Margaret Mark - The hero and the outlaw: building extraordinary brands through the power of archetypes

Copyright 2015 by Margaret Mark and Carol S.Pearson. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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by Alex Kroll

In October of 1987, I had to make a rush business trip to Toronto. After I landed at Pearson Airport, I ran for the first taxi in line. From the rear seat, I could see that the driver wore a tattered mackinaw and a wool cap with earflaps pulled down over wisps of straggly hair. In the mirror, I could see a crusty, days-old beard.

As he pulled away from the curb, he suddenly braked, turned to me, and spoke with urgency: Did you hear the news?

I sucked in some cold air. No, what?

Awful. The Hang Seng stock index went down nine percent this morning.

In that instant, I knew the long-awaited era of global communications had actually been born.

All the world, rich and poor, was fixated on the collapse of the financial markets in real time. And there was real worry in the cabbys eyes, which reflected fears around the world.

What was the story? No one seemed to understand why the markets were in free fall. What did it mean, this October collapse? Neither President Reagan, nor Margaret Thatcher, nor the secretaries of the treasury or exchequer, nor any other leader of reputation had stood up to tell us what the story was. So, in the absence of a new story, millions of people fell back on the last usable story: the stock market collapse of October 1929. And the quotes chased each other down and down.

Eventually, after scooping the cream out of millions of portfolios, the markets bottomed out, well above depression levels, because it wasnt actually 1929 all over again.

Today, as I write in another October, markets are roiling as never before. Brands are being born faster than ever before. The media are glutted with much more data, news, entertainment, and advertising than they were 13 years ago.

Without a good story for us to latch onto, to give meaning to the message, most of it slides by, vaguely seen or heard, but surely not absorbed.

We all love stories, and we need them. From fables to novels, from musicals to advertising, we instinctively crave stories which can provide the human context for forces that are often vast, ancient, and abstract. Stories are the best teachers.

This is a book about finding the right story. It provides a fresh framework for understanding how brands and companies gain and lose meaning, attention, value, and share of market in these hectic times.

In 30-odd years in the business of advertising and marketing, I have met no more original thinker or articulate researcher than Margaret Mark. I have had the good fortune to work with her for nearly two decades, during which I have watched her constantly tear up the hard sod of accepted wisdom and break new ground for the great benefit of her clients. Now, she has joined forces with Dr. Carol Pearson, a uniquely gifted scholar who has not only been delving deeply into archetypal studies for years, but has been applying her insights in a practical fashion as a consultant to major organizations. Together, they have fused a remarkable thesis that, in the end, is all about strengthening the valueeven the market valueof brands and companies.

I could not help but think of Margaret and Carol on the last Super Bowl Sunday, as a fresh phalanx of dot-coms paraded their million-dollar-per-half-minute commercials in front of the nations richest TV audience. Most of the commercials were witty, novel, and spectacular in effect. And most lacked anything close to meaning. Their millions were wasted.

This book illuminates the most ancient grooves in our mental architecture, which Carl Jung described as archetypes, and shows how they can be employed to bring meaning and profit to a brand. There is a nascent power here that, if understood correctly, can bring a rare vitality to a brand or a corporation.

But let me post the warning label up front. In my opinion, meaning is not something that can be grafted onto a product, particularly an inferior one. To attract and keep customers, meaning must be true to the intrinsic value of a brandthat is, what the product really is and does. Thus, the management of archetypes must begin long before an ad is begun. It starts with the development of a product or service that provides a real benefit.