The language of the subconscious that we speak is the language embedded deep in human values, cultural memes, iconography, or archetypes. Archetypes surround us, but are most often not consciously noticed. Examples of archetypes are love from the heart (in just about any story told), redemption through love (Beauty and the Beast), legitimization through ritual (Lion King), fulfillment through accepting challenge (Good Will Hunting), the sacrifice of parents for children (It’s a Beautiful Life), and invoking sub-personalities to meet insurmountable challenges (Fight Club).
Archetypes are civilization’s attempts to encode the values that make civilization, and they often reach all the way back to our earliest writings. Early religious writings can be thought of as the ultimate collection of archetypes. Even today, the most successful books and movies are the ones that draw heavily on the ancient archetypes. Often movie-goers will rave about a movie because the story and the images really resonated with them, without realizing that the real resonance is with the archetypes deep within them.
While there are major archetypes such as love from the heart, there are many millions of smaller archetypes. All archetypes are embedded deeply in our collective subconscious.
While there’s no hard rule that all your marketing content has to derive from large archetypes, it always helps to draw on what you can. Virtually all human activity parallels at least one archetype.
So I will take this challenge from you. Leave a human activity in the comments, and I will reply with an archetype.
