An effective brand personality is something your audience can relate to and interact with. In order to get this feeling, your brand personality should have a set of human characteristics that make your brand more human.
Caregiver brands provide a structure to the world by ensuring everybody is receiving the same level of help and attention. Your brand’s main talents are compassion and generosity, so you will want to help people care for other people, pets, society, or the world at large with sacrificial devotion. Your brand’s voice is caring, warm, and reassuring and your brand's strongest motivation is service.
Before you get deeper into the caregiver archetype, there are some questions I want you to think about and link your answers back to your brand strategy...
What does the word service mean to you and your audience?
What adjectives you would use to describe your brand?
What is the purpose behind your brand’s existence?
What are some brands you look up to and aspire to become like?
What drives the caregiver?
As the proud owner of a brand with a caregiver personality, you will want to have something behind your brand to help push it forward and to grow. These are your brand purpose and brand vision.
Remember that brand purpose is internal, it is what drives you and your brand to continue, and brand vision is the long-term goal you want to achieve.
Providing service
Service is what is most important to all caregiver personality types. Have you put any importance on that word or the meaning behind it?
Note. Keep in mind that service can be understood in many different ways. It can be the want to help or assist others, the action or process of providing for others, or being considered as a servant with unquestionable devotion.
Whatever your definition or reason behind it, look deeper into yourself and your brand and pull that innovation out.
Important! Service has nothing to do with levels and hierarchies! Do not let yourself be treated as lesser.
The reason you come up with is what you want to talk about with your audience and provide to them.
Service
The Caregiver drives
When you were thinking of adjectives to describe your brand, these can be linked or related to your brand values. You already know all about brand values and you have your own and a few brand value statements.
Now, I want you to link the caregiver personality drives and your own brand values.
Supportive
Responsible
Familiar
Cautious
Grateful
Important! These are the drives behind caregiver personalities. If they don’t match your brand values, that is okay! Instead of looking at them as value words, look at them as the result you and your clients will have after working together.
As the caregiver archetype, your goal would be to help others. Your brand can do this through...
Compassion and generosity
The caregiver is compassionate and self-sacrificing. This archetype places a high value on serving and protecting others and has a core desire to protect people from harm.
The caregiver purpose
Every brand is as unique as the person that stands behind it. Even so, we use categories and archetypes, and different classifications to better understand how we fit with others.
Keeping that in mind, I want you to review the purpose behind caregiver brands and compare it with your own brand purpose.
Help others.
You can do this by showing caring, warmth, and reassurance when helping others. Your strongest strategy is putting others first and doing things for others.
The Caregiver examples
When you were working on your brand positioning, you got to look for aspirations for what you want your brand to become. You already have your own goals, but I want you take a look at these three examples of caregiver brands...
The Salvation Army
Habitat for Humanity
WWF
I want you to ask yourself if any of them could be an aspiration for your own brand and if so, how.
Note. Remember that we are not talking about the product here, but the brand personality that sells it (or the cost of said products and services).
How to reach out as a caregiver
As a caregiver personality type, your brand attracts a wide range of audience. No matter who you are addressing, though, your goal is to help them grow.
Here are some tips on how to talk to your audience and put your caregiver personality forward, as someone who is supportive and helpful...
Use caring, warm, and reassuring language.
Be empathetic and good in all of your connections.
Remain calm even in a crisis or world event.
Show positive behaviour during tough situations.
Defend others and stand a symbol of protection.
Provide nurturing guidance and loving oversight.
Be selfless and kind through compassionate actions.
Create optimal conditions for healing to happen naturally.
Remain full of faith and perceptive of others’ emotions.
Help guide others to change their lives for the better.
Connect with
Since the main goal of the caregiver is to help others, this brand personality attracts a wide range of audience, including most of the other archetypes. Below is a list of a few audience archetypes that are attracted to caregiver brands and what caregiver brands can use to appeal to them...
Innocent. Trust, honesty, positivity, safety, connection, inner beauty
Sage. Truth, knowledge, wisdom, intelligence, factual
Hero. Empowerment, inspiration, opportunity, worth, recognition
Jester. Fun, happiness, entertainment, memorable, positivity, laughter
Lover. Attractive, passion, desire, belonging, intimacy
Everyperson. Belonging, normality, connection, honesty, friendliness
Start creating content for your audience
As part of your brand strategy, you already know who your people are and where to find them. Now, it's time to talk to them! Here are a few content and conversation prompts you can use to display your caregiver personality...
Everyone deserves care
No one has ever become poor by giving
Be good to people for no reason
Explain how you provide structure to the world
Tip. Your brand sometimes attracts an audience that is used to becoming the martyr, but the martyr is a solitary figure and if you are all the martyr, your cause loses its meaning. Promote community and cooperation between your audience and clients, instead of playing on their sacrificial personality.
You can display your caregiver archetype through two main strategies...
Place others before self
The greater good is worth sacrifice
The Caregiver voice
Your brand voice is a unique element of your brand’s communication with your audience. It remains consistent throughout all the content that you create.
You will be working on finding your brand voice after this module, however, your brand voice has input from both you and your brand personality. In addition, a brand voice is often characterized by both what it is and what it isn’t.
Here are some examples of caregiver voices...
Caring, but not coddling
Warm, but not motherly
Reassuring, but not bolstering
Humble, but not meek
The Caregiver character
You now know a lot more about your brand personality. You have a character, a brand that is a separate entity that will interact and befriend your audience. This character has its own goals, values, and ambitions, as you’ve discovered when working on your brand positioning and core.
But, if we want to make them more human, we want to add a bit extra to it.
At the moment, your brand’s personality is too perfect and structured. Your brand can become more human by being open with its fears, weaknesses, and characteristics.
Knowing these, will help you battle against them and since there is no person out that doesn’t have these, you will make your brand more approachable to your audience.
The Caregiver weaknesses
The things you should be most worried about as a caregiver are becoming a martyr or being exploited. Make sure not to show any form of selfishness and ingratitude, but also stand your ground so you can’t be taken advantage of.
The five things you should avoid in your brand are...
Anguish
Helplessness
Ingratitude
Neglect
Blame
Now consider your audience.
You’ve written their problems and emotions in your ideal client bio, so take a look at all the negative emotions in there and see if they connect with any of these fears. If so, then these are things you can help them with, as they are dangerous for you and your brand too.
Niching the caregiver down
Twelve personalities may seem very limiting, especially when you start thinking that there are almost 8 billion people on earth, half of them are on social media, and all of them fall into these twelve categories.
However, you can narrow your personality down to make it more unique to you. Every archetype has three levels and five sub-archetypes.
Note. Keep in mind that both of these are not static! They change over time as you and your brand evolve.
Caregiver levels
The three different levels for each archetype are based on the development within that personality. That means the lower level is less mature while the higher level is more developed.
This is linked to your brand’s vision, figuring out what point you are at now and how your brand personality can grow with your brand, the closer you get to your vision.
Level one. Caring for one’s dependents and audience.
Level two. Finding a balance between caring for others and self.
Level three. Altruistic concern for the world at large.
Caregiver sub-archetypes
There are five related sub-archetypes within the caregiver archetype, which emerge based on particular attributes that are visible within that archetype. That means each has different attributes. This is linked to your brand values and helps you split yourself from the collective within your archetype.
Caregiver
The caregiver is good, compassionate, and empathetic, with a sacrificial concern for others. Caregivers remain calm in a crisis and are always optimistic, even when that means they will sacrifice themselves for the point of helping others. Unfortunately, they have an inability to say no, always wanting to help even when it is detrimental to them.
Guardian
The guardian is fiercely protective and focuses on defending others. Guardians provide nurturing guidance and loving oversight while keeping to traditions and values. They are focused on defending themselves from an attack and are always prepared to jump in the way of one, which can, unfortunately, lead to them becoming overbearing or misusing their power.
Samaritan
The samaritan is selfless and kind. Samaritans tend to focus on the quest to love thy neighbour as thyself, giving them more importance on themselves than others in this archetype. They demonstrate compassion and action by finding meaning in relieving others’ suffering. However, they may face the challenge of self-martyrdom, if not careful.
Healer
Strong on sensitivity, the healer acts as a conduit to wholeness by creating optimal conditions for healing to happen naturally. Healers have a healthy dose of optimism and empathy and remain full of faith. They are perceptive to others’ emotions but can succumb to ego if holding too tightly to the idea of having the only right answer.
Angel
The angel exudes purity and humility. Angels use infinite compassion to bring joy and laughter while providing aid and comfort. As the name implies, Angels can guide others to change their lives for the better through spiritual connection and miracles. This, however, makes them have an unrealistic outlook, ignoring anything negative to focus only on the positive.
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