Ben Doepke on Brand & Archetypes

Ben Doepke is the Principal of IX Strategy. I was introduced by Ben my a mutual researcher friend. I remember hitting it off with him the first time we spoke. He’s a big thinker, who has a way of bringing the most compelling parts mythology and archetypes into this work. I was excited to speak him and learn more about how he got to where he is.

In addition to the strategy work they do with clients, they also do pretty amazing Brand Behavior Training. I attended an event he organized in Cincinatti several years ago, and had a lot of fun, and met some amazing people. Coming up, I’ll be joining them in New York City.

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I think you know this, but I'd like to start all of my interviews, all my conversations with this question that I've borrowed from a friend of mine. Her name is Suzanne Snyder, and she teaches the Oral History Summer School up here in Hudson. I stole it from her. I always use it all the time, and I love it, but I always over explain it. You can answer this question any way that you want. You're in absolute control. And the question is, where do you come from?

Ben Doepke: Peter, I knew this one was coming. I haven't listened to previous interviews that you've done. I've learned that there seems to be an importance of acknowledging place and that people would answer that question in a geographical sense. So I guess the answer to that. In a geographical sense, Peter I come from Cincinnati. In fact, I am seventh generation Cincinnati. And with these kids now, it's eight generations of Cincinnati, you just can't get out. The cost of living is really low. The parents are so friendly, it's everywhere, it's a nice way of life.

But I think the reality is I didn't grow up in Cincinnati. I grew up on a goat farm, about 20, 25 miles outside Cincinnati, which is interesting because my mom was a flutist in the symphony orchestra, my father, an urban designer, very cosmopolitan interests in profession, goat farmer. As I thought about your question, I knew it was coming.

It's Cincinnati, but it's not really Cincinnati. And in point of fact, I come from the in between and you and I have talked about this in the past, I think you and I are both fascinated by these transitional moments, the threshold, the liminal and for better or worse, those are the only places that I feel comfortable.

What, and so where would that be now? What's another example of where do you find that space?

I'm continually finding that space. It's like you're asking me to describe my whole life, every wedge of my life. I'm currently speaking to you in a parking lot. This is endemic. This is built into my rhythm of life, my way of working. I don't know if you've been to my website. Most people who visit, I eventually just had to scrub the entire thing so it just said strategy and insight so that people would know this is what's happening here. And even still, what does strategy mean and what does insight mean? There is not a whole lot of agreement on what those things mean. So of course, that's where I set up shop is the space where people are it could be anything.

What did as a young goat farmer, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A musician. And so that came true.

What kind of, tell me the music story. I don't know this about you Ben.

I was a classical pianist and I was a damn good one until I was about 14 and then I quit having left tooth marks on the lid of the piano.

I'm confused. I don't know what those teeth marks are about.

Frustration, pain. When you're practicing a few hours a day, you're always left with the feeling that you're not as good as you would like to be and so you practice some more but you only exacerbate the situation. When you're 14, it's like dude. So lots of frustration. So I quit we've probably a good call. So where I wouldn't touch it, but then because I was socially awkward, I discovered that if I was going to make friends it would, I would need some sort of avenue.

And so I found out that people in my social circles they like music. And so I joined a band, lots of band, and I stayed in bands, eventually toured for, I don't know, five, six, seven years, something like that. Full time. Into my mid toward my late 20s, 26, 27.

Are you willing to share band names?

Yeah. I got to make peace with it at some point. I was a psychology nerd. Always have been fixated on understanding what it means to be a human. And so getting into psychology, I discovered the somatosensory homunculus. And so the group of guys that I was playing with, they did not want to call the band somatosensory homunculus, but they were okay calling it just homunculus.

So there you have it. Homunculus.

What the somatosensory homunculus is?

If your body parts were sized according to the amount of cortical region designated or the nerves that were how sensitive they are. That's what it, that's the somatosensory homunculus. They're like huge lips, huge fingers, huge feet tiny little legs and midsection, and no butt.

Wow. Amazing. How old were you when you named that you're in that?

20.

Wow. How long did homunculus survive? What was the peak homunculus experience?

So I think the first show was in 96. We got it. I think we hung it up in '03.

Nice. You had a good run.

Yeah, it was a weird time to be in a band, because it was pre internet, dawn of internet, and then oh, like we don't even have to play live shows to be discovered. I came from, dude, we were the last of the handbill generation. You know what I'm talking about. You're an old. I'm an old. So we were out on the street corners passing out handbills.

Painful. I'm with you. I'm with you. That's amazing. I love knowing this. You said that you 20, when did you discover that you were fascinated by what it means to be human? When did psychology become a thing that, that was in your world that you were interested in?

Growing up on a farm, but going to school in the inner city every single day driving along the Ohio river. There was that in between period, which as a kid what are you doing? You're staring out the window, watching the river go by every single day. And we didn't have a TV. So when I would get into school, all the kids were talking about the different TV shows or whatever's going on, like cultural stuff.

And I was like a freaking space alien who just landed in their frothy little world. In the in between, always in the in between. And so this thing of growing up on the farm, going to school in the inner city and just trying to figure out like, this is such a, I think a universal human response is why is everybody else so different? Why are they so different?  

It doesn't dawn on you till probably early teens where you're like, why am I like, what's my problem? Why don't I go to mass? Why don't I, watch Parker Lewis can't lose. That was a TV show or whatever. Or what's happening, I think was a TV show. And kids would, we're talking about these shows and they were going to their religious ceremonies or what have you. And just, I was. Yeah. And I just, I also like in the midst of that, what is the word flummoxedness, flummoxation?

Anyway, in the middle of that flummox, I was like, holy hell, I'm so taken by difference. I'm obsessed with difference. And that is a thought that I am still just really fixated on, if you're in a family setting and you look to your left and right, and maybe everybody in your family is speaking the same language, or maybe they all look the same, or there's all this sameness that you might find in your family, and still what is it that makes family life interesting? It's usually they will call out, Oh Peter is this, he's this way.

Like he, that as humans, we lust for difference lost for it. And I think it's just, that's all tied into that drive to become who we are.

When I started out West the guy that I worked for he would speak in like corporate koans. One of them that I always say was, “We consume what we are afraid we are losing.” What do you make of that? It came to me as you just described this attraction to difference or novelty or difference you were saying.

The part it feels a bit careless is the afraid. I wouldn't paint fear as this predominantly defining feature of our existence. I think it's a big part of it. I use the word lust for difference and I think maybe there, these are two sides of the same coin. Maybe, I don't know. But I do believe that we were, we're always, let's say this, I think we're gathering pieces of ourselves through our interactions with each other, which is really a an expression of Vygotsky. So nothing new there.

Tell me about Vygotsky.

Lev Vygotsky. He, like most of his work I think was originally in Russian and the way it translates is pretty clunky, but I think a good summation of his work was we're always becoming ourselves through each other. He was a developmental psychologist and most of his work really focused on childhood, early childhood, but we just, we keep becoming older children.

Yeah. And tell me a little bit, I want to hear about the work you do now. Tell me a little bit about what you do. What you're working on and you're thinking you, I've, we met a while ago and you're thinking is beautiful and the, what you bring to brand and the qualitative is so powerful. How do you talk? How do you start a conversation about the work you do when somebody asks, Hey Ben, what do you do?

Thank you for speaking so kindly of the work, Peter. The way I would answer that question is contingent on who I think is asking it. And all the guesswork of trying to understand what it is they want to know.

Let's say it's a parent at the swim that's in the bleachers. And the person at the swim meet asks you, ‘Hey what do you do?’

So I'll either, if it's really loud and I'll just say I'm a consultant and then that's the end of that.

The consultant exit.

Yeah. That's fine. But no I say that I work with brands to help them understand who they are, to help them understand who they serve. And to understand what is possible, and then not just what's possible, but what is right. And I think all four of those things structure each other. I think it's just almost like a Buckminster Valerian, model that I hold in my head, like where everything is holding itself together.

You know what I mean? I think too often, brands go right to, Oh we could make this, or we could say this, or we could run this particular activation or whatever the case may be. And sometimes you'll run into people who are saying, Oh yes, we can, we could do that, right? That is possible, but let's take a step back and ask Oh, what's going to resonate best with the people we serve.

Very rarely do you back up further from that to say who are we and what do we have to offer anything to anyone, i. e. what is our most sacred remit.

This isn't, this isn't just about brand purpose or brand promise or I think those statements are really important, by the way. This is really about the essence of the brand. And I think too often what we see is that in the rush to activate, in the rush to make ourselves visible as brands, we leave behind what matters. That's why you see so much cultural pollution coming from brands. Just the detritus of rushing and cleverness. God with the cleverness.

What do you mean the cleverness? What's an example of what do you get? What are you talking about?

You, in our fields, Peter, and I'm speaking broadly, like marketing, business, innovation. There are very talented, very gifted, brilliant people, truly brilliant, who are under commercial demands to perform, to deliver something, but without the latitude oftentimes to deliver something beautiful or to borrow the parlance of your initiative. Deliver something beautiful and meaningful.

There it is. Deliver something meaningful. It sucks, man. Like, how many times have you been in that room and looked around and been like, this is an embarrassment of talent. What could we actually do here? If people understood what this brand was about. What could we do?

Oh my God. So talk to me there. Like I just had a, you just painted a picture of that room that we've all been in, right? You've painted a picture that there's like another step all the way back is the sacred remit, right? How do you slip, how do you get, how do you get into a conversation about sacred remit?

So again I'm still figuring that out because a lot of that is contingent on who's asking. Or more often, who's charging ahead and has paid for your help. That's not asking by the way.

Wait, what do you mean? Same more about the brands are not asking.

Brand leaders are not often asking, what are we about? What is our essence? What is sacred that should permeate everything that we are doing? They're not asking that they are asking, how do we hit timing under constraints of budget. How do we deliver quarter by quarter, everything is just this sort of keep the ball rolling down, downhill instead of what is the right thing.

And so when I say they're not asking, they're charging ahead, they're charging ahead and they might reach out and say we need to know who our consumer is, or we need a commercial platform for 2025. We need to build out our pipeline, for the next three to five, maybe 10 years. If you're on a real fine one, but they're like, they're not at, to me they're not asking the most important questions that have to do with the sort of sacred origin, the sort of belief underneath the brand.

I'm seeing your mind operate, and I think maybe you have a belief about what a brand means and what it is for people and the potential that it represents.   And there's a feeling that if only the client really understood it, the brand leaders understood what that was, then this embarrassment of talent could create just a flourish of beauty, basically. So that's what I feel like I heard. Please tell me if I'm wrong and then maybe I'm just projecting. And then the second part is how do you lead teams to an experience of what that is? How do you articulate that possibility? Is that, am I making sense?

You are. The first thing you said is that I have a belief about what the brand is, about what brand essence brand is. It's not that I have a belief, it's that I know that they have a belief about what the brand is, and I don't know that belief has been properly served. If you ask a lot of decision makers that are working on brands, what is the origin story or the primal myth, the creation myth of this brand. They might look at you sideways give you that quizzical dog look.  

As an alternate to that, they'll probably start reeling off the chronological history of the brand. That's not the way belief works. Belief tracks back to a creation myth or what bro, Barbara Sproul. S P R O U L. Barbara Sproul, she wrote a book on what did she call it? Primal myth.

Low key banger. That book is fantastic. And I'm going to tell you, if you don't read the entire book, that's cool. But the intro come on. All right. Basically the creation myth, which is a dreamlike recollection and of the sacred origin of the brand. It holds the DNA. Like, when we enter into that non linear, into that imaginative space, images flood our minds.

Those images carry instruction and it is our work then as we are faithfully delivering through that belief system to activate that essence to carry those instructions all the way through into the products that we are making and the messages that we are delivering and the services that we're offering and the experiences that we're hoping people will remember all of it, all of it should come from an intentional effort to carry that essence all the way.

And the reality, Peter, sorry, and I'll wrap up this never ending thought. The reality is that those instructions, they're coming through anyway, but when they come through by accident, the results are usually painful. They are degenerative instead of generative, because when you are talking about this essence in its intentional form, in its deliberate form, it is generative and beautiful and gives the brand and a belief strength and traction, but in its sort of default, where it is not deliberate, where it is unin haphazard, then it shows up and it shows up destructively.  

And when you're working with some of, I have so many near and dear friends who are working in these corporations that are characterized by this default way of working. It's just cranking it's just that, it's like somebody is asking you for something. Don't ask a whole bunch of whys just do it.

Just get the thing done. And as I said, like I said earlier if you're immensely talented, you can draw from your talent. You can draw from your personal experience. You can be extra clever.

But that doesn't change the fact that you've not stopped, paused, and asked what is the sacred content, the ineffable, the essential, that we can drive through here. Your cleverness, notwithstanding.

Can you tell a story about helping a team. What's the process? How do you guys work? What I've heard is what I, what's interesting to me is you're collecting teams with their origin story, which is not something that I've ever really thought about like that before. So tell me a little bit more about how you guys work.

As you would probably know is important given that you're doing similar type work, you got to meet people where they are like, I can't go streaming through the front door with my robes trailing behind me, my hair, all frizzed out. Come on, man.

So when we set up stakeholder interviews, a big part of this is tell me about your time with the brand. What do you love about this brand? What makes you crazy about this brand? We have to start out in the sort of mundane, as it were, and probably even rage into the profane, which is a great setup for getting to the sacred.

And usually that's what we'll do and say, All right. Now we built up some rapport. I have a really good picture of the chronology of the brand because everybody loves telling you about the chronology of the brand. And maybe there's an audit of all of its commercial activity going back 107 years.  

Okay. That's great. And now I'll say, all right, we're just going to do something a little bit differently now. And we can think about it as creative inspiration. I'm going to ask you three questions. And there's there is actually a wrong answer and the wrong answer is when you start thinking too hard about what you're saying, I'm going to be able to tell, and I'm going to ask you to back up and think less and feel more.

Is that an intervention that you'll do? That's how you are in an interview like that? You'll be like, I'm sorry, you were thinking too hard on that one.

Yeah.

That's fantastic.

We have to, we got to hold the line, man, got to hold the line. Otherwise everybody continues to fall back into the default. I want to say something that's smart. I want to say something that's not going to get me fired. I want to say something that, yeah. I'll ask him three questions. It's I want you to imagine that this brand has never existed. Tell me about what comes to mind and tell me about the universe as you are picturing it where this brand never existed.  

And oftentimes they will start telling you like, they're going to start playing back. Some historical element. And so I'll say, look, just as a reminder, I'm not interested in the history. I'm interested in the images that are flooding your mind. As you imagine the universe where this brand didn't exist.

First reflexive images that are bubbling up. And then, so what I'm looking for in those answers are images, actions, and descriptions, and that's the order of priority image action and description. So there we go. The universe before the brand existed. Now, tell me about the brand. That's like in some moment, the universe went from no brand to now here's this brand again, images, actions, descriptions in that order is what I'm looking for. And then finally, we look at the universe as a comprehensive holistic system, and now there is this new presence that has been injected into it.

Tell me about how you are observing the world shift. In response to this new present, how is it integrating or rejecting or whatever the case may be. How does the world adapt? And it's those three chapters that spell out these, what we would call core brand actions, that form the essence of the brand.

And was it before, universe before it existed, and then when it arrived? And what are the three?

Universe before the brand existed, now the brand exists, how has the universe responded? I don't even get. And based on those core brand actions, now we have psychographics that we can drop into the recruiting for understanding our design target.  

We also have these syndicate instructions that can be deployed across the full spectrum of brand engagement, ranging from awareness all the way through to advocacy. It provides an action based line of continuity that, I don't think you often see in most brand strategy structure. You'll see a bullet point list of like first moments of truth, a bullet point list of second moments of truth, whatever the case may be, and what we are trying to say is the brand experience is itself a story that we as human beings have the opportunity to activate within our own lives. And there should be a line of continuity in there. There is a core brand action that we will sense through all touch points.

And then other aspects of the brand from an action standpoint will come forward, will fall back. And all of that is baked into these instructions that live in the brand's origin or creation myth.

Can you tell a story of a client story about how this plays out? Do you have a, a friendly case study that you are able to share? You express all this work in the story of a brand.

Yeah. Without naming anybody we did a project about a year and a half ago that I think finally reached a very convincing point of success. Actually, you know what? Even better going, I think I can probably even share more specifics on this one because it was a while ago. There is a, our client from, I don't know, like five, six years ago called Money Lion. They're a financial tech company. At the time they were just I don't know, they were the startup, and they were at the very beginnings of trying to understand what are we and now they were at, they were not asking that question.

They were asking who do we serve and how do we make sure that what we're offering is going to be relevant? So we do the stakeholder interviews. We meet with the entire C suite and we were asking these questions asking even at that time, I think we were even asking more biographical questions of them.

What brought you into this, like something in your nature drew you into this brand. Can you tell me about what that might've been? And then we moved on to the questions that I mentioned to you before. And it was very cool. Like these are finance guys. These are like, hardcore, like financial dude.

And so this was like pretty novel territory for them. But they ended up getting into it and we had a very we, some of them even called back two or three times and be like, I want to something else. And because narrative, narrative is addictive, when you're really in it, it's you just want to, you just want to keep pulling on that thread.

But we did end up getting to some really concrete brand action, some core brand action. When we look at it that way, it's these are the things that you will do all the time. In everything. And so as we transitioned out of the stakeholder interviews, we got into the qualitative research where, as I said, like we injected the psychographics from those stakeholder interviews into the screener and we're going out and we are talking to people who are looking at.  

In addition to their they're open to working with a financial app or all this category stuff. In addition to that, these are people who self identify a desire to liberate and be liberated. These were people who self identified as instigating or being instigated, right? Like jump starting.  

Also people who were guarding and being guarded and these were just these prevailing action themes in their lives. And so you start to see, what is this configuration? You've got people jumpstarting chain, you've got people who are breaking free and people who are about guarding and safety and providing and all that business, right?

And so the cool part is we go into their lives and we're, we are actively looking for how those four brand actions are coming to life already. How did those actions show up in their lives? And again, it's through images, it's through actions, and it's through description. And in the qualitative research, we discover all these insights, but I think some of the ones that were most stallion were the one that showed the relationship between these core brand actions, brought it all to a head to say the way that I take care of myself and my people often means that I need to break the status quo.

It often means that I'm going to have to be the one who's turning over tables in the temple. And that whole energy transferred into the brand identity that the agency, We Believers fantastic agency, by the way, in New York We Believers took a lot of that material and codified it into the brand book.

And so much of what in the brand today is it's now publicly traded company. It is lift and drop from those first couple phases of the work we did. Yes. Did we produce a comms platform and provide recommendations on what those services should be? Yes. But honestly, Peter, that stuff is a cakewalk compared to some of that chewier upfront stuff.

How beautiful. I want to with the time we have left, I want to talk about archetypes. I know I've signed up for the thing in New York. Thank you. I'm so excited. What's the role of archetypes in the work that you do?

We've almost stopped using the word archetype because of what you just said. I'm not interested in having this whole linguistic conversation about what is archetype, what does it mean, all this. The reality is most people who are talking about it haven't studied it. So let's not have that conversation.

The conversation I am interested in having is the one that looks at the hypocrisy of brands who are willing to concede that they are all wrapped up in human nature. Nobody's going to argue if human nature isn't part of the way that you run a brand. No, one's going to fight you on that. And yet where is the line between human nature and nature, really? Are we just going to say that, Oh, like we're going to use this human nature line of discernment to separate brands from actual nature?

Man, that's BS. And so what we try to do, we've backed out of the whole no disrespect to Carol Pearson, by the way, love Carol Pearson for people who are skeptical about archetypes. As you've learned about them through Carol's work, go deeper into Carol's work, because she she has made it very comfortable to linger in the lobby, as it were, but get a room, go deeper into the work.  

She does follow it all the way through into its Jungian roots. I think we've gone into the, essentially, to borrow an archetypal reference, the belly of the whale. Where we are basically looking at these universal laws of nature and saying, how do they show up in human life? And then how did they show up consequently in brand life?

And so that's it. We are looking at these nine, you could call them forces of nature. These nine different forces of nature. How are they shaping human life? How are they shaping brand decision making? And the, and what I was saying before is. If you work with those forces of nature, those archetypes as they were, if you work with those in a conscious way, in a deliberate, intentional way, then you have a chance at experiencing something generative, creative, harmonious, and of course, if you're working at it from a, from an unconscious standpoint, It's quite likely that you are incurring pain in your own life, as well as your team's lives.

And God forbid, and this happens actually all the time you are scaling that oversight into the lives of millions of people. And this is where not to, as we run out of time, go all the way down the rabbit hole. But there is an ethic of brand decision making that I think a lot of people are not seeing, which is you are affecting people on psychological, social, cultural levels that you don't know about, that they don't know about, and it wouldn't take that much effort to stop and look at the essence of what you're doing and to activate it more intentionally.

What should I expect in New York with you Brand Behavior Workshop?

We are going to help you to embody these forces of nature in a social setting so that firstly you get these sensations in your body and we will then look for those sensations, externally as we go through the galleries at the Museum of Modern Art to say, Are there images, actions, and descriptions that are activating our bodies in a certain way?

And we're going to go out and photocapture all of that. We'll bring it all back. We will look at each other's images together. We will discuss them. And we will certainly have a moment where we realize, Oh my God, like there were two or three of these that I couldn't find. And that's really typical.

It doesn't mean that they're not in you. It just means that those rooms in your house are dark and we might need each other to help flip on the light. And now we're back to the Vygotsky again. We're always becoming ourselves through each other. It's beautiful.

But thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. I appreciate you sharing your time and this was a lot of fun. So thank you so much. It's so great to hear more about your work.

Peter, thank you so much. I appreciate you.