The Lover brand archetype: meaning, examples and names

The Lover is the brand that makes people feel desired. It is passionate and sensual, and it sells pleasure, beauty and closeness rather than features. Chanel, Godiva and Victoria’s Secret all play it.

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

What Lover customers need

To feel desired, special and close to others. A Lover customer is buying something for the senses, or for someone they love: a scent, a box of chocolates, a dress, a dinner, a weekend away. They want the moment to feel like more than a purchase.

What they fear is the ordinary: feeling plain, being one of many, going unnoticed. So a Lover brand never sells on price or specs. It sells on how the thing feels, and how you’ll feel with it.

Brands that play the Lover

• Chanel has sold N°5, its first perfume, since 1921. A scent can’t be shown on a screen, so Chanel sells the feeling of wearing it.
• Godiva began in Brussels in 1926 and takes its name from Lady Godiva. It sells chocolate as an indulgence and a gift, not as a snack.
• Victoria’s Secret sells lingerie on how it makes the wearer feel. From 2001 to 2018 its fashion show was a television event.

None of them is the Lover because of what they sell. A perfume house, a chocolatier and a lingerie brand make very different things. They share a promise: you will feel desired.

Watch the Lover in action

Baz Luhrmann directed this short film for Chanel in 2004. Nicole Kidman plays a famous star who runs from the photographers in a pink feathered gown and climbs into a taxi with the one man who doesn’t recognise her, played by Rodrigo Santoro. They fall for each other, she goes back to the red carpet, and the last shot is a diamond N°5 pendant hanging down her bare back. Notice what the Lover does here. It never describes the perfume. It tells a love story and lets you want to be in it.

When the Lover fits, and when it doesn’t

When it fits: your brand is about beauty, pleasure and feeling special: fashion, fragrance, fine food, jewellery, hotels, gifts, anything people buy to treat themselves or someone they love. If your customers ask “how will this make me feel?”, the Lover is a natural fit.

When it fights the customer: a product people buy to get a job done. A Lover accounting tool sounds like it’s flirting with your bookkeeper. A Lover in medicine, insurance or child care feels out of place, because the customer wants calm, not seduction. And a category where every brand already whispers (perfume, much of luxury) makes one more whisper hard to hear.

How the Lover sounds

Warm and slow. The Lover speaks to one person, not a crowd. It prefers a word you can feel to an abstract one: it would rather say velvet than “premium quality”.

The words it reaches for come from the world of the senses: velvet, silk, ember, honey, amber, bloom, blush, dusk, pulse, linen, candlelight. Its images are the candlelit table, the open window on a summer night, the dressing room, the handwritten note.

Its names do best when they can be said slowly. A good rule: favour soft sounds (l, m, v, s and open vowels) and avoid clipped, hard endings. A Lover name should feel good in the mouth.

What the Lover does to a name

A Lover name makes you want something before you know what it is.

• Kinds that suit it: evocative names built on texture, scent or warmth, invented names with a soft, Romance-language sound, and lexical names that play on a sensual word. Chanel and Godiva are both women’s names, which makes a brand feel personal. See the six kinds of startup names for each kind’s traps.
• The trap: the archetype’s own clichés. Love, Passion, Desire, Amour, Romance, Kiss and Cupid are on thousands of companies, and they announce a feeling instead of creating one. Heart and rose logos, too.
• A test: say the name softly, as if across a dinner table. If it sounds like a slogan or a spec sheet, it isn’t the Lover.

Good partners for the Lover

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

• The Ruler, for luxury: beauty with status and a sense of the best.
• The Creator, for craft: fashion, perfume, chocolate and design, where the pleasure is in how something is made.
• The Caregiver, for self-care: skin care, wellness and spas, where pleasure and looking after yourself meet.

A Lover with a Jester can work (a cheeky, flirty brand), but it needs care: the joke must not break the mood.

The Lover in deepmarks

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

• “If your brand were a person, what would they be like?” Passionate
• “What should your customers feel when they use your brand?” Adored, and Understood counts for half (the other half goes to the Sage).

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

The names written as a Lover are shown in Playfair Display, a high-contrast serif with the feel of a perfume label, over a warm picture of two hands.

The Lover in short

• Promise: you will feel desired.
• Customers need: to feel desired, special and close to others.
• Sounds: warm, slow, close.
• Avoid: Love, Passion, Desire, Amour, and hearts.
• Pairs with: the Ruler, the Creator, the Caregiver.