Find Your Branding Category

A great deal of research has been conducted in order to discover precisely what motivates people to take action. The exploration of Abraham Maslow[1], Eric Erickson[2], Robert Kegan[3], and the extensive writings of C.G. Jung have gone a long way toward identifying and explaining twelve distinct categories of human motivation. By utilizing powerful, universally recognizable images and story-lines – some call them symbols, others call them archetypes – marketing experts like Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson have effectively applied the collective knowledge of those twelve categories of human motivation into a fairly simple process that, when followed, produces the desired results again and again.

Do you want your branding efforts to succeed? Don't ignore these categories. Find out what the categories are and what they represent. Then determine which category your brand belongs in. When you do this, new marketing ideas will come out of the woodwork and some of the things you've been thinking about doing will suddenly seem inappropriate because they don't "fit" your brand's category.

Speak the "language" of one - and only one - brand category in all your marketing materials. Choose every word and every picture, every way of describing yourself and every image, very carefully. Make sure that every way you tell your story is in perfect harmony with that category. Okay? Seriously, I mean it.

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[1] Motivation and Personality, 1954
[2] Childhood and Society, 1963 and Identity: Youth and Crisis, 1968
[3] The Evolving Self, 1982

Marketing Defined

It’s about barriers and eliminating them. Anything that a business enterprise does in order to reduce or eliminate the real or perceived barriers that may impede a would-be customer’s decision to initiate a transaction – THAT is marketing.

Completely eliminate the barriers and you’ve got a customer.

You have a product or service that someone needs? Marketing is about making it easier to get a Yes out of every person that needs what you’ve got. Whether you’ve won your new client over with price, quality, service, credibility, or overall value, effective marketing is doing a good job of overcoming all of their reasons for saying No.

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