The friendly neighbour with no sense of humour

Nearly half of the field is Everyman or Caregiver

Brand archetypes are one of the most widely used tools in brand strategy: twelve basic stories that a brand can build its identity on. In theory, twelve equally valid choices. In practice, Danish business picks two of them.

In our analyses, 47 percent of the brands are either The Everyman (the down-to-earth, approachable one) or The Caregiver (the caring one). Next come The Creator, The Sage and The Ruler. And at the bottom of the list it gets lonely: The Jester (the joker), The Magician (the transformer), The Lover, The Innocent and The Outlaw (the rebel) are found together at about one brand in ten (37 of 351).

The pattern follows the industries to a large extent: fashion, design and lifestyle brands gather around The Creator (the creative one), retailers around The Everyman (the down-to-earth one), and finance and the public sector around The Caregiver (the caring one). Each industry has, in other words, its own herd story.

Humour is almost extinct

The tone confirms the picture. We measure brand language on five scales, including serious-humorous and respectful-cheeky. The field's average speaks plainly: on the humour scale from 1 to 5, Danish business sits at 1.9, and on the cheekiness scale at 1.7. On the other hand, the language is slightly informal and simple.

Consumer brands are measurably looser and funnier in tone than brands that sell to businesses: they sit at 2.1 on the humour scale against 1.6 for B2B brands, and at 3.3 against 2.5 on the informality scale. But even the consumer brands sit well below the middle of the scale. Humour is thus not a B2C privilege that someone has taken: the space is empty in both camps. And the archetypes follow the same split: B2B brands gather around the knowledgeable and the caring, consumer brands around the down-to-earth and the creative. Of the fourteen jesters in the field, ten sell only to consumers and three to both groups (for one, the customer segment is not determined); none is classified as a purely B2B brand.

Danish brands thus speak kindly, properly, simply, and strikingly alike. There is nothing wrong with that tone. The problem arises when everyone in a category has it, because then customers cannot hear the difference.

The herd is safe, but expensive

Archetypes and tone are not decoration: they are the story and the voice that customers meet in everything the brand says. When nearly half of the field chooses the same story, and almost everyone chooses the same tone, the categories become choirs. It is safe to sing along, but it costs recognition. And recognition is what a brand lives on.

The few brands that stand somewhere else (the rebel, the jester, the transformer) have a paradoxical head start: the space is vacant. Not because the unusual archetypes are better, but because differentiation requires that you do not stand where everyone else stands. This also applies to tone: a touch of humour or edge is today one of the cheapest ways of standing out in Danish brand language.