When creating a product or service, identifying your target market is important. Yet, it goes beyond what your target audience looks like or where they come from. True audience understanding comes from interpreting a customer’s goals, struggles, and thoughts.

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of a customer archetype, how to create one, and how to use it in commercial decision-making.

What is a customer archetype?

A customer archetype represents the ideal audience for your product or service. It’s a fictionalised profile of your ideal customer sub-sets, with a personality and background. It can help to give you a focus for your marketing efforts, ensuring a more personalised and relatable experience for your audience.

How do customer archetypes differ from customer-buyer personas?

Customer-buyer personas are another useful tool for effectively targeting your audience, dealing primarily with useful demographics such as age, gender, race, nationality, and location. However, customer archetypes explore a more abstract view of the customer, including their goals and challenges, approach to life and behaviour, and motivations and values.

These elements are not directly determined by demographics, but they will really help you get to know your customers and their needs.

Customer Archetype Examples

There are many types of customer archetypes, and they cannot be defined in an exhaustive list. Archetypes are wholly dependent on industry and brand offering and can be quite complex.

Be sure not to confuse customer archetypes with brand archetypes. While brands position themselves as archetypes such as The Hero, The Lover, or The Rebel based on their values, customer archetypes reflect the types of customers those values appeal to—they are not always the same thing.

Some typical customer archetypes for brand archetypes are:

  • Hero brand: Someone with strong values who cares about the environment and others.
  • Lover brand:Someone who values connection, takes time for themselves, and understands the importance of time for relaxation.
  • Rebel brand:A person with a work-hard-play-hard mentality, someone who takes risks, and someone who likes to make their own choices.

How to create a customer archetype

When creating customer archetypes, you should begin by collecting data that answers useful questions about your audience. This will subsequently inform the traits, habits, pain points, and values of your customer archetypes.

1. What questions do you need answering?

First, you need to establish what information you are trying to glean from your research. This can be as practical as determining shopping habits, or as ruminative as understanding your customers’ values and struggles.

Example questions:

  • What are your key touchpoints?
  • Do you tend to shop around?
  • Do you write reviews?
  • Do you engage with brands on social media?
  • How often do you make a purchase?
  • Do you impulse buy or take time to think over a purchase?
  • What do you struggle with?
  • What are you proud of?
  • What is important to you?

2. Data collection

There are many ways to collect the data you need to create a customer archetype. Behaviour and user journey analysis using tools like Google Analytics can show how potential customers interact with your site. This includes page views, clicking links, engagement time, and interactions.

Social media is another invaluable tool for market research. Observing interactions with your brand through comments, shares, likes/reactions, tagging and re-posts can inform you of the kind of content that your customers enjoy and value the most. This will ultimately inform you of the best way to reach your ideal customer. You can also look into individual users and followers to find out more about them.

Similarly, forums are a great way to find out what people discuss regarding your brand or industry and understand what elements are important to them. We can also get more direct feedback from reviews and case studies, which give clear indications of what worked for a customer and what didn’t. Don’t forget to conduct competitor analysis to determine where you’re succeeding in targeting your ideal customer and where you’re struggling.

Alternatively, you could take a more direct approach, sending out surveys to discover customer purchase habits and arranging focus group discussions to provide yet more organic insights.

3. Creating the archetypes

Now that you’ve identified the touchpoints for your audience, their purchase habits, and what they care about, we can start building a picture of who they are.

The key things to note are:

  • What are your customers thinking?
  • What are their main priorities?
  • What are their biggest pain points?
  • How will they interact?
  • What are the common touchpoints?
  • How can the product or service help?

The important thing to remember is that the archetype is a fluid concept. Your ideal customer can be many things at once and react unexpectedly when outside factors arise. Consider how behaviour and priorities may change over the course of the year, or even in just a day. Additionally, consider how your customer’s archetype may differ depending on the funnel stage they’re in and how long each funnel stage might last for different people.

There are a variety of methods used to create customer archetypes. One method is empathy mapping, which maps what customers say, think, do, and feel in a quadrant. The example below shows the process a customer might follow when booking a holiday.

Empathy Map Example

Using customer archetypes

Customer archetypes can tell you a lot about your potential customers, providing context and answers to questions about what they care about the most—is it the environment? Saving money? Achievements?

An example of a customer archetype within the travel industry might be someone who is experience-focused but also environmentally conscious. These customers will want to know that the company they are travelling with has the same concerns in mind and is taking action to combat them. Highlighting the use of biofuels in air travel, carbon offsetting, reduced single-use plastics, and fair wages for resort workers overseas are some ways to target this archetype.

In e-commerce, you might have a customer archetype of someone who tends to buy last-minute gifts. They also want to save money and care about sustainability. They’ll need to know where their purchase comes from and when to expect it. They’ll want to know about your discounts and may benefit from emails giving gift ideas in good time for Christmas delivery.

People engage more with content and campaigns when they feel understood on a deeper level. This could be through using ironic humour, breaking taboos, or addressing hidden concerns that people don’t always talk about out loud. When a customer feels they can relate to a brand’s message, they are much more likely to convert and actively want to show support for that business. They will also be more likely to share your content with friends and family, thus increasing your reach.

There are many ways you can use customer archetypes in your marketing campaign. They can inform the focus areas, tone of voice, and other specifics of your ad campaigns, as well as the content you produce and offers you might make. They can also help you pinpoint the most relevant media outlets, blogs, and influencers to target, as well as which channels to prioritise.

Summary

Creating customer archetypes is essential to gaining a deeper understanding of your ideal customers and connecting with them personally. They are more abstract than customer buyer personas, which deal with surface-level demographics. Customer archetypes can be as simple as ‘the bargain hunter’ or as complex as ‘the environmentally-friendly person who shares important topics online and likes to take risks’.

Brands can create customer archetypes through research on social media, analytics, surveys, and reviews, and they can use these platforms to answer important questions about customers’ habits and motivations. This will ultimately help brands boost engagement and reach more people on a personal level.