Consumer Semiotics

Although structural semiotics has origins in the dual disciplines of communication science and anthropology, many commercial semioticians limit their practice to the analysis of texts such as advertising, popular media, and cultural phenomena, to the exclusion of consumer research. Some practicing semioticians even advertise that semiotics does not apply to consumer behavior. However, a cursory look at the academic literature makes it clear that the object of semiotics is not limited to textual analysis, but applies to a wide range of human experiences, including social organization (Hodge and Kress 1988), cinema spectating (Metz [1976] 1981), the flow of traffic in a mall (Oswald 2015), and even animal behavior (Sebeok 1972). Furthermore, in the course of twenty years of consulting to blue chip companies, it is clear that the object of semiotics is not limited to textual analysis, but also applies to a wide range of marketing factors including consumer-centered design strategy, cultural branding, and media planning. This chapter illustrates how semiotics can be applied to standard qualitative research methods to gain deeper insights, encourage respondent creativity, and improve the consistency and validity of findings for the client. Christian Pinson contributes an early essay on marketing semiotics research.

Design Strategy

Design is a semiotic system, a technology, and a commercial practice that shapes to a great extent the ways consumers sense, experience, and understand objects, events, spaces, and processes in the marketplace. Some writers have used the term “semiotic engineering” to describe the design process because it involves the deliberate actions of molding and organizing phenomena to influence human behavior. Although design performs an esthetic function to create beautiful, pleasing things and environments, it differs from fine art in several ways. Fine art is valued for its unique, one-of-a-kind creativity, its ability to transcend the mundane, functional aspect of things, and the force of its impact on the hearts and imaginations of the individual spectator. Design, on the other hand, weaves the esthetic priorities of art into functional forms that help consumers build stuff, organize processes, and navigate the world of things and information. This chapter walks the reader through basic semiotic principles and methods for developing design strategy and planning for service sites and packaging. Laura Santamaria contributes a case study on design semiotics for innovation.

Brand Equity and Semiotics

Marketers generally agree that consumers make brand choices based upon intangible benefits such as status, belonging, or sex appeal, rather than product attributes alone, such as ingredients. Intangible benefits are delivered to consumers through communications or brand semiotics, which include the brand’s cultural positioning, service and packaging design, media content, and technological innovations. The semiotic dimensions of brands are not just the icing on the cake, or a “value added” to the brand’s functional benefits; they form the foundation and sine qua non of brand equity. The brand equity equation banks on the strength of brand meanings to build and differentiate the brand in an increasingly cluttered market, prompting consumers to choose one brand over the other. This opening chapter introduces readers to the semiotic dimensions of brands and methods used by semioticians to leverage competitive difference in a given market. In order to understand the basic semiotic methods presented here, analysis is limited to advertising campaigns rather than design or consumer research. Marcel Danesi contributes an essay on the importance of brand names for value creation.

Introduction

Structural semiotics is a hybrid of communication science and anthropology that accounts for the deep cultural codes that structure communication and sociality, endow things with value, move us through constructed space, and moderate our encounters with change. Doing Semiotics: A Research Guide for Marketers at the Edge of Culture...

Semiotic Ethnography

Consumer ethnography is essentially a semiotic enterprise inasmuch as the ethnographer is tasked with making sense of a situation or behavior through interviews and observations (Geertz 1972a & b). Unlike in-depth interviews and focus groups, which take place in the rarefied atmosphere of the recruitment facility, ethnography embeds consumer speech in the complex semantic context of consumers’ lived environments. Ethnographic methods enable development of a rich, multi-dimensional data set that sheds light on relationships between what consumers say and what they do, including the decisions they make about the disposition of goods in the home, the organization of their living spaces, their social interactions and their brand choices. The semiotic analysis of this data set decodes the patterns or codes that structure meaning production across multiple consumer encounters and interviews, identifies variations in the ways consumers modify the codes, and also identifies tensions between the various dimensions of the study. This chapter puts into play the skills and semiotic principles learned in the four previous chapters as they relate to research design, management, execution, and write-up of ethnographic consumer research for marketing. I wrote the reading for this chapter, a case study related to a prolonged ethnography of community gardening on the West Side of Chicago.

Strategic Semiotics

In this chapter, readers discover the impact of external factors such as competition, new technologies, and cultural change on brand strategy. Management’s decisions about everything from new product development and technology to pricing strategy communicate to consumers what the brand stands for, including the brand persona, value proposition, and its customer relationship. The discussion, exercises, and team project center on the play between code and performance in cultural brand management. Codes are cultural norms that account for the collective understanding of sign systems such as language, rituals, and brand discourse and perpetuate these systems over time. Performance defines the act of manipulating these codes in the interest of creativity. Teams will learn to conduct a binary analysis of brand meaning; decode the strategic dimensions of a product category; define the brand’s strategic positioning in relation to competitors; and find an original positioning for a new brand by bending category codes. Rachel Lawes contributes an essay on the human dimensions of semiotics-based research.