Fouroboros | Brain, Metaphor, Archetype, Brand. Part II

Fouroboros | Brain, Metaphor, Archetype, Brand. Part II

[Update - 11:36, 3/12/04. Thanks to John Dumbrille for the heads up.
[Update 2 - 14:37, 3/13/04 Tweak to final graphic and some cleanup for clarity on the self/brand dynamic]

Okay, we laid the ground work in Part I for how people make choices that often aren't "rational" or predictable in the usual sense. We talked about how leadership and brand are really synonymous. And we explained that the brain has a flow that relies on metaphorical imagery, converted into psychological benchmarks called "Archetypes." Oh yeah, one other thing: Brand is Ubiquitous.

Some of the following may get a bit dense, but hey, I'm trying to share a lot in an accellerated, compressed manner. A lot of it is counter to prevailing "wisdom" therefore we'll be short on "buzzwords" to grease the skids. And anyway, as the Talmud and sage old chinese guys like Lao Tsu have pointed out since forever, "for a thing to be easy, first it must be hard." Or something like that.

We mentioned that "brand is ubiquitous". What does that mean? Well, if you think about it, brand--or, at least, brand well executed--takes on a human character. Look at the attachment people have to their Harley or their Mini or their iMac or their Manolo Blahnik shoes. These things become appendages to our selves. More than appendages, they fit naturally, they are us. Now think of the best job or friend you ever had, or the best place you ever lived. Were they natural or effortless, and fun, and now you're sad they're gone (if they are gone)? Would you say "I lost a piece of myself" when you lost X, or moved on to Y?

A piece of yourself. Fit. Best place. Best job. Effortless. Natural. Notice those are terms or ideas that deal at once in concepts of time and space and feeling. So, taken this way, brand is dimensional and can have coordinates.

Let's talk about dimensionality. Because this is not just brand building, it's basic mathematics too. And math has Archetypes as well.

One point is called a monad - a dot
Two points are a dyad - a line
Three points are a triad - surface
Four points are a tetrad - volume

It looks like this:

And, taking what we know about Brand so far--time, space, feeling--it looks like this.

Time. Space. Feeling. But Brand is also meaning--we know that in personal terms, about the brands that matter to us, about our Mini or Manolos. But do we know why? Or how it fits together? Or, why some brands, companies or communities have all the necessary "tools" yet somehow just can't seem to make the leap into "Icon"? Or why some simply fall apart? Maybe it's because they lack an Archetype tied to what pioneering psychologist Carl Jung called the "Collective Unconcious." This element equates to the missing fourth point that any collective effort needs to stand and have valence in a feeling, dimensional world.

Hopefully, as you've trawled through all the above you can see that the three Brand points that are time, space, and feeling only add up to what mathematicians call "Surface", as in surface area. Flatness. Now remember that the left brain is time-based, the right is space-based, and the R-Complex (reptillian and mammalian brains) is the one known for it's emotional, tribal, instinctive responses to its world.

Left, Right and R-Complex. Those three coexist together, but beyond the on/off nature of the R-Complex, there are no guiding rules for how they should behave and thrive, together. What's more, what provides the context for the left brain to measure effective or not, good result from bad? And speaking of context, when the right brain is doing its metaphorical job of joining up feeling with sensory imagery and deciding "Good feeling" or "bad", what is its frame of refererence? Why is a rose "pretty" instead of "ugly"? Why should a Harley or an iMac make us feel "good"?

Looks like somebody needs some benchmarks. But who decides?

Too late. It's already done. And here's an idea how: Since sweaty cavemen swapped shiny rocks and chased animals across the landscape, the one thing they couldn't catch or touch or eat or wear was located up. Literally, Up: The Stars. They were different from anything they knew. The twinkles acted strangely and followed patterns. Naturally, they figured if they didn't control them, somebody else did. Somebody who? The same person who made the animals? Probably. The same woman who made the trees? Must be. But whoever it was never showed up. So, they made him or her up in idealized form. And since the stars, the seasons, and they themselves had patterns and rythmns they followed, it made sense that that person made them too, and also, had some kind of plan for them, as well. Again, since nobody was offering them a timetable or a list, they started making one up. Just as "nature abhors a vacuum," the human brain hates not being able to put things into context. And so, symbolism was born, and the search meaning was on. People began to tell stories about things that happened to them. The stories had winners and losers, happy endings and sad endings. In this way, they contained lessons. Eventually after a lot of time, and lots of hits and misses, a guy with a long grey beard comes down from a mountain holding 2 stone tablets with 10 rules that codified much of the last 50,000 years' evolutionary lessons for social coherence. Voila! Right and wrong had an outline, qualitative up and down. And metaphor got a universal, collective starter alphabet. After 2000 more years of trial and error, today, I'd say it looks pretty much like this, give or take:

[click to enlarge]

These are the foundation for Western culture as well as being sacrosanct for 99% of the globe. They are the building blocks of law, art, war, business, history and pretty much anything else that requires people. The idea of a Collective Unconcious works as a "library of meaning" because these truths are held to be self-evident--they're not debatable--as Thomas Jefferson noted in a certain Set of Rules he was outlining in 1776. Meaning, therefore, the 4th coordinate of the Brand Framework, is derived from these agreed upon metrics of good, bad, happy, sad, nice and not. In turn, Archetypes--roles almost--such as Shadow, Light, Hero, Rebel, Warrior, Sage, Creator, Caregiver and others are built out of the attributes and lessons latent in these metrics. And yes, since these lessons and images are older than rocks, they and their Archetypal messengers are the only language able to bust though to the stubborn, twitchy, self-interested R-complex.

Now, here's where it can get a bit messy. This encyclopedia of meaning is ingested and experienced daily by the thing that created it -- us. Except, because these patterns are deep-seated in the most paleo reaches of our brain, the poor thing can't really point out what "turns it on". It only "knows it when it sees it". It can only respond. Sometimes in good ways. And other times, in stupendously short-sighted dumb ones, which we'll cover a bit below. (Think: Nixon or Clinton; Ken Lay and others.)

Back to the brain and what it's looking for.

Jung broke personality into three elements: Ego, Persona, Self. This matters because brand is ultimately not about "image" but about its character and the characteristics it's imagery invokes and evokes--it's deeper archetypal vocabulary.

As you may know, Ego is the package of hidden, baser desires we hold in ourselves. They are limbic, they derive from the oldest R-Complex brains--mammalian and reptilian. Their instincts are centered on the Four Fs tied together with compulsive, ritual, paranoid and rigid tendencies. Ego is always with us.

Persona is the face we craft to present to the World, it's our best first impression. You do this, I do this, and companies do this through their brands and other actions. The only problem is, the boss, our R-Complex, knows its ownself is not perfect and it is deeply suspicious of anybody who suggests that they are any different. Here is where companies and individuals get into trouble and lose standing, customers and employees: The R-Complex is home to the idea of "too good to be true" (Remember, it is paranoid and self-interested.) A corrollary to too good to be true, is "too perfect to be human." Take that thought, inate cynicism really, matched to the mission of the R-complex as tribal and protective of "the gene pool"--its community--and then compare it to what Companies try to create: Brands.

As presented by companies, things like brands, their strategies and the structures they dictate within companies are often anything but human. They are counterintuitive, counter to what the brain knows to be true. They are therefore, false "selves" presented by companies as authentic and truthful, yet found to feel false and inert to the R-Complex. If the brain interprets brand as "people", and it does, then many brands fall flat. They are false people, dimensionless selves. Viewed in this way, we often don't as much brand companies as we spray-paint them. Whoops.

This brings us to what Jungian psychology defines as the "Self", the final and third aspect of personality. Here lies what I would say is the core of brand, it's Character.

[Grandiose Statement Alert:]

Brand is the public interpretation of personal beliefs.

Following on the "feeling" aspect above, Brand is not product. Not price. Not approachability, nor attitude. Brand is not ego or persona. It is the "self" Carl Jung described. That is, it's the quieter, hopeful, original part of a person, place or thing that can't be neatly tagged yet fits naturally and effortlessly. And it grows along with its adherents and admirers. Better still, it helps them grow. In this way, brands mirror the ambition of a consumer and reveal themselves as tools for the journey of becoming the idealized self we saw in the Statue of Liberty example. Dr. George Boree describes it this way: The self is an archetype that represents the transcendence of all opposites, so that every aspect of your personality is expressed equally. It is an ideal of perfection.

The Human Self, being a soft idealist, needs a safe place to reside. In our brains, the most secure place is the R-Complex, the protector. Therefore, Brand must be composed of character traits that build a wireframe in dimensional space, a shelter if you will, for the consumer's journey. These can be Trust. Sex. Bravery. Whimsy. Sobriety. Generosity. Beauty. Wisdom. Faith. Compassion, etc. the list is longer, but not too much. (Simplicity, remember?) Most important, as currently interpreted Brand is not marketing. Marketing is marketing. Brand is leaving the world and the mind a better place than you found them. Brand is the epitaph: "we were glad they were here, we are sad they are gone."

The above attributes or qualities get the attention of the R-Complex, whereas others bounce off it's rigid worldview. In fact, they grab the R-Complex by the Jugular, metaphorically speaking. (Hah!) And they derive their power from the aforementioned playlist called the Collective Unconscious. If you take these and build a frame, you have not done business or built a brand. You have created a "Legacy." You have done good.

Legacy is key. It is deeply symbolic. And very magnetic. It is qualitative. It inspires action and doesn't shy away from sacrifice. It values reward, on many levels. Why is Legacy so powerful? Well, the R-Complex is on/off. To be quite honest, it's also kind of melodramatic. It interprets and experiences things in terms of life and death, pleasure and pain. Shades of grey were not an R-Complex invention. But legacy it understands. Because it speaks to perpetuation of the species, it includes making a difference. It means being remembered well. It is about "being" and becoming, not "doing" or what is. The R-Complex, simplistic as it can seem is the seat of ambition and leadership--again, think Nixon or Clinton. Creating a legacy, and letting others share in the creation and bounty is what leaders do. As it turns out, all those things are vital to organizations and the people who lead and populate them.

The challenge business-people often need to overcome is the modern confusion between managing and leading. Leaders guide and point out, they don't demand and prod. Interestingly, Western culture once had a very strict interpretation of leadership and its code of conduct. The terms honor, noblesse oblige and mercy were deeply ingrained in this.

"The captain went down with the ship." "He fell on his sword" "The buck stops here."

There is a universal symmetry to those thoughts. They are Limbic in their common sense. The R-Complex likes their clarity.

But they are also out of fashion, as the papers remind us every day. The tribal self-protective nature of the collected R-Complexes in a Board Room or an Oval Office can, in their narrow-focus attempts at self-preservation, doom their hopes of maintaining "life" or, more realistically stated, Power and Influence. For this, another wise old chinese guy had a saying: "The tighter you squeeze, the more grains of sand slip through your fingers." (For the modern version, the term "Bunker mentality" was invented along with the idea that "The cover-up is always worse than the crime".) Here, the deep institutional cognitive dissonance that reveals itself is what damages companies' and an individual's ability to be believed, trusted, and invited in by our R-Complexes. The left brain hears the words "I care", "Customer Service is job one", "We value people". The right brain backages the concrete sensory evidence, usually to the contrary. The R-Complex assesses the package, and it says..."yeah, uh-huh, sure. Bullshit! Get lost."

Brands ignorant of this process prove the aphorism "the perfect is the enemy of the good", perhaps in an unintended and ironic way. In sanding off the rough edges of authenticity, in sacrificing brand-humanity, if you will, we doom ourselves to irrelevance.

The concept of Brand Character is vital to company mission also. To paraphrase Nathaniel Hawthorne, you can't show one face to the world, and a different one to yourself without really screwing your head up. This fact has become more salient and destructive as companies spend more time telling the world how "wonderful" they are through media, marketing and so forth only to have members of the corporate family know it's not usually true. The boilerplate does not match the reality. In this way, companies make lots of promises and spend billions to introduce unwitting customers to disaffected employees who don't intrinsically know why what they do matters on a deeper level. Donald Trump reminded his budding Appretices of the danger of this a few weeks ago: don't sell a product you don't believe in.

It's Bad Mojo. In all caps.

So. If brand is not just a suit you put over a flabby body in order to get a date, what's the key to being "real"? Simple. View things as a transformational journey, exactly as the self does. And understand and frame your particular brand, organization and environment as tools and shelter with deeply symbolic power for the trip.

Again, we'll make with the Geometry. Just as a three-part brain needs guidelines built from a Collective Unconscious in order to function, so does a brand need to meet 4 requirements to be deemed "real" to that brain. If we're thinking dimensionally, they look like this:

Next: Part 2.5 Some examples of archetypes in brand motion... and why "Survivor", "American Idol", "The Apprentice" and "Junkyard Wars" have some of the most brand-loyal viewerships going.

Thanks for your patience and thanks for reading. Comments and any corrections are welcome.

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