Exploring the changing role of brand archetypes in customer-brand relationships: Why try to be a hero when your brand can be more?

Exploring the changing role of brand archetypes in customer-brand relationships, by Omar Merlo, Andreas B. Eisingerich, Richard Gillingwater and Jia Jocelyn Cao, published in Business Horizons in 2023, is a peer reviewed marketing study analyzing over 2,400 brands to argue that strong brands now tend to draw on multiple archetypes at once rather than embodying a single one, revising over twenty years of prior brand strategy advice. Cited here specifically for its correct attribution of the popular twelve archetype marketing framework to Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson's 2001 work on a Jungian basis, and for the point that mapping a brand onto an archetype happens after the fact of a brand's existing identity rather than as prediction. Its strength is peer reviewed empirical grounding for that attribution and that limitation. Its limit is that it studies the commercial marketing framework specifically, not Carl Jung's own psychological archetype theory, which this atlas should keep distinct from the marketing application this article addresses.