Building brand personality through archetypes used in advertisement

Advertisement that is one of the fundamental components of marketing is also one of the tools that are very important for brand managers in developing a brand personality. For this reason, a very big part of the marketing communication efforts is aimed at developing brand personalities through advertisements. Archetype model is one of many other models that are used to create and strengthen brand personalities through advertisement.In this study, concepts of advertisement and brand personality were defined. Detailed information on semiotics and brand personality models has also been presented with examples. Besides, the role of advertisement in the process of developing brand personalities was thoroughly explained. In what follows, the study gave a general account of how the concepts of collective unconsciousness and archetypes were used in developing brand personalities. In the light of this account twelve archetypes (hero, king, magician, caregiver, creator, lover, rebel, seeker, sage, jester, ordinary guy, innocent) were explained in detail with examples of contemporary advertisements in which they were used.In the conclusion, two-staged empirical application was presented. For the first stage of this social experiment, tv advertisements of ten successful airway companies were evaluated through semiotics analysis. In this analysis one representative archetype has been identified for each company by a careful investigation of the fundamental and subsidiary meanings of semiotic employed in their respective advertisements. In the second stage of the experiment, an online survey has been conducted with a sample of 390 university students to verify if the archetype identified for each company in the firs stage matches the perception of the subjects. Results of this study will be guiding for those who want to experiment with archetype models in their business or who look for an alternative way to develop a brand personality.