Worldviews: Key to Understanding the Difference Between Brand Persona and Brand Personality

Paraphrasing George Burns’ famous witticism about sincerity, authenticity is everything in marketing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. My good friend Joe Pine and his partner Jim Gilmore, authors of The Experience Economy recently came out with a new book on the growing importance of authenticity in business entitled simply Authenticity.

From the earliest snake oil salesmen, authenticity has been a high priority in marketing and sales. But two recent events are making that disposition dangerous to the health of a company and its brands. The Internet is of course one of those events. The second emerged about the same time the Internet entered mainstream culture. It was the seismic demographic shift that turned people 40 and older into the adult majority.

Today, adults in the second half of life outnumber younger adults by 140 million to 91 million – and the gap is still widening. This has produced profound changes in the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times. It now reflects the more seasoned worldviews and values typical of people in the second half of life.

The annals of adult development psychology are richly laden with clues for understanding the mind of the market today. However, because few people in marketing and sales have any grounding in developmental changes that take place in the second half of life, consumer behavior is less well understood today than it was before the emergence of the New Adult Majority.

A person’s perceptions, thoughts and decisions are processed through the lens of his or her worldview. Famed science writer Danah Zohar defines worldview as

A theme which integrates the sense of self, the sense of self and others, and the sense of how these relate to the wider world – to Nature and other creatures, to the environment as a whole, to the planet, the universe, and ultimately to God – to some overall purpose and direction. A successful worldview must, in the end, draw all these levels – the person, the social, and the spiritual – into one coherent whole.  If it does so, the individual has access to some sense of who he is, why he is here, how he relates to others, and how it is valuable to behave.

No one would argue that dramatic changes in worldview take place as a person moves from childhood into adolescence and from there into adulthood. Less well grasped are the equally dramatic changes that take place as a person moves into and through the second half of life. Mostly, as actors in our own stories, we mostly see these changes only in retrospect, often years after they have altered our course in life.

Carl Jung chose the term persona to represent the image we want to represent our personality in the outside world. Persona is Latin for mask. Following childhood in the first half of life, we devote considerable attention to conforming our mask to what we believe will gain us the most fortuitous outcomes in our relations with our peers and others. Knowledge of this has been the mainstay of marketing ever since N. W. Ayer & Son opened as the U.S.’s first advertising agency in Philadelphia in 1859.

Since then, marketing has dominated by an ethos steeped in the narcissistic, materialistic values of the youthful self. Sex has been the armature around which the threads of most marketing messages have been wound – including much children’s advertising as demonstrated by Barbie since 1959.  

Much of traditional advertising approaches are out of sync with the worldviews that are dominant in today’s middle age and older person dominated consumer population. But not a lot of evidence exists indicating much awareness of this crucial fact.

In Jungian theory, the onset of midlife is accompanied by internal forces that incline a person toward a more introspective, individuated and more autonomous self. People begin examining their lives less in terms of “Me” and more in terms of “We.” Questions arise about one’s life purpose and the meaning of life itself. Men tend to peel back layers of the persona to get more in touch with the feminine aspects of their personality. Women do the same thing, revealing the inner masculine of their real personality.

Uncovering the real personality is the main developmental task in the second half of life. Accomplishing this task, which Jung referred to as self-realization, requires dissolving the persona, no easy task. And marketers aren’t helping these days.

Marketing messages to the middle age and older population remain saturated with narcissistic and materialistic values. In larger part this is because most marketing messages are created by people who are not far enough along in their own personal development to understand the difference between persona and personality. However, understanding this difference is crucial in a marketplace dominated by a very different worldview than marketers were accustomed to before the emergence of the New Adult Majority.

NEXT: Dissolving a brand’s persona to reveal an authentic essence.