SELLING TO ARCHETYPES

Casting a wide net may seem like a good idea, in some circumstances, but in sales, it waters down your message. It’s like trying to shoot an arrow at 15 targets — you’re not likely to hit any of them. In sales, it’s essential to figure out who your customer is and try to sell to them.

The problem is, how do you figure it out? You don’t have to study sales and marketing for very long before you hear the advice, “create a customer avatar.” It’s great advice — creating an imaginary person that has all the attributes, traits, and predilictions of your ideal customer. The problem is, if you don’t have the money or resources to pay for market research, avatar building is basically an act of guessing — an act of imagination. And, while I’m a big proponent of imagination, it can be a scary thing to base the development of your marketing on.

Enter stories. You’ll hear a lot these days how story is the key to effective marketing. It’s true. 90% of our communication is done through storytelling — it makes sense we would want our marketing efforts to fall in that majority. So, how does story help you figure out who to sell to? Avatars.

Psychologist Carl Jung first talked about the concept of avatars. Jung, like Joseph Campbell, believed the stories, regardless of what they claimed to be about, be it stealing fire from the gods, or floods that destroyed humanity were really about what happens inside each one of us. And, as such, the characters in these stories told us something important about who we are. Jung suggested that there were 12 major archetypes — meaning that most stories have 12 kinds of characters to choose from (these archetypes can be combined to create millions of varieties, however). Those 12 archetypes also represent 12 personality types that you find throughout humanity. Everybody is one of the 12 (or one of the millions of combinations, but let’s start small…)

Discovering which archetype your customer is, helps you figure out what kind of story they’re in. The story an explorer is in is one where he’s looking for new place and experiences. The naive child wants a perfect world. The rebel wants to go his own way and not be part of the crowd. Knowing what kind of story your ideal customer is in, allow you to join them in their story — to show them how you and your product/service empowers them to be who they really are.

How do you figure out your customer avatar? Easy. What does your product do? Does it provide freedom? Does it give people a place to belong? Does it give important information? Figure that out (you should probably already know, though…), then look at the different kinds of avatars at the top of the page. Below each one, in a colored block, is what that avatar values. Which of those values do you and your product reinforce?

Simple, but not easy. It takes time. And, yes, imagination, but it’s not a shot in the dark. It’s a real, centuries tested idea. Once you know what avatar your customer is, you can start working on their story.

Let me know if I can help.

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