There’s a good chance you’ve looked at the brands getting all the attention right now and thought, Maybe that’s what I’m missing.

Maybe you’ve told yourself you need to be bolder. More opinionated. More willing to say the thing everyone’s thinking but nobody’s saying out loud. Or maybe, it’s turned you off to marketing so hard that you’ve run full speed in the other direction, saying, “On second thought, maybe I just need to be quieter. Softer. Less pushy. Less visible.”

And if marketing has felt like you’re either forcing yourself into a personality that doesn’t fit or disappearing into a version of “quiet” that keeps you safely out of the line of fire—it makes sense that you’d start to believe one of those identities must be the answer.

Nobody told you there’s a third option. 

The myth is that there are only two options—be loud, or be quiet—and your job is to pick the one that makes you the least miserable. But there are eleven other brand archetypes besides the Outlaw, with two of the twelve being your dominant archetype blend. And it’s how they blend that produces your unmistakable dominant voice.

When you stop trying to fit yourself into one of these boxes, the comparison-itis loses its grip. You stop measuring yourself against every other brand on the internet. You stop asking whether you need to become more provocative or more palatable. You start sounding exactly like what your ideal client needs. You. 

In this post, I’m going to show you why this myth has gotten so deep into your head, what it’s been costing you while it’s lived there, what’s true instead, and what changes when you stop building your brand around someone else’s personality.

Ready? Let’s get into it.

Why You’re Not Wrong For Believing The Myth in the First Place

The Outlaw brand is having one of its cyclical moments. And right now, it seems to be everywhere because brands that adopt that persona—whether it’s truly theirs or not—tend to be loud, opinionated, and willing to say the quiet part out loud, and that gets attention. 

In an environment where everyone is talking about the attention economy, shorter attention spans, and the need to “stop the scroll,” it’s easy to assume that the loudest person in the room must also be the most effective. 

You’re not wrong. They absolutely do. But you’re drawing an incomplete conclusion from the data, and the industry isn’t in a rush to correct it because the incomplete conclusion is good for business. Courses on how to develop your brand voice. Frameworks for finding your edge. Coaches who will help you be more provocative, more polarizing, more of a presence. More cosplaying as someone else.

And if that style doesn’t feel natural to you, the industry is happy to hand you a second identity to try on: quiet marketing.

Which sounds like relief at first.

Less pressure. Less posturing. Less aggressive selling. But that movement comes with its own set of rules. Low-key. Not pushy. Soft. Subtle. Email-only vibes. And depending on your relationship with visibility, money, and sales, that can become less of a solution and more of a permission slip to stay small.

 And now you’re stuck between two false binary choices: Be the rebel, or be the whisper. Both of them feel wrong, but you can’t articulate why, and since you can’t articulate it, you assume the problem is you.

Standing out is not about picking the right performance. It’s about getting specific enough about who you are to be recognizable in the crowd. 

The True Cost of the Contrarian Trap

The thing about wearing someone else’s archetype is that it doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. It sets another false binary trap.

If all the attention seems to be going to the boldest, most provocative voices, it starts to feel like you either participate in that performance or you accept that marketing is always going to feel hard for you. 

When you try to wear an Outlaw identity that isn’t actually rooted in who you are, what ends up happening is your contrarian hot takes come out as frustration rather than conviction. It sounds like a performed kind of edge, like you’re trying to force yourself into a voice you hope will finally get attention. And when that doesn’t work, you internalize the failure. You’re probably not thinking, Maybe this was never my voice to begin with. You’re thinking, I’m just bad at marketing. That confusion grows, and so does the imposter syndrome. And the urge to keep tweaking, which leads to comparing yourself to other people while you search for the missing piece that has been staring you in the face the entire time. 

The internalized failure compounds, making the performance more strained, and producing worse results. This leads you to start chasing tactics, or a different platform, or a better content strategy, or another course that promises to be the thing that finally makes it click. When all that fails, eventually, a second or third rebrand.

I’ve had some version of this conversation more times than I can count. Smart women who are genuinely great at what they do, but their marketing doesn’t reflect the quality of their work, and they can’t understand why, despite trying to figure it out for years. And the reason it never seems to resolve itself is that they’re treating a foundation problem with a surface solution. It’s like repainting the walls instead of remediating the mold underneath.

At first, it looks like a visibility strategy. Over time, it becomes brand masking. The danger of performing as an Outlaw brand,  when that energy isn’t native to you, is that eventually you stop being able to tell the difference between your real voice and the version you’ve been using to get through the room. And the longer that goes on, the more exhausting marketing becomes. 

That exhaustion is data telling you that you’ve been building from the wrong place.

Mixing Red and Blue Doesn’t Make Orange

The concept of brand archetypes isn’t new, and almost every brand strategist worth their salt uses them. There are 12 archetypes, which means everyone is a blend of all twelve, but you have two that are your most dominant. That blend is what makes your brand stand out. One of those archetypes might absolutely be Outlaw. But the second dominant archetype mixed in determines how someone actually thinks, speaks, and writes. 

My own blend is Sage/Creator/Outlaw, and that combination is exactly why “just be an Outlaw” is such incomplete advice. Sage is my dominant archetype, so I naturally lead with insight, education, and perspective grounded in experience. Creator is what pushes me out of the obvious and helps me see patterns, connections, and possibilities other people miss. Outlaw is absolutely there, and yes, it’s loud — but because it’s shaped by Sage, the disruption is intentional. It’s not shock and awe. It’s truth-telling with purpose. Less “look at me,” more “look at this.” 

That specific blend is why this voice doesn’t sound like any other brand strategist you’ve encountered. Not because I’m louder or more provocative or more willing to ruffle feathers. Because I’m more specific. And specificity is what cuts through when everyone else is optimizing for noise.

A Sage/Outlaw is going to sound completely different than an Explorer/Outlaw (adventure without a map) or a Lover/Outlaw (rebel with a cause). They share an archetype and inhabit entirely different communication styles. They’re not Lego bricks. They’re not interchangeable.

The question that actually matters isn’t Am I an Outlaw? It’s What is my blend, and what does that specific combination sound like when it isn’t pretending to be someone I created to make everyone else comfortable?

The signals are already there. You just have to stop talking long enough to hear them. It’s in the opinions you pre-edit out before they hit the page. It’s in the three times you almost said what you really think and didn’t. It’s in the instincts you keep overriding because they don’t look enough like what’s getting attention. What you need to do now is give that voice permission.

Brian Built a Brand on the Wrong Archetype. 

If you build from the wrong archetype, no matter how much you polish it, the brand will keep fighting you. That’s exactly what happened when I helped my client, Brian, with his rebrand. Before rebranding to Flying Leap Studio, Brian had taken an archetype quiz and, based on a limited set of multiple-choice answers, was told his brand was a Lover archetype. And this is exactly where these quizzes can go sideways: Brian could recognize some traits of the Lover archetype in himself, because the result can feel familiar and feel off at the same time. 

This happens when the answer isn’t obvious, or you give an answer based on an aspirational version of how you want to be seen.

The problem isn’t the quiz itself. It’s what happens next. You take that incorrect result and start building a brand around it. Something still doesn’t click, but you’re not sure why. That’s what happened here. The content can sound good, and you can see bits and pieces of your brand personality, but there’s always a voice in the back of your head telling you something isn’t right. 

When I created the archetype quiz I use as part of the work I do in the DIBS Method, I was able to find Flying Leap’s real archetype blend: Outlaw/Magician, and this wasn’t just because I asked more questions. I asked questions that dug deeper into Brian’s mindset and psychology around how he wants potential clients to see his brand. It gave Flying Leap a brand identity that Brian could recognize immediately without hesitation.

“But What If There’s Nothing Special Underneath?”

That’s a legit fear.

One that doesn’t get asked out loud,  but lives under the surface of almost every conversation I have with a new client.

What if I do all this work, and what’s under there is just… ordinary? What if I excavate and find the same thing everyone else has?

The surface will always produce generic wrapping on the outside. Not because you’re generic. Because the surface is. 

The specificity that makes a brand unmistakable doesn’t live on the surface. It never did. It lives in the layer beneath your vulnerability. Under the safe zone, where putting yourself out there doesn’t cut as deep, if you’re wrong. And that layer doesn’t appear in a fillable PDF. It reveals itself when someone asks for the answer to it. That’s what Discovery does. It doesn’t find something new. It uncovers what was always there but never had permission to surface.

That’s also why when two people build from the surface, they end up sounding the same. But when you dig deep, the paydirt you find can’t be replicated. Because no one else has your specific combination of archetypes, instincts, values, voice, and lived experience.

That combination is what makes your voice impossible to replicate. Not an archetype. The whole specific person underneath it.

The answer to what if there’s nothing special there is simple: there is. 

You just haven’t dug far enough yet.

And yes, this is the part of the work that people side-eye because the ROI doesn’t come with a Stripe notification. Foundation work doesn’t hand you a neat little “I made X dollars from this one tweak” screenshot. But it does pay you back. It pays you back when you stop burning time creating content that was never going to bring in paying clients in the first place. It pays you back when you stop attracting wrong-fit clients who drain your energy, question your process, and make the work harder than it needs to be. It pays off when trust builds faster and more deeply because your message finally resonates with the people it’s meant for, which means the sales cycle gets shorter and the right people need less convincing. It pays you back when you stop throwing money at new courses, new templates, and new strategies, trying to fix a problem that was never tactical to begin with.

And, depending on your offer, the return doesn’t need to be dramatic to recoup your investment. Depending on your offer, it might take one client or maybe two. That’s it.

Foundation work isn’t a magic trick, but once the message is right, everything built on top of it stops fighting you.

What Changes When You Stop Performing

Once your real voice comes to the surface, you’ll know when someone asks what you do and the answer just comes.

You stop stumbling over your answer when someone asks what you do. The question that used to feel like a trap now feels like a conversation. The words come without the internal negotiation over which version of yourself to present. Your content stops feeling like an obligation and starts feeling like something you’re proud of. Comparisonitis clears up because you know what makes your voice distinct from others. And your ideal client starts recognizing herself in your message—because you got more specific, not louder. 

The right people don’t have to work to figure out whether you’re talking to them. They just know.

That’s the paydirt moment. 

So What Do You Do With This Now?

Stop trying to fit your square peg into someone else’s round hole. 

That means stop asking whether your choices are binary and whether you should be more Outlaw or less. Or whether quiet marketing is your answer. It’s not. The move is to get curious about your blend. Not continuing to ask which box I belong in, but asking, “What’s the truth about how I think, speak, see, and believe when nobody’s editing me?”

Stop measuring qualities of your brand against whatever’s having its moment on social media. And start paying attention to what you almost say and then don’t. To the opinions you soften. To the instincts you override because they don’t look enough like standing out.

That’s exactly what I help my clients do inside DIBS. 

Discovery starts with me sitting across from you, listening for the gap between what you’re saying and what you actually mean, and challenging you to think deeper if what I’m hearing sounds like holding back.  

Identity takes what Discovery surfaces and shapes it into language you can use. A voice that sounds like you. A way of describing what you do that doesn’t make you cringe when you read it back. The end of the “I think,” “kind of,” “sort of like” padding that’s been protecting you from being fully heard.

You don’t leave with someone else’s voice made slightly more personal. You leave with yours. In writing. And you’ll recognize it immediately.

Ready to Find Out What Your Brand Has Been Saying?

Before you decide what to do about your brand voice, it helps to have someone review what you’re currently saying and tell you exactly what they see.

That’s the Brand Snapshot. It’s free. It takes about ten minutes to complete. And instead of a checklist or a generic PDF, you get my eyeballs looking at your online presence and telling you what I notice with no preconceived bias.

I’m not asking you to hop on a sales call. I’m giving you the first real data point that isn’t a comparison to someone else’s brand.

[Complete the Brand Snapshot →]