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Episode
57

Enneagram Personality Types in Branding

An interview with
Shay Bocks

Introduction

When working on identity design it’s important to know who you’re targeting so that you can create a solution that attracts the desired audience. But exactly how to approach this can often be subjective, but what if there was a more strategic way?

Enneagram Personalities is one fascinating approach. 9 personality types which are represented by the points of a geometric figure known as an enneagram, that can be used to explain how each type interacts with the world. To learn more Ian interviews brand stylist Shay Bocks, an expert on the topic.

In this episode we also discuss the benefits of productising your business, and the approach Shay took to sell her WordPress theme business.

Shay Bocks Interview Transcription

Ian Paget: I understand that you’ve been studying Enneagram Personality Types that can be used in branding. It’s not a term I’ve heard of before and I’m not familiar with this, so could you let us know what that is and how you would then go about applying that to your branding work?

Shay Bocks: Sure. For someone who hasn’t ever heard of the Enneagram before, I’ll tell you that the Enneagram is simply a symbol. It’s kind of this mysterious symbol that philosophers have used for a long time to describe different processes in the world. There’s some legend that it comes from the Near East as well. We’re pretty sure it comes from the Near East, but legend says they used it in ancient Egypt or Babylon, but it was definitely used as a wisdom tool by the Sufis and esoteric Christianity for thousands of years.

Then in 1916, an Armenian philosopher named Gurdjieff brought it to the west, and he described it as a symbol of the inner dynamic of the cosmos, which sounds really floaty and out there, but it was a way of organising his understanding of the world through this symbol. And I know Pythagoras had his hands on the symbol at one point, and so it’s got this rich history for processes and creativity and just kind of explaining the world.