The Explorer brand archetype: meaning, examples and names

The Explorer is the brand that promises freedom. It is adventurous and independent, and it earns trust by going further, not by talking about how far it went. Patagonia, Jeep and The North Face all play it.

It is one of the 12 brand archetypes, the personalities a brand can have if it were a person.

What Explorer customers need

Freedom, discovery and a life that is not boring. An Explorer customer wants to get out: off the usual road, out of the office, past the edge of what they know. The product is how they get there, a jacket, a car, a ticket, a laptop that works from anywhere.

What they fear is the opposite: being stuck, fenced in, or living the same week on repeat. So an Explorer brand never crowds them. It opens a door and lets them walk through it on their own.

Brands that play the Explorer

• Patagonia grew out of a climbing hardware business, and it is named after a remote region at the southern tip of South America.
• Jeep puts a Trail Rated badge on models that pass off-road tests for traction, water fording, manoeuvrability, articulation and ground clearance.
• The North Face is named after the side of a mountain that is usually the coldest and hardest to climb in the northern hemisphere. Its motto is “Never Stop Exploring.”

None of them is the Explorer because of what they sell. An outdoor clothing company and a carmaker are very different businesses. They share a promise: you can go further.

Watch the Explorer in action

The North Face posted this 41-second film in July 2019, as part of its Walls Are Meant for Climbing campaign. The voice-over opens with “Since 1966, we have viewed walls not as obstacles, but as opportunities,” travels from the big walls of Yosemite to the high peaks of the Himalaya, and says its climbers were searching for “a personal kind of freedom.” Notice what the Explorer does here. The voice-over never mentions a product. It talks about the wall, and what you find on the way up.

When the Explorer fits, and when it doesn’t

When it fits: your brand is about freedom and discovery: travel, the outdoors, remote work, learning something new, finding your own way. If your customers ask “where can this take me?”, the Explorer is a natural fit.

When it fights the customer: a product people buy to feel settled and safe. An Explorer bank sounds like it might wander off with your savings. An Explorer childcare app makes parents nervous. And an Explorer that never leaves town, with adventure in its ads and nothing adventurous in its product, gets found out fast.

How the Explorer sounds

Bright, quick and open. The Explorer speaks in short sentences that keep moving. It doesn’t lecture or boast. It points at the horizon and goes.

The words it reaches for come from the world of the trail, not the shop: ridge, pass, switchback, cairn, basecamp, drift, north, range, scout, meridian, trailhead, horizon. Its images are the open road, the tent at first light, the edge of the map, the last petrol station for a hundred miles.

Its names tend to sound bright and quick: short vowels, light consonants, two syllables that move forward rather than settle. A name you could shout across a valley.

What the Explorer does to a name

An Explorer name suggests distance without promising a holiday.

• Kinds that suit it: geographical names (Patagonia is a region, The North Face is a side of a mountain), evocative names from the trail, and short invented names with a far-off sound. See the six kinds of startup names for each kind’s traps.
• The trap: the archetype’s own clichés. Explorer, Quest, Journey, Voyage, Odyssey, Venture, Nomad and Wander are on thousands of companies, and they tell people you like adventure rather than take them on one. Mountain-peak logos, too.
• A test: would someone say this name out loud at a trailhead, or on a station platform, without feeling silly? If it only works on a brochure, it isn’t the Explorer.

Good partners for the Explorer

Most brands play one personality strongly and borrow from one or two others. The Explorer pairs well with:

• The Hero, for brands about going further and coming back stronger: climbing, endurance sport, expeditions.
• The Sage, for travel guides, science and research: discovery that teaches you something.
• The Outlaw, for brands that leave the usual road on purpose and want customers who do the same.

An Explorer with a Caregiver can work (a travel insurer, a guided trip), but it needs care: the safety net has to feel like freedom, not a fence.

The Explorer in deepmarks

In the deepmarks brief, two answers point to the Explorer:

• “If your brand were a person, what would they be like?” Adventurous
• “What should your customers feel when they use your brand?” Free

deepmarks reads the rest of your brief too, then suggests three personalities, in order, and says why in your own words. If the Explorer isn’t among them and you want it, click Change next to the personality on your names, then Read & watch on The Explorer, and Use as Primary. The first personality colours most names; the second and third add range.

The names written as an Explorer are shown in Space Grotesk, a geometric sans with character, over a quiet picture of a road through the desert.

The Explorer in short

• Promise: you can go further.
• Customers need: freedom, discovery and a life that is not boring.
• Sounds: bright, quick, open.
• Avoid: Explorer, Quest, Journey, Nomad, and mountain peaks.
• Pairs with: the Hero, the Sage, the Outlaw.