Different Drop is a fast-growing online business made up of a team of wine geeks with a slight obsession for artisanally made Australian wines and spirits. They wanted to move their e-commerce store to Shopify Plus, a platform that would make it easier for their audience to discover and buy Australia’s best artisanal beverages.

We used a combination of tools to craft the Different Drop brand story. One of which is storytelling archetypes.

Archetypes are universal patterns found in all stories. They come to life in 12 characters – from the innocent to the lover, from the revolutionary to the jester. The beauty about storytelling archetypes is their ability to cross culture, continents, markets and brands.

We asked the Different Drop team to share what they thought their brand storytelling archetypes were. We received similar responses – hero, revolutionary, sage. They completely overlooked the one that we felt was core to their brand.

The lover.

The lover seemed foreign to blokes who filled boxes of wine every day. Yet everything about their brand spoke of love. A love of artisanal wine, local winemaking and the sensory pleasure of wine. A love for the wine geekiness in each team member.

The Different Drop team was not just filling boxes, they were sharing their love of artisanal wine.

We started where we always start – on purpose – to define a brand’s reason for being.

We also spent a lot of time understanding the hard-of-hearing target market. Later evolving the audience to become 3 distinct personas – diagnosed, undiagnosed and the colleagues, friends and family of people with hearing loss. From here we began the brand name exploration.

We used our Naming Tool to come up with hundreds of brand name options and tag lines. The key was to be as broad as possible with names that covered the full spectrum of descriptive to abstract names.

We came up with lots of good names but HearSpace made the final cut. It was easy to recall and conveyed a sense of place for people with hearing loss. Sound Advice for Life was the chosen tag line, which summarised the brand’s rational and emotional benefits in one statement.

The team acknowledged their higher purpose and accepted that the lover archetype was core to their brand (sealed with a glass of artisanal red!)

From here, we were able to develop a new brand identity and guidelines that talked to the love and passion that underpins this brand. A story that translated well into their online store.

Different Drop had the opportunity to move straight into a new platform. But they made the bold step to step up their branding by connecting to their story. That story has strengthened their brand experience across all touchpoints including a more engaging e-commerce platform.

If you want to connect to your brand story using storytelling archetypes, reach out.

You never know what you’ll discover about your brand.