Personal Brand Archetypes

Brand archetype

The Rebel

The Rebel is the harbinger of social change. They appreciate unconventionality and challenge the status quo. By promoting alternative lifestyles, they create cult-like followings and shake up the industry.

  • Disruptive
  • Liberator
  • Confrontational
  • Independent
  • Change
Promise
Unapologetic change
Goal
to shake things up
Strategy
to innovate with out of the box thinking
Weakness
Rebels can be perceived as argumentative, confrontational, or overly-dramatic. This has to be played very carefully in your messaging. You need to keep your finger on the audience’s pulse at all times and be ready to tone down the rebel attitude as soon as you see a conflict with the audience.

How the Rebel sounds

Tone of voice is the most immediately useful part of an archetype, because you apply it every time you write anything at all. For the Rebel, the register to aim for is:

  • candid
  • straight-shooting
  • bold
  • polarizing
  • controversial
  • anti-mainstream
  • defiant
  • unapologetic
  • dominant

Write a post, then read it back against that list. If it does not sound like those words it will not sound like you either — and that gap is exactly the friction that makes publishing feel like work.

What the Rebel fears

Every archetype is defined as much by what it avoids as by what it wants. These are the things this one instinctively moves away from:

  • Conformity
  • Rules
  • Repetition
  • Rigidity
  • Status Quo

The blind spot: Rebels can be perceived as argumentative, confrontational, or overly-dramatic. This has to be played very carefully in your messaging. You need to keep your finger on the audience’s pulse at all times and be ready to tone down the rebel attitude as soon as you see a conflict with the audience. Naming it is what stops it running the show — an archetype used well leans on its strengths and plans around this one.

Colour direction

The Rebel palette leans towards black, dark reds, and dark oranges.

#FFFFFF
#B6B3B8
#85848B
#000000
#433540
#99222B

Type direction

Typefaces for the Rebel should feel shock factor with bold and non-conventional fonts.

The Rebel characters you already know

Recognisable examples of the pattern, described rather than pictured — these are other people's characters.

Tom Cruise as Maverick in Top Gun

Russell Crowe as Robin Hood

Antonio Banderas as Zorro

Reece Witherspoon as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde

A different kind of Rebel, but one who goes against the norms and is true to her character.

Merida in Disney's Brave

Is the Rebel actually you?

Reading an archetype and recognising yourself in it are different things. The test scores you against all twelve and shows you the whole spread, not just the winner.

Discover Your Archetype

The other eleven