Compare archetypes · 04 of 12
Explorer vs. Outlaw.
Both refuse the beaten path. Both attract customers who think of themselves as independent. The Explorer goes outside the system to find something new. The Outlaw goes outside the system to overturn it.
Order quadrant · Explore Spirituality
The Explorer.
To find out who you are through what is beyond.
- The North Face
- Jeep
- REI
Ego quadrant · Leave a Legacy
The Outlaw.
To break what isn’t working.
- Harley-Davidson
- Virgin
- Diesel
Side by side, dimension by dimension.
| Dimension | ExplorerOrder · Explore Spirituality | OutlawEgo · Leave a Legacy |
|---|---|---|
| Core desire | To find out who you are through what is beyond. | To break what isn’t working. |
| Mind (typical) | NP or STP. Open, observant, comfortable with the unfamiliar. | NTP or STP. Skeptical, contrarian, allergic to consensus. |
| Temperament | Sanguine or Phlegmatic. Curious, self-contained, calm under uncertainty. | Choleric. Combative, fast, direct. |
| Persuasion | Pathos via possibility. The world is wider than the customer remembers. | Pathos via refusal. The thing the customer is told to do is the thing not to do. |
| Shadow form | Aimlessness. Restlessness for its own sake. Refusal to commit. | Nihilism. Cruelty. Becoming the thing it once opposed. |
| Brand risk | Vague. The brand never names what it is for, only what it is against (the indoors). | Self-parody. The brand becomes a uniform; the rebellion becomes a marketing position. |
| Best when | The product enables a real journey or shifts the customer’s sense of what is possible. | The product makes a substantive critique of the category and offers a better alternative. |
| Often confused with | The Outlaw. Both reject the mainstream. | The Explorer. Both attract customers who want to be seen as independent. |
| Famous example | REI: #OptOutside, 2015. | Apple: 1984, 1984. Diesel: Be Stupid, 2010. |
Where they’re alike
Both stand outside the system.
Explorer and Outlaw both build customer bases out of people who don’t want to be told what to want. Both are attractive to the kind of buyer who is, or believes themselves to be, the first to do something. Both can claim authenticity in a way that mainstream brands cannot. Both produce iconic visual languages that resist imitation.
Where they diverge
The Explorer is leaving. The Outlaw is fighting.
The Explorer’s relationship to the mainstream is indifference: it has somewhere else to be. The Outlaw’s relationship to the mainstream is opposition: it cannot exist without the thing it opposes. The Explorer’s product is a path forward. The Outlaw’s product is a stake driven into the ground.
A note on diagnosis
If your brand is reading as both, ask what it would do if the mainstream agreed with it.
An Explorer brand keeps moving when the mainstream catches up; the journey was never about the mainstream. An Outlaw brand has a problem when the mainstream catches up; the opposition was the position. Which scenario is more uncomfortable for your company tells you which archetype you actually are.