Jungian typology and the sixteen types.

In 1921, after his break with Freud and the long period of introspection that produced the material in the Red Book, Carl Jung published Psychologische Typen. The English translation, Psychological Types, would not appear until 1923. The book is dense, often digressive, and contains within it almost everything that became the modern personality typology industry: introversion and extraversion as orientations, the four functions (thinking, feeling, sensing, intuition), and the idea that a person’s habitual combination of these is stable enough to be a kind of cognitive signature.

Jung never built the system out into a usable assessment. He treated the types as a heuristic, useful for clinical observation but not, in his hands, a tool for the laity. The work of formalizing it into something testable belonged to two women working independently of academic psychology.

Briggs and Myers.

Katharine Cook Briggs (1875–1968) read Psychological Types shortly after the English translation appeared. Briggs had been quietly developing her own typology of human character since around 1917, working from observation rather than research literature. When she encountered Jung’s book, she abandoned her own taxonomy and adopted his, which she found more rigorous and more general. She spent the next two decades teaching the framework to her daughter, Isabel.

Isabel Briggs Myers (1897–1980) inherited the project and made the consequential move: she added a fourth dimension (Judging–Perceiving) that Jung had implied but not formalized, and built a paper-and-pencil instrument that ordinary people could take. She began work in earnest during World War II, motivated by the conviction that misplacement in the wrong job was producing both unnecessary suffering and avoidable industrial waste. The first version of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator was published in 1944. The form most people know today (Form F, then G, then M) was finalized through the 1960s and 70s.

It is fashionable to say that the individual is unique. Each is the product of his or her own heredity and environment, and is therefore different from every other individual. From a practical standpoint, however, the assumption of unique individuality is not very fruitful.

Isabel Briggs Myers · Gifts Differing, 1980

The MBTI has been criticized, repeatedly and fairly, for the limits of its psychometric reliability. The four-dimension model produces sixteen types because it forces binary cuts on what are actually distributions, which means a person who scores 51% Thinking and 49% Feeling gets sorted into the same category as a person who scores 95/5. For psychological research, this matters. For brand strategy, where we are reading dispositions of an organization rather than diagnosing a person, the binary clarity is a feature, not a bug.

The four families.

Of the sixteen types, the most useful unit for brand strategy is the family of four formed by combining the perception function (Sensing or Intuition) with the judgment function (Thinking or Feeling). This produces NT, NF, ST, and SF: the four broad cognitive postures.

A brand’s cognitive family is one of the more durable things about it. The motivation can shift across decades; the temperament is harder to move; the family is harder still. This is why two brands in the same archetype can read so differently. Same Hero motivation, but Nike (ESTP, an ST brand) and Patagonia (INTJ, an NT brand) think nothing alike.