Brand personality
A brand with no personality is invisible.
People do not grow attached to a product: they grow attached to a character. To give your brand a personality people recognize we use the tools of psychology — MBTI and Jung’s archetypes — not as a game, but to place you in customers’ minds and set you apart from competitors.
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THE THESIS
BRAND = PERSON
If your brand were a person, what type would it be?
In modern marketing, “brand personality” is treated alongside the more solid concepts of psychology. It is not poetry: it is strategy. A brand with a clear character is easier to remember, to choose and to talk about — because people think in personalities, not in feature lists.
We have always said it: the logo comes last. The character comes first. And to define it with method, instead of trusting instinct, we borrow two tools the world has been using for decades.
FROM JUNG TO BUSINESS
From a 1921 theory to the most used tool in the world.
It all starts with Carl Gustav Jung and his dimensions of personality. In the 1940s Katharine and Isabel Briggs Myers turned them into a practical test; in 1962 it was published as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
It has been the world’s most recognized questionnaire for exploring personality preferences ever since: it is used by 88% of the Fortune 500, in 115 countries. “Much of the seemingly random variation in human behavior is not random at all”, wrote Isabel Briggs Myers: it is the logical result of observable differences. True of people. True of brands.
The 4 axes · the MBTI method
Four axes, sixteen personalities.
By crossing four preferences, MBTI defines 16 types, each with a four-letter code. We use the same scheme to give brands a character. Tap a famous brand, or move the sliders yourself.
What “type” is your favorite brand?
Tap one: the sliders snap to its personality profile.
Tap a brand to see what “type” it is.
Introverted: singular focus and real depth — of sector, of niche, of situation.
Sensing: attentive to detail and practical, a supplier of useful, concrete products.
Thinking: values facts and efficiency, tends towards operational success.
Judging: plans ahead and seeks order, slow but steady growth.
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THE ARCHETYPES
SIXTEEN CHARACTERS
Sixteen archetypes, one that is right for you.
INTJ
Architect
INTP
Logician
ENTJ
Commander
ENTP
Innovator
INFJ
Advocate
INFP
Mediator
ENFJ
Protagonist
ENFP
Campaigner
ISTJ
Logistician
ISFJ
Defender
ESTJ
Executive
ESFJ
Consul
ISTP
Virtuoso
ISFP
Adventurer
ESTP
Entrepreneur
ESFP
Entertainer
Giving a brand an archetype helps place it in consumers’ minds, build a stronger connection and set it apart from competitors. Curious about your own profile? The most used free test is 16personalities.com.
Brand personality
In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.
HONEST CRITICISM
It is not an exact science. It is a powerful prompt.
Let us be honest: MBTI is debated, and the results can be swayed by the moment. We do not use it as absolute truth — we use it as a structured prompt to bring the brand’s character into focus, instead of deciding it “on a feeling”.
We cross it with Jung’s archetypes and with Kapferer’s prism, where personality is the first facet — the one holding up all the others. From there come the tone of voice, the imagery and the logo: consistent, because they start from the character and not from this month’s taste.
Related
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THE POINT
WHY DO ANY OF THIS
Why funnel a company into “semi-imaginary” personalities?
Because MBTI, built on Carl Jung’s archetypes, offers a structure for understanding personality and ways of thinking. In branding that helps a company identify and better understand its own unique “character”, and build a more consistent, more authentic brand identity.
It is a process that prompts a deep reflection on what makes you singular: which distinctive traits and values resonate most with your vision and with your audience. As Jung himself put it, archetypes are not there to “label” people, but to explore the dimensions of character.
So here, using MBTI does not mean reducing a brand to a four-letter code. It is the starting point of a deeper journey into defining the identity — a tool for digging into the motivations and the inputs that actually move a company.
ENTP
The Debater
We practice what we preach
And us? Adam is an ENTP.
Adam Wolf — the face of our method — has all the ENTP traits: creativity, a constant search for new ideas, enthusiasm for the challenge of pushing past limits and conventions. For us MBTI is the right excuse to dig deep into the motivations that move a company and its brand. In the spirit of our “transparent marketing”: what works now is the real thing.
Let us give your brand
a character.
We start from who you are: with MBTI, archetypes and the prism we define your brand’s personality and translate it into tone of voice, imagery and — only at the end — the logo. Without trusting instinct, and with the usual bluntness.