Soul quadrant · Pursue Connection
The Lover.
Help people feel wanted and at ease, and draw them closer to one another.
- Chanel
- Godiva
- Tiffany & Co.
Soul quadrant · Pursue Connection
The Jester.
Help people have a good time, staying loose enough to be spontaneous.
- Old Spice
- M&M’s
- Skittles
Side by side, dimension by dimension.
| Dimension | LoverSoul · Pursue Connection | JesterSoul · Pursue Connection |
|---|---|---|
| Drive | Love, indulgence, pleasure, intimacy, desire. | Delight, cheer, fun, assurance, togetherness. |
| Fear | Rejection, solitude, loneliness, oblivion, scorn. | Boredom, gloom, sadness, loneliness, dullness. |
| Strategy | Help people feel wanted and at ease, and draw them closer to one another. | Help people have a good time, staying loose enough to be spontaneous. |
| Counterweight | Usually Creator, Sage, or Jester. The secondary sets whether desire reads as craft, depth, or delight. | Usually Sage, Everyman, or Outlaw. The secondary gives the joke a point. |
| Shadow form | Neediness, objectification, performative seduction. | Cruelty, avoidance, unseriousness about things that matter. |
| Brand risk | Too seductive. The brand starts to feel like manipulation. | Too shallow. Nothing the brand says can be taken seriously. |
| Best when | The product creates emotional closeness, sensory pleasure, or ritualized intimacy. | The product relieves tension, invites play, or reframes a serious thing lightly. |
| Often confused with | The Jester. Both promise the customer a feeling rather than a function. | The Lover. Both can be carried entirely on tone of voice. |
| Famous example | Chanel No. 5: The Film by Baz Luhrmann, 2004. | Old Spice: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, 2010. |
Where they’re alike
Both are pleasure brands.
Both Lover and Jester live in the Soul quadrant. Both promise the customer a feeling rather than a function, and both can carry a brand entirely on tone. Both will be described in a customer interview using the word “fun” or “wonderful,” and both can carry a brand on tone of voice alone. This overlap is real, and it is the reason the two get confused in the first place.
Where they diverge
The Lover wants another. The Jester wants any.
The Lover’s promise is intimate, monogamous, slow. The Jester’s promise is spontaneous, communal, immediate. A Lover brand creates the conditions for one person to feel known. A Jester brand creates the conditions for any person to feel free. The Lover holds eye contact. The Jester breaks it on purpose.
A note on diagnosis
If your brand is reading as both, ask the customers what they came back for.
Do they come back to feel known, or to feel free? A brand can’t quite be both, even if both feelings show up in the same review. Pick the one your operations actually deliver, build everything around it, and the other becomes a side effect rather than a competing claim.
Read in full
The Lover.
Three case studies, three commercials, the diagnostic signals.
Read in full
The Jester.
Three case studies, three commercials, the diagnostic signals.
The instrument
The Brand Diagnostic.
Read your own brand and see whether the archetype is coming through Expressed, Suppressed, or Distorted.