Innocent archetype because Innocent archetype is all about you know â itâs about natural living naturally and stuff like that. So just other examples, maybe like Caregiver would be probably most of nonprofits and charity, right, like WWF. Ruler. I know that some of different brand strategies define those archetypes slightly differently. I mean they carry sometimes different names but itâs basically about the same. Itâs basically all rooted in Carl Jungâs framework, right? So Ruler archetype would be like Rolex, maybe Mercedes, things like that. How about Apple? Because you know what is very interesting, I came across⌠I read it in some book that Apple is a seducer.
Kaye Putnam:
Really? Interesting.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Yeah. Yeah. But you said, I think you said that this is a Magician, right?
Kaye Putnam:
Yeah.
Arek Dvornechuck:
And I also, I also â someone said that this is the Creator brand. So whatâs your opinion on that?
Kaye Putnam:
Yeah. Apples are really interesting case study. Because if you think back to their famous 1984 commercial, have you seen that one, Arek?
Arek Dvornechuck:
Yeah, yeah.
Kaye Putnam:
Yeah. So they started out as a Maverick or Rebel. Theyâre disrupting the status quo. Theyâre being that you know the anti-Microsoft, essentially. So they started off of there. I would argue that most of their messaging now has a mix between the Magician and the Creator. So they talk a lot about creating tools for creators. And then their actual product design, it almost feels like a spaceship or something Uber modern or Uber future-sque. So thatâs where I feel like the Magician really comes into play. Theyâre giving us what we donât even know that we need in their products.
Arek Dvornechuck:
Right. OK, So as you mentioned, if this is a small brand, probably you as the founder, you would have to identify your core archetype and that would be your brand, also brand product and brand archetype, right?
Kaye Putnam:
Exactly.
Arek Dvornechuck:
But if this is like a team of co-founders letâs say, then what do we do? How do we approach that?
Kaye Putnam:
Yes. Then it depends on what the dynamic of the team is. So if youâre all equal players, equal leaders, thereâs not one single visionary thatâs driving the brand forward, typically, what works best is to have all of the leadership team take the brand quiz. See if you have any overlap and use that as a starting place for your discussion. So you can start to talk about what your brandâs strengths are which are now going to be different than just your personal strengths. So maybe you create an incredibly welcoming community for your clients and you pinpoint that as your primary strength. When you take the brand quiz, youâre then going to be taking it as the brand instead of as yourself. And then like I said, see where you overlap with the team to see if thereâs any disagreements or lack of clarity between how you want to show up as a brand and use that to have that â facilitate that conversation about what your top two archetypes should be.
Continue reading this transcript at:
đ https://www.ebaqdesign.com/podcast/17
Clap if you liked it đ and subscribe for more tips from top branding experts.