Archetypology offers a new way to consider brands which turns conventional marketing theory on its head.

Borrowing a model of brain organisation from the neurosciences, known as ‘The Triune Brain’, we know that human brains are organised into three levels of function. These are related to our evolutionary development and involve both conscious and non-conscious processes.



Traditional marketing and branding tends to focus most on what happens at a cognitive level of brain processing and therefore follows what is often referred to as a ‘persuasion strategy’ – grab the audiences attention, then persuade them to buy through a needs benefit led proposition. The notion is that positioning is about one salient, overriding cognitive thought in the mind that will justify engagement and purchase. This, though, ignores a big chunk of brain activity. What’s more it ignores the non – cognitive areas of the brain concerned with learned and patterned responses, long term memory and instinctive, fast processing.

We believe that brands interact with people on a multilevel basis and so need to be analysed and understood in a multidimensional way. Whole Brain Branding mirrors the way people are organised and puts the emphasis on these deeper, out of conscious levels because these are where our automatic behaviours reside. It is only recently that we have started to understand that what happens at these levels is a process of response to pre determined and learned patterns. Many of these patterns are archetypal. Brands which have a power others do not succeed because they tap into these pre existing archetypal patterns.