marketing and branding

archetype and stereotype

Today, unfortunately, my bike needs to go to bikeshop. The bike’s chain broke. That’s a first in my life and totally not exciting. It broke yesterday, and I had to walk home from town. But these transitions are fascinating on the other hand: you know… things work and from one moment to the next, for no particular reason, things break; and the world is a different world.

I mean: Not that the world is really different because my bike chain broke, but I look at it as an allegory.

Yesterday, in the factory, I was thinking about air du désert marocain, and archetypes and stereotypes. Stereotypes: Perfume and art and art editions, and snakes and sins and arabic nights and so on. And I realized that with air du désert marocain I  was actually very close to some of these stereotypes. It’s a thin, very thin line there. From stereotype I moved over to archetype and was looking for pictures of dunes (yes, stereotype around the corner there, too) to paint, and then a picture of a Berber man (Berber tribe in the Maghreb) popped up on the ipad and I did a sketch of him. Men of the desert… archetype or stereotype?

And then, before going to bed, I realized that actually, a bit of stereotype is necessary. It helps.