A client sent me a deck last week with a wheel on slide eleven. Twelve wedges, twelve labels, one of them circled in red. They had landed on Sage, with Explorer as a secondary, and the next forty slides were built on that decision.
I asked what changes tomorrow if they are a Sage instead of a Creator. Nobody had an answer. The room got quiet in the specific way rooms get quiet when everyone privately agrees and nobody wants to go first.
I have sat on the other side of that table. I have presented that wheel.
Archetypes feel like strategy because they produce a confident answer to a hard question, and like astrology, the answer is broad enough to fit whatever you were already doing.
Three problems.
One. They are unfalsifiable. Name a brand that could not plausibly be called a Hero. Nike, obviously. But so is every B2B software company that says it empowers teams. A positioning that fits everyone positions you against nobody.
Two. They describe posture instead of behavior. Sage tells you to sound wise. It does not tell you whether to publish your supply chain, refuse a retail partner, price above the category, or answer support tickets in under an hour. Patagonia is not interesting because it picked a wedge on a wheel. It is interesting because it ran an ad telling people not to buy the jacket, then kept making expensive decisions in that direction for years.
Three. They let you skip the hard conversation. The wheel is comforting because it is a decision you can make in a conference room in ninety minutes without talking to a customer or arguing with your CFO about margin. Real positioning requires giving something up. The wheel never asks you to give anything up.
A positioning that fits everyone positions you against nobody.
What I ask instead is boring, and it works. What do you do that a reasonable competitor would refuse to do? What would a loyal customer say about you to a skeptical friend, in their own words, without adjectives? What is the thing you would keep doing even if it never appeared in a campaign?
Answer those and you get Oatly putting an argument about oat milk on the side of the carton. You get Trader Joe's refusing to run a loyalty program while every grocer in the country runs one. Answer the wheel and you get a mood board and a font.
Jung was not wrong about stories. He was just never trying to help you decide what your company does on a Tuesday.
Truffles is a Ruler and Barnaby is a Jester. I workshopped it at length, to an audience of two cats who did not look up. Neither has changed a single behavior since, which is the most honest research finding I have had all quarter.