Your brand is the Creator Brand Archetype- ready to learn how to use it?
Understand the Creator Archetype:
The Creator has a knack for bringing order to chaos through beauty, functionality, or both. This archetype is intensely creative and quite persuasive. Their desire to create is often expressed through taking something existing and deconstructing it and creating something better – that works more efficiently, with better aesthetics, or simply more in line with how they think it should work.
Always on the hunt for excellent solutions to the world’s disorder, the Creator worries that their ideas or creations will end up being mediocre rather than great. Their perfectionism and fear of coming up with a poor solution can paralyze them at times. At their best, the Creator marries creativity, imagination, and inventiveness into a harmonious combination.
Creator archetypes excel in helping their customers learn to DIY. They value self-expression above all things, particularly above fitting in. Often seen as a contradiction, the Creator brand archetype desires freedom of expression while at the same time they are motivated by structure and order. Within this balance, visionary and innovative brands than value creativity, imagination and self-expression live – particularly those in the fields of arts, design, technology, consulting, and marketing.
Purpose:
The creator archetype thinks they are high in desire for freedom however they have a deeper motivation to exert aesthetic or artistic control – in other words to create something that has never been seen before, some form of enduring work that is so special that they will in essence achieve a form of immortality. The love the process of dismantling existing structures and creating new ones. This is one of the biggest reasons consultants are often Creator Archetypes.
Strengths:
Developing artistic control and skill. Giving form to a vision. Creativity and imagination.
Challenges:
Perfectionism. Miscreation. Fear of having a mediocre vision or not being able to execute the vision to completion.
Brand Voice:
In the long run, for a Creator organization, quality of output is going to be more important than quantity. The brand voice for a Creator brand is of course, focused on innovation, creativity, and self expression. Use of customer generated content, particularly from classes and workshops, when available is absolutely amazing. Lego, a king in the realm of Creator archetype brands, mastered the use of user generated content in a creative realm. The beauty of what Lego has done truly, is that they have engaged their customer community as innovative experts – a true partnership in the creation process – creating a worldwide artist’s collective.
Customer & Brands:
The Creator customer is one who loves to follow tutorials, who thrives on do-it-yourself, who loves to find unique solutions to everyday problems. If you are trying to market to a Creator, you are best served having videos showing the process, diagrams of how to get something done, templates that they can take apart and customize for themselves, classes they can do along with you. Igniting the creative spirit inside of them and allowing them to give form to their own vision is key – but beware of their perfectionism and fear of failure (a common challenge with any Creator, as previously mentioned) and predict and allow for those learning stages.
The Creator brand archetype is a natural fit in the arts, design, marketing and other fields requiring a high degree of imagination or innovative thinking. In addition, if you product itself fosters self expression and provides your customer with choices and fosters innovation and artistic expression, it is likely this archetype will fit nicely. Fields like public relations and technology, especially software development often show this archetype. It is important to note that any sort of artistic endeavor satisfied the human desire for form and stability- which is one of the biggest reasons that brands that live in this archetype tend to thrive during times of uncertainty and chaos. Humans deal with uncertainty by exerting control and agency in any way that they can- and creation is a small, easy, very powerful way to do so.
Pin this handy reference sheet:
Not sure you found the right archetype?
Most brands are a mix of more than one archetype – and two archetypes can be tricky but very rewarding to blend. Below you will find links to all of the archetypes so you can familiarize yourself with other descriptions and characteristics to see if there is one that feels like a better fit for you and your brand. If you are still struggling – feel free to contact me to chat and see if together we can sort out what works best for you!
