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: make your brand more human.
Lover brands are driven to create meaningful relationships and the best version of themselves to attract others. Your brand’s talents are sensuality, gratitude, appreciation, and commitment, so give your clients the red-carpet treatment. Your brand’s voice is sensual, empathetic, and soothing and your brand's strongest motivations are belonging and intimacy.
Before you get deeper into the lover archetype, there are some questions I want you to think about and link your answers back to your brand strategy...
What does the word intimacy 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 lover?
As the proud owner of a brand with a lover 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 intimacy
Intimacy is what is most important to all lover personality types. Have you put any importance on that word or the meaning behind it?
Note. Keep in mind that intimacy can be understood in many different ways. It can be the physical want to be close to someone, the inner mind to be understood on an intimate level, or the world-level connection where you are part of an exclusive clique.
Whatever your definition or reason behind it, look deeper into yourself and your brand and pull that innovation out.
Important! Intimacy does not always mean sexual! In fact, lover brands are not always based on the beautiful side of love and sometimes can take on the darker qualities of love.
The reason you come up with, this is what you want to talk about with your audience and provide to them.
Intimacy
The lover 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 lover personality drives and your own brand values.
Passionate
Close
Indulgent
Affectionate
Loveable
Important! These are the drives behind lover 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 creator archetype, your goal would be to be in relationships with things you love. Your brand can do this through the gifts of...
Appreciation and passion
Also, the lover archetype encapsulates all types of love — parental, familial, friendships, spiritual, romantic, and even the darker sides like obsession, dependency, selfishness, and unrealistic expectations. Their core desire is to attain intimacy.
The lover 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 lover brands and compare it with your own brand purpose.
Dote on your clients, even if you don’t know them.
You can do this by offering products and services that make them feel attractive and wanted. Your strongest strategy to achieve this is to give your clients the red-carpet treatment. Your strongest strategy to do this is to become attractive to others.
The lover 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 to take a look at these three examples of lover brands...
Godiva
Victoria's Secret
Chanel
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 lover
As a lover personality type, your brand attracts a wide range of audiences. 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 lover personality forward, as a brand that is both sensual and intimate...
Use sensual, empathetic, and soothing language.
Be faithful to your audience and only to them.
Be passionate about your message.
Appreciate beauty in various forms and values.
Show you can be charming and charismatic.
Strive for optimistic and sociable behaviour.
Respect people’s values and relationships.
Live in the moment and in excitement.
Show a bit of a streak in the erotic and sensual.
Facilitate connections between your audience.
Connect with
Since the main goal of the lover is to attain intimacy, this brand personality attracts a smaller range of audience when it comes to specific 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
Everyperson. Belonging, normality, connection, honesty, friendliness
Caregiver. Warmth, thoughtfulness, generosity, safety, security
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...
Your striking beauty is impossible to ignore
You complete me
Truly. Madly. Deeply. Always.
Explain how you connect with others.
Tip. Address your audience as individuals and directly. You can draw attention that way and create the feeling of a closed-off and personal connection. In addition, feel free to go crazy with the adjectives and descriptors, as long as they make sense.
You can display your lover archetype through two main strategies...
Reaffirm beauty
Red carpet treatment
The lover 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 lover voices...
Sensual, but not sexual
Empathetic, but not sensitive
Soothing, but not pacifying
Obsessive, but not manic
The lover 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 lover weaknesses
The things you should be most worried about as a lover brand are being alone, unwanted, or unloved. Make sure not to lose your own identity when so focused on pleasing others. Be careful of revealing your fear in being alone or unwanted.
The five things you should avoid in your brand are...
Rejection
Loneliness
Isolation
Invisibility
Contempt
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 lover 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.
Lover 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. Casual or one-dimensional connections, and pleasure-seekers who are not truly intimate or personal.
Level two. Forming deeper attachments and establishing commitments, finding fulfillment in relationships.
Level three. Spiritual love, a sense of wholeness and connection to others, and a love for humanity as a whole.
Lover sub-archetypes
There are five related sub-archetypes within the lover archetype, which emerge based on particular attributes that are visible within that archetype. That means each sub-archetype has different attributes. This is linked to your brand values and helps you split yourself from the collective within your archetype.
Lover
Faithful and passionate, the lover is all about intimacy and connection. This isn't all about the romantic side though, as lovers appreciate beauty in various forms and value collaboration. The challenge facing lovers is letting the fear of being alone, disconnected, or ultimately, unloved, overtake them and dictate their future actions.
Romantic
This is the sensual romantic who wants to create a sense of oneness, stemming from a shared love. Romantics are charming and charismatic, optimistic and sociable, and can be extremely intense with their emotions. Unfortunately, they can often stumble over their own optimism and have to learn how to remove their rose-coloured glasses.
Companion
The companion is loyal and trustworthy and is the comrade and confidante we turn to when we need a helping hand or a patient ear. Companions hold a deep respect for a person’s inherent value and place a high value on relationships. They may be devoted to a fault — potentially leading to loss of self and a rise of dependency or obsession.
Hedonist
The hedonist is the erotic and sensual side of the lover archetype. They love in the moment, seeking out exciting things and focusing on pleasure. Hedonists want to indulge in their wants, but must be careful of indulging too much. In addition, hedonists have a habit of disregarding others in pursuit of simple and short-term pleasures.
Matchmaker
The matchmaker understands the power of human connection and relationship dynamics. They act as a facilitator to draw people together and build relationships between others. In addition, they use strategy and intuition to connect with their audience. Unfortunately, they can end up letting their personal judgment and furthering their own agenda take over.