If you’ve been on the internet, and you’re in the online business space, you’ve seen the videos.
She’s in her car with an iced drink, telling you in the voice of your most organized friend where to get the good jeans, which pharmacy has the walk-in, how to pack a carry-on for ten days, and why she switched dentists — helpful, specific, and weirdly magnetic in a way you can’t quite name.
Somewhere in the middle of your fourth one in a row, you had one of two reactions. Either you thought “I could do this,” or you thought “ew, I could never.”
If it was the second one, stop blaming yourself for it. That reaction is telling you something useful.
It comes down to human psychology
Somebody online looked at a specific wave of creators making real money right now and called the style “just a girl marketing,” and the phrase spread fast — half the internet started shitting on it as not-real-marketing and the other half started defending it, and now the argument itself is the viral thing.
Underneath all the noise are three creators who had a serious cycle:
- Jesse Jean’s Yap Challenge — reportedly over $7 million.
- Jessica Carter’s non-techy edits course — in the range of $700K.
- A “have Claude edit for you” course from another gal — similar range, roughly $500K–$700K.
Three different offers, all leaning into the same archetype — and the archetype is what people are reacting to without being able to name, which is also why the “is this even marketing?” fight is so loud. Nobody arguing is reading the right layer.
Just a girl marketing = the girl-next-door archetype
The “just a girl” thing isn’t a TikTok invention and it isn’t even a 2020s invention — it’s the girl-next-door archetype, the friend who happens to be really useful and the one you absolutely trust, showing up in a crop top with a trending audio.
That archetype has been running quietly under good brand strategy for a hundred years, and every ten years or so somebody renames it and we all act surprised.
Which brings us to Carl Jung.
Archetype what?
An archetype is a classic human trait that’s basically been stereotyped — the same recurring threads that make people act certain ways and that we all recognize on sight. It’s what drives the shorthand like “he’s my goofy friend,” or “he’s the adventurer friend,” or “she’s the girl next door.” Everyone knows exactly what you mean the second you say it, because the pattern is already in all of us.
Carl Jung brought the idea forward in 1919, mapping the deep patterns that keep showing up in human beings across every culture, every story, and every myth. Then in 1991, Carol Pearson got more nuanced with them in Awakening the Heroes Within and sorted them into twelve archetypes, each with its own underlying desire that pulls people in. Then in 2001, Margaret Mark and Pearson wrote The Hero and the Outlaw and brought it into brand strategy — because humans connect with humans better than they connect with logos, and brands that align their messaging with one of these archetypes built the real stuff: connection, following, and (more importantly to the brand) sales.
So the lineage, if you want to be accurate about it, is that Jung built the psychology, Pearson systematized it into twelve, and Mark made it a brand framework. Every strong brand you can name is running on one or two of those twelve — usually a primary archetype with a secondary one layered in as the backup, which is where the nuance lives. A Creator brand with a Jester streak feels different than a Creator brand with a Sage streak, even though they’re both Creators at the core.
The underlying drive of the archetypes
Pearson grouped the twelve into three categories by what each archetype is actually after underneath its surface personality:
Ego — identity and stability. Promise: you belong, you’re safe, you’re one of us.
Soul — freedom and transcendence. Promise: you get to be fully yourself, or something more than yourself.
Self — mastery and meaning. Promise: there’s a bigger game, and this gets you into it.
Why “just a girl” is working for these creators specifically
The girl-next-door archetype is a specific flavor of the Everyman, which sits in the Ego category — the archetypes that make you feel like you belong, you’re safe, you’re one of us. Everyman brands are the ones that don’t feel like they’re selling to you, they feel like a friend. Target does it, Old Navy does it, Trader Joe’s does it.
The thing getting missed in the fight is that Jesse Jean, Jessica Carter, and the third gal were already showing up as the girl-next-door archetype in their content long before any of this took off. That’s just how they naturally are — approachable, useful, a little undone, like the friend you’d text about where to buy jeans.
What happened next is they read the market, leaned in on what their archetype was already doing well, and built a product that was both hot AND named really well for their market (which is a whole other post), and then they blew up.
The success worked because people already trusted them. It isn’t disingenuous and it isn’t a trick — it’s just interesting that three women had massive success in the same little pocket of the internet at the same time, which is what drew everyone’s attention to how similar their content style is in the first place.
The feeling you want someone to have at the end of a good “just a girl” video is the one phrase that gives the whole thing away:
“Oh — This girl I know online….”
That’s the entire pitch, because “I know somebody who can tell me where to get the thing, who to call, what to skip” isn’t information, it’s parasocial connection, and parasocial connection is the only thing on the internet that still converts for free. When it works, it really works — which is why every brand strategist on earth is suddenly interested in an argument about iced coffee.
Don’t copy their archetype — find your own
Here’s where most people watch this happen and go wrong. They see it work, decide to copy the style, and six Reels later they feel like a stranger in their own content.
The one working for them is probably not yours, because there are twelve archetypes, not one. Let me show you the other eleven.
The 12 brand archetypes (Pearson’s wheel, in a scannable list)
Ego — identity and stability
Promise: you belong, you’re safe, you know what you’re getting.
- Innocent — pure, honest, hopeful. (Dove.)
- Everyman — the friend who just knows a guy. (‘Just a girl,’ Target.)
- Hero — brave, disciplined, proves it with results. (Nike.)
- Caregiver — protects, serves, nurtures. (Johnson & Johnson.)
Soul — freedom and transcendence
Promise: you get to be fully yourself, or something more than yourself.
- Explorer — seeks the unknown, hates being boxed in. (Patagonia.)
- Outlaw — breaks the rules on purpose. (Harley-Davidson.)
- Lover — intimacy, beauty, desire. (Chanel.)
- Creator — builds, makes, imagines. (Apple, LEGO.)
Self — mastery and meaning
Promise: there’s a bigger game, and this gets you into it.
- Jester — plays, breaks tension, lightens the room. (Old Spice.)
- Sage — truth, wisdom, teaches. (Google.)
- Magician — sees what others can’t, transforms it. (Disney, Tesla.)
- Ruler — order, control, premium. (Rolex.)
Read that list and notice what happens in your body, because one or two of those probably made you lean in, and one of them probably made you quietly go yeah, that sounds like me. That isn’t a vibe, that’s data.
Your ‘ew’ is the diagnostic, not the flaw
Your reaction to a style going viral isn’t a referendum on your confidence — it’s a reading on your archetype.
When you watch the “just a girl” content and think “ew, I could never,” your nervous system is correctly telling you that is not the shape of me, and that isn’t fear talking, it’s instinct — the same instinct that tells you when a sweater looks like a costume on you, even when it’s objectively cute.
A Magician trying to perform Everyman content feels like they’re hiding something, and an Outlaw trying to perform Caregiver content feels like they’re being nice at you, and a Sage trying to perform Jester content feels like they’re trying too hard at a party. The content performs okay, converts almost nobody, and feels like nothing — to make, and to watch.
That “feels like nothing” is the real cost of copying someone else’s archetype, and the cost isn’t the lost views, it’s the slow erosion of your own signal.
Parasocial connection — the thing that makes a stranger feel like they already know you — only fires when the archetype is actually yours, and when you perform someone else’s, the audience can tell. They just can’t tell you what’s off.
Which means your assignment isn’t “post more”
If you’ve been staring at the viral girls and feeling behind, let me take you off that hook — because the problem is not that you aren’t visible enough.
The problem is that you’ve been borrowing a shape that isn’t yours and wondering why it feels like wearing someone else’s shoes, and more of the wrong shape doesn’t fix it, it just makes you more visible as the wrong shape.
The move is to figure out your actual archetype and then let the content, the voice, the pace, and the aesthetic all follow from there — lean into yours accurately and the right clientele starts to show up on their own, which is the whole premise.
That’s also the entire reason brands run on these twelve in the first place, because they’re not personality quizzes — they’re the twelve human patterns we’ve been reading off each other for a hundred thousand years, and people recognize their one on sight.
Including yours.
So. Which one are you?
I did a post on Threads talking about this. Go check it out and follow me (ha. shameless plug) and then post your profile in the comments, I’ll take a look and see what archetype you’re giving off.
So the next time one of those videos crosses your feed and you catch yourself thinking “ew, I could never”, your gut is doing its job.
The ick is telling you what you’re drawn to, or what you’re repulsed from — which is also a sign that their messaging is working.
All brands, and all archetypes, aren’t for everyone.
Want to put your archetype to work?
The free Brand Stories Workbook gives you the five foundational stories every personal brand needs and shows how to shape each one around the archetype you naturally lean into.
