i

PRAISE FOR USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

2ND EDITION

In an age where influencer marketing, personalization and building positive

social impact are the new mantras of marketing, Lawes’ book is a priceless
guide for marketers to make sense of the world that their consumers live in.
Brilliant, incisive and a comprehensive look at using the principles of semi-
otics in marketing, this book is testimony to Lawes’ mastery of the subject
and her immense contribution to the world of semiotics.
Shelley Sengupta, GM and Head of Insights, Pernod Ricard India

This book confirms why Lawes is one of the foremost industrial semioti-
cians. It is a masterclass on the role of culture in consumer behaviour. If you
are a researcher, this book is an essential part of your library.
The second edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing adds three new chap-
ters that link recent changes in the global socio-political context and the
emergence of metamodernism. Lawes provides an insightful, actionable and
entertaining comparison between generations with regards to how they
process functional and emotional information, and translates this into how
brands should think about designing product experiences and communica-
tions to be authentic and sincere.
Dr Nick Harrington, Senior Director, Procter & Gamble

Dr Lawes’ book goes much further than academic or professional stand-

ards. Her writing is emotional, touching, profound and delicate at the same
time. And that reflects that semiotics is about culture before becoming a
matter of marketing. Nevertheless, it is vital for consumer trends under-
standing and brand planning. Using Semiotics in Marketing is full of
meaning. It is brilliant and compelling, both professionally and personally.
André D’Abreu Pazin, Director of Customer Intelligence, Research and Strategy,
LATAM Airlines

Business leaders talk about using semiotics in research, but do they actually
know what it means? In this book all is revealed, and in a simple, practical
and applicable way to boot. Using Semiotics in Marketing ultimately proves
that semiotics meets the stature of its buzzworthyness and that leaders can
gain differentiated insights by leveraging it, top down, bottom up and
layered with other methods that help us investigate deeper into consumers
and cultures.
Joanna Lepore, Global Foresight Director, McDonald’s
ii

Rachel Lawes writes with insightful brevity, but what makes this book shine
is the incredibly useful techniques she offers for ‘culture first’ thinking. The
‘Tree’ technique in Chapter 6 has particularly inspired me in how to guide
strategists to structure upstream thinking rooted in truisms. A gem of a
book to reignite your approach to creative development.
Lucy Crotty, Cultural Strategy and Insight Lead, ITV

This is a book that demands to be read (again and again), comfortably sat
back with a note-taking device nearby, as we are invited to jot down our
own reflections and ideas that will inevitably come.
This second edition brings future applicability to all the learnings from
the previous chapters, with a focus on key changes in consumer culture
brought about by metamodernism. Rachel Lawes makes light work of
explaining the values, needs and behaviour shifts that will define the future
through the metamodernist lens. The insights are so compelling that you’d
be forgiven for concluding that this shift is not just key for marketing into
the future, but for adding value and meaning to all kinds of professional and
personal relationships. If Rachel’s book doesn’t stir something inside you,
you haven’t read it right.
Trish Rajo-Brea, Insights Professional and Capabilities Lead, Unilever

A fascinating and insightful read on an area of research which can often be

underrepresented. Lawes makes a compelling case for the use of semiotics
and the commercial impact it delivers. If you ever need to convince someone
of the power of semiotics, make sure you give them a copy of this book. A
must-read for marketers and insight professionals.
Andrew Tenzer, Independent Insight and Brand Strategy Consultant, Reach plc

This highly awaited second edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing is writ-

ten by a semiotics veteran. Dr Rachel Lawes knows the industry well! If
you’re a marketer, you need to read this book. If you’re studying marketing,
branding, retail UX and/or consumer behaviour, you need to read this book.
With three new chapters on Generation Z, social change in the ‘West’ and
the rise of emotions, the book is bang up to date. So, if you’re in any way,
shape, form or part of the ‘digital ecosystem’ (and I’d be surprised if you’re
not!) you must read this book. Like, now! What are you waiting for?
Professor (Dr) Zubin Sethna, Professor of Entrepreneurial Marketing and
Consumer Behaviour, Regent’s University London

The publication of this second edition has given me the perfect excuse to
revisit this seminal text on best practice in semiotics – written by one of the
discipline’s best practitioners. This is a book that should sit within arm’s
reach of everyone working in marketing, research and communication; in
fact, anyone who needs to understand how people tick as part of their job.
 iii

Filled with practical advice and fascinating examples, it is that unusual

breed of textbook that you will fly through. This new edition applies the lens
of the seismic cultural shifts caused by the pandemic and maturing of
Generation Z. It is now even more imperative that you absorb its wisdom
and insight.
Meanwhile, we all need to hold our breaths for what will be the inspira-
tion for a third edition!
Fiona Keyte, Planning Partner, Grey London

Using Semiotics in Marketing is a must-read for anyone committed to

putting people at the centre of marketing. Dr Lawes manages to make a
complex and nuanced practice approachable, and does so in a way that
illuminates, rather than dulls, the pixie dust of semiotics. This effortless
balance of the practical and the magical solidified my belief that Dr Lawes
is an underutilized resource in our industry.
Kim Einan, Chief Strategy Officer, Starcom

How many times in our lives have we looked at objects or ideas or brands for
what they are rather than what they signify? A coffee, for example, as a brewed
beverage, evokes comfort, creativity and alertness; a sofa, as a furniture item,
evokes symmetry, relaxation and family time. In this compelling book about
images, icons, language, culture, people and meaning, the often-mystifying
world of semiotics comes alive. Lawes, in her commercially relevant and practi-
cal account, masterfully brings forth the future of researching customer
engagement by describing how researchers, strategists and marketers can
decode signs so they can see connections and meanings that others cannot. It
beautifully and aptly explains the fascinating world of semiotics with clarity
and accessible language for all, novices or experts. A must-read!
Dr Panagiotis Kokkalis, Chair of Business and Management and Associate
Professor of Strategy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Dubai

Seeing things other brands, marketers or even the person sitting next to you
don’t is vital to success. In Using Semiotics in Marketing Dr Lawes gives you
the keys to unlock the unseen that’s all around us. With sharper vision we
become sharper marketers. Dr Lawes’ book helps you keep your ‘eyes on
that very special prize’.
George Tannenbaum, Founder, GeorgeCo, LLC, Adaged Blog

Are great semioticians born or created? Mindful, perhaps, of my own limita-

tions in this field, I had always leaned toward the former, lamenting my lack
of relevant genetic curlicues. The first edition of this book changed all of
that, making the mysterious hinterland of semiotics accessible, sending up a
flare to illuminate this terrain and roll back the shadows cast by past intel-
lectuals – yes, I’m looking at you, Barthes.
iv

This new version, enriched with recent social history and dripping with
new cultural codes, is clear, concise and comprehensible, touching the
universal elements of the everyday while spotlighting the ‘how to’ of creative
analysis – increasingly necessary to business innovation and delivering
competitive advantage.
Leslie X Hallam, Course Director, Psychology of Advertising MSc, University of
Lancaster and Qualitative Consultant, Tangent Partnership

The field of semiotics is littered with books that are either unreadable, unus-
able or far too pleased with themselves. Lawes’ is different. As well as being
hugely practical and commercially relevant, this gem of a textbook is packed
full of juicy cultural analysis. Lawes manages to make page-turners out of
discussions on baked beans and toilet tissue. Her depiction of British tea-
time rituals is up there with Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down. It could only
have been written by someone who cares as much about Instagram as she
does about Ideograms. Essential reading.
Dr Nick Coates, Global Creative Consulting Director, C Space

Do you wish you knew more about semiotics, how it is used in market
research, and how it links to other techniques? Learn how ideas get into
people’s heads, the role of culture and the method of outside-in thinking. A
must-read for any marketer or market researcher.
Ray Poynter, Founder and Chair, NewMR and Member of ESOMAR Council

I like to think I know a bit about semiotics, but Lawes is the real deal, the Full
Monty, the Queen of Codes. Her insightful work is an important rejoinder
and reminder to all those in the brand and comms world of the need to focus
on culture and meaning, linguistics and anthropology, icons and images – not
just the reductionist world of messages, propositions and benefits.
Anthony Tasgal, Strategist and Owner, POV Marketing and Research

A great read for anyone in the research game! Whether new to the field or
long in the tooth, this is certainly a book to get stuck in to.
Viv Farr, Managing Director, Narrative Health

From the moment I started reading about the culture of weddings, I was
gripped. This was going to be a good read! But more than that, Using
Semiotics in Marketing gives you the step-by-step, practical tools to learn
and use the discipline yourself – written in a highly engaging manner.
Lawes masterfully combines the practicality of a training manual with a
‘can’t put down’ read. If you are intrigued by semiotics, if you wish you
knew how to be a semiologist, Lawes gives you the tools to get stuck in. This
second edition really opened my eyes to the importance of Generation Z and
 v

provides heaps of practical strategies for brands and marcoms as new gener-
ations of consumers evolve.
Fiona Blades, President and Chief Experience Officer, MESH Experience

I have concluded that all Quant researchers become Qual converts in the
end – and I am no exception. I’ve spent the last 10 years promoting qual
research, and it seems to me that semiotics is a qual ‘superpower’. I loved the
clarity of this book and the clever synthesis of so much academic research
that I wouldn’t have had the time to read for myself, but most of all I appreci-
ated gaining an insight into current trends that I have been observing without
fully understanding. If you are a ‘boomer’ (like me), some of the ideas of
metamodernism are bewildering and very hard to assimilate – but the effort
is very definitely worthwhile for the light it shines on the modern world.
Phyllis McFarlane, Market Research Society Gold Medallist

Lawes excels at writing in a way that demystifies semiotics and makes it

clearly actionable in an engaging way, exploring the cultural changes
happening in society that only semiotics can truly identify. The new chapters
include identifying the consumer needs of the 2020s and provide several
different lenses that businesses can instantly learn from. A shout out here
goes to the way that the case studies and activities dovetail seamlessly
together, to provide the tools for marketeers to apply immediately.
Alan Hathaway, MD, Discovery Research Ltd and Judge, MRS Awards 2022

An invaluable tool for any researcher looking to go beyond the traditional

methodologies to successfully level up and differentiate their analysis and
storytelling. Lawes has made semiotics accessible to those of us who aren’t
expertly trained as semioticians but still understand the value of decoding
the cultural symbols and language all around us. Lawes’ Using Semiotics in
Marketing gets us results for our clients every time with its inspiring advice
for market researchers. It’s full of amazing revelations and stories you won’t
read anywhere else. This expanded second edition has even more fascinating
insights concerning social change in the United States.
Stephanie David, Vice President Research and Design, Vital Findings

In writing Using Semiotics in Marketing, Rachel Lawes has succeeded in

both simplifying and making a complex subject accessible. This book is a
great practical guide to semiotics written in an engaging style. I would highly
recommend it to all insight professionals who want to further their under-
standing of the subject.
Julie Irwin, Co-Founder and Board Director, Citrine Market Research and Judge,
MRS Awards 2022
vi

If you’re looking for a well-written, easy-to-understand and informative

book on the use of semiotics in marketing then look no further. Dr Lawes
has taken years of experience and succinctly summarized it into a practical
and interesting book. The second edition builds on the first by bringing an
explanation of semiotics in relation to recent yet rapid changes to western-
influenced culture. Dr Lawes continues to deliver further knowledge to the
reader and practical responses that brands can make to meet the changing
expectations of their market and consumers.
Steven Darby, Director, AURA

If you read just one book about the shifting consumer culture and what it
means for brands, make it this one! Dr Lawes sets out the criticality of semi-
otics in this powerful, practical and immensely insightful second edition. It
brilliantly elevates semiotics from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ for all
insight and marketing practitioners. It bravely challenges old ways of think-
ing and catapults us into a state of readiness for the future. It’s an essential,
enlightening and hugely enjoyable read.
Sandra Grandsoult, Co-Founder and Equity Architect, Equitas Insight

This is a weighty tome of information and thought-provoking content.

What is most relevant and fruitful for me is the way Rachel Lawes helps
marketers (in the broadest sense) understand that semiotics can make tangi-
ble what their customers are thinking and feeling in ways that are much
more insightful than the kind of answers we tend to get in Q&A market
research.
Hilary Woods, Strategic Partner, Crater Lake & Co and Agency for the Third Age
 vii

Using Semiotics in Marketing

How to achieve consumer insight for brand
growth and profits

SECOND EDITION

Rachel Lawes
viii

Publisher’s note
Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is
accurate at the time of going to press, and the publishers and author cannot accept
responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. No responsibility for loss or
damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material
in this publication can be accepted by the editor, the publisher or the author.

First published in Great Britain and the United States in 2020 by Kogan Page Limited
Second edition published in 2023

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be
reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in
writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms
and licences issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be
sent to the publishers at the undermentioned addresses:

2nd Floor, 45 Gee Street 8 W 38th Street, Suite 902 4737/23 Ansari Road
London New York, NY 10018 Daryaganj
EC1V 3RS USA New Delhi 110002
United Kingdom India

www.koganpage.com
Kogan Page books are printed on paper from sustainable forests.
© Rachel Lawes, 2020, 2023
The right of Rachel Lawes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBNs
Hardback 978 1 3986 0766 8
Paperback 978 1 3986 0764 4
Ebook 978 1 3986 0765 1

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lawes, Rachel, author.
Title: Using semiotics in marketing : how to achieve consumer insight for
brand growth and profits / Rachel Lawes.
Description: Second edition. | London ; New York, NY : Kogan Page, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022056825 (print) | LCCN 2022056826 (ebook) | ISBN
9781398607644 (paperback) | ISBN 9781398607668 (hardback) | ISBN
9781398607651 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Marketing. | Semiotics. | Consumers–Research.
Classification: LCC HF5415 .L3264 2023 (print) | LCC HF5415 (ebook) | DDC
658.8001/4–dc23/eng/20221201
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056825
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056826

Typeset by Integra Software Services, Pondicherry

Print production managed by Jellyfish
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
 ix

This book is dedicated to Frances Lawes,

born Mary Frances Look in 1943.
x

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 xi

CONTENTS

List of figures and tables xv

About the author xvii
Foreword by Daniel Sherrard xix

Introduction to the new edition 1

Introduction to the first edition 9

01 Semiotics will change your career in marketing

or market research 17
Business dilemmas 17
A new focus on culture 19
What is semiotics? 21
How is semiotics applied in marketing? 22
How is semiotics used in market research? 23
Frequently asked questions 25

02 An explosion of semiotics in business 35

Activity: Find your challenge 36
Marketing Challenge Hotlist 36
Case study: Rebranding Charmin 37
How to detect when semiotics may solve your problem 44
Activity: Write a brief for semiotic research 47
A sample brief 49
Another sample brief 50
The market for semiotics 51
Endnote 52

03 How to do research using semiotics: A blueprint for

marketers 53
Understand your client’s brief 53
Set your research questions 55
Brainstorm with your client 58
Sample data 59
xii Contents

Identify semiotic signs 62

Identify codes 62
Detect social structures 64
Apply findings to your client’s business objectives 65
Write your story 66
Activity: Write a proposal 69

04 Images, language and other semiotic signs 73

Data and method 73
Still images 78
Activity: Decode an image 82
Language: Speech and writing 82
Activity: Decode language 86
TV ads and other time-based media 86
Physical data 87
From signs to codes: Moving towards top-down analysis 88
Activity: Find a code 93

05 Society, culture and other big influences on consumers 95

Where do I begin? Recognizing and framing top-down questions 95
Sourcing information and data 97
Texts as an explanatory resource 98
Beginning analysis: Time and place 100
Ideological analysis 104
What to do at the end of analysis 109
Frequently asked questions 110
Activity: Top-down analysis 111

06 Creativity and innovation: Semiotic tools for thinking 113

Truisms 113
Activity: Find your truisms 117
The semiotic square 118
Activity: Identify a brand opportunity using a semiotic square 123
Build a meme 123
Activity: Build a meme 131
Twig-to-branch 131
Activity: Twig-to-branch 136
 Contents xiii

07 How to do semiotic field trips 137

Why do semiotic field trips? 137
Learning from semiotic field trips 140
When to use semiotic field trips 150
Who is involved in semiotic field trips? 151
Where should I go? What to do when on the ground 152
Some final notes about planning 154
Analysing field trip data and finding insights 155
Activity: Your own semiotic field trip 156

08 Combining semiotics with ethnography and discourse

analysis 159
How to distinguish ethnography, semiotics and discourse analysis
and stop making curry 160
How to analyse conversation using ethnography, semiotics and
discourse analysis 164
Activity: Multi-method research 172

09 Data – insight – strategy 175

Common problems and how to avoid them 176
What is an insight? 177
Activity: Challenge the taken-for-granted 179
Activity: Grow it or shrink it 182
From insight to strategy 182
I need to… tell a story 183
I need to… adapt to change 185
I need to… get ahead of competitors 186
I need to… innovate 188
I need to… change the appearance of my brand 189
Activity: Make strategic recommendations 192

10 Sharing the findings of semiotic research 195

Advice for all market research, especially semiotics 196
Activity: Prepare a report or debrief 205
Advice exclusively for semiotics 206
Activity: Quality-check your work before distribution 212

11 Industry debates and the future of semiotics 215

Industry debates: Is semiotics a science? 216
Technology and social change 219
xiv Contents

Activity: Technology and your next project in semiotics 226

Cross-cultural variations in semiotics 226
The semiotics of the future 229

12 Inspiration: How to continue teaching yourself

to do semiotics 233
1 Product design and architecture 234
2 Visual art and graphic design 235
3 Entertainment media: Cinema, TV, gaming 238
4 Fiction 240
5 Journalism and other non-fiction 242
6 The social sciences and humanities 243
7 Travel and other physical experiences 246

13 Consumer needs in the 2020s 249

Metamodernism 250
Sincerity 258
Feelings 265
Activity: Metamodern needs and your brand 271

14 Brands and Businesses 273

Metamodernism 274
Sincerity 280
Feelings 287
Activity: Review your brand’s core purpose and values 292
Bonus activity: Learn from LEGO 293
Endnotes 293

15 Marketing and communications 295

Metamodernism 296
Sincerity 301
Feelings 308
Activity: Fluff flash fiction 316
Going forward: What to read next 318
Endnotes 318

Acknowledgements 321
Glossary 323
References 326
Index 334
 xv

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES
Figure 4.1 Tea and cake 80
Figure 4.2 Store exterior 84
Figure 6.1 Why we need myths 119
Figure 6.2 Brands can be mythical 122
Figure 6.3 Semiotic squares help you identify opportunities 122
Figure 6.4 What if I told you… beans 127
Figure 6.5 None of my business… beans 128
Figure 6.6 Distraction… beans 129
Figure 6.7 What if I told you… health 130
Figure 6.8 Not sure if… health 131
Figure 6.9 Twig-to-branch model of ideology and trends 134
Figure 6.10 A rudimentary tree 135
Figure 7.1 Dales Toffee Shop 142
Figure 7.2 New Maypole for Grassington Children 143
Figure 7.3 PricewaterhouseCoopers 145
Figure 8.1 Extract of conversation with a consumer 164
Figure 9.1 Masons Beans story 184
Figure 9.2 Painless needles 189
Figure 10.1 Avoid using images as illustrations 201
Figure 10.2 Visual images as evidence of codes in consumer culture 202
Figure 10.3 Visual images as evidence of codes in product
categories 203
Figure 11.1 A means to display the changing status of codes
over time 230
Figure 13.1 Authenticity is about you and your inner self 260
Figure 13.2 Sincerity is about successful social relationships 261

TABLES
Table 5.1 Bottom-up and top-down research questions 96
Table 5.2 Matching business problems to top-down research
questions 112
Table 6.1 Truisms and their reversals 116
Table 13.1 What consumers want and need, and how brands may
respond 257
xvi

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 xvii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Rachel Lawes is a social psychol-

ogist specializing in the interface
between individuals and consumer
culture. She supplies brand strategy
and consumer insight, using social
psychology, semiotics and discourse
analysis, to brands around the
world via Lawes Consulting Ltd
(established in 2002). Rachel’s
academic career started with a PhD
from Loughborough University’s
internationally renowned Discourse
and Rhetoric Group (DARG), and
recent academic positions include
that of Principal Lecturer in
Marketing at Regent’s University London. For 15 years she has convened the
Advanced Qualitative Methods Masterclass for the Market Research Society in
the UK. Her extensive publishing history includes the books Using Semiotics in
Marketing: How to Achieve Consumer Insights for Brand Growth and Profits
(Kogan Page, 2020, 2023) and Using Semiotics in Retail: Leverage Consumer
Insight to Engage Shoppers and Boost Sales (Kogan Page, 2022). They are
preceded by around 60 conference papers at the annual conferences of the Market
Research Society, ESOMAR, IIEX, Qual360, the Social Research Association, the
Association of Qualitative Researchers (UK), QRCA (USA), ASMRS (Australia),
Social Intelligence World and many more. Her writing spans marketing industry
trade journals, academic publishing in psychology and market research, and jour-
nalism. Rachel is recognized as one of the founders of British commercial semiot-
ics and is known for her engaging style and ability to make difficult concepts and
theory accessible to non-academic audiences. She is a Fellow of the Market
Research Society.
xviii

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

 xix

FOREWORD

On one of my first meetings with Dr Rachel Lawes, we took a walk through

a huge Christmas fair in London’s Hyde Park. As we walked around the
festive scene, Rachel’s trained eye transformed the various fairground rides
and vendors around us into meaningful semiotic objects to be scrutinized
and ‘read’. Each one conveyed different signs and codes that revealed hidden
cultural insights spanning topics as broad as the modern family, national
identity, gender and social class. It was fascinating to see all of this insight
hidden in plain sight in the mundane objects around us.
From that point on, Rachel has become one of the first people I pick up
the phone to when I’m in need of fresh cultural insight or a new perspective
for the brands that I work with. Over the years, Rachel’s analysis has
provided insights that have helped me to create new brand and communica-
tions strategies for my clients, breathing new life into some of the nation’s
favourite FMCG brands. These strategies in turn have been able to focus
those businesses internally, ignite consumer desire and drive profit.
As one of the founding figures in commercial semiotics, it should come as
no surprise that the analysis Rachel practices carries the depth and rigour
that it does. In an industry where so many companies are only just waking
up to the full potential of commercial semiotics, I am yet to have seen work
as illuminating or practically useful as the work that she produces. Her
analysis is underpinned by an impressive academic pedigree. She was
published before she had even graduated, holds a PhD in social psychology,
she has written over 40 conference papers, is regularly published in the
International Journal of Market Research and currently convenes the
Advanced Qualitative Methods course at the Market Research Society
(MRS). But the magic of Rachel’s semiotic approach lies in her combination
of this academic background with her strong commercial focus. After 20+
years practising semiotics for some of the world’s largest companies, the
business application of her work is always front and centre.
This book is written with Rachel’s signature commercial lens. It is also
written with an intelligent simplicity that removes any of the academic
complexity so common in the world of semiotics. Since Rachel started work-
ing in the field, her mission has been to make semiotics as accessible as
xx Foreword

possible. Her mission started with her award-winning paper ‘Demystifying

semiotics’ back in 2002. This down-to-earth approach is what has allowed
her to become one of the leading teachers of semiotics in the UK.
Here, Rachel has put her teaching experience to paper. She has created a
simple how-to for semiotics which breaks down the sometimes-bewildering
discipline into its component parts, explains each one, and shows how they
can be applied to create genuine insight. The simply laid out theories, the
practical frameworks and the commercial examples and applications make
this book refreshingly action orientated. Whether you are planning on
conducting your own semiotic analysis or looking to commission a piece of
market research, this book provides a clear guide and a firm foundation in
the discipline and serves as a reference point for what good commercial
semiotics should look like. It outlines the different sorts of questions semiot-
ics can (and can’t) help businesses with, the different techniques possible
and, perhaps most importantly, the difference between superficial analysis
and more deep and insightful work. In the commercial field, I’ve found that
it’s not uncommon to find pieces of semiotic work that stop at the obvious.
Here Rachel equips the reader to be able to spot and avoid this to make sure
the semiotics you are involved in is going to be genuinely insightful.
Above all, Rachel reminds us of the continued relevance and importance
of semiotics in the market research mix. She highlights how the insights it
creates are different to those from other methodologies because they come
from reading signs in culture rather than from asking consumers questions –
providing cultural insight rather than consumer attitudes. In her own words,
‘If you know how culture works, you can design brands and marketing
communications that are culturally appropriate and that people will like.’ In
my experience, it is this cultural appropriateness that creates the ‘authentic-
ity’ and ‘relevance’ that is so elusive in the marketing world – but so
important for creating consumer desire.
Daniel Sherrard
Brand and Communications Strategy Director, Grey London
 1

Introduction to the new edition

Thank you and welcome

Dear reader, thank you for joining me. I am tremendously happy and excited
to welcome you to the second edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing: How
to Achieve Consumer Insight for Brand Growth and Profits. Lots of people
liked the first edition, published in March 2020, so that’s why publisher
Kogan Page asked me to prepare for you an expanded edition, featuring
new content that reflects our rapidly changing world.

Global events since the first edition

The Covid-19 pandemic, which not only caused a tidal wave of fatalities but
changed the shape of most people’s daily lives, ended many businesses,
caused economic damage to many more, and benefited only a few. Economies
contracted, jobs were lost, schools closed, more people stayed indoors, shop-
ping behaviour changed. I wrote about this as it was happening in my second
book, Using Semiotics in Retail, which was published in 2022. There I
described a changed landscape of consumer culture and showed how semi-
otics offers new ways to meet consumer needs and drive the value of
businesses. Using Semiotics in Retail is also a book about the future, using
semiotic tools for thinking to explore the expansive business models and
marketing skills of Chinese retailers, future jobs in retail and the products
and services that consumers of the future will be willing to pay more for.
In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, resulting in the displacement
of millions of Ukrainian people and causing economic and political rever-
berations around the world.
2 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

September 2022 saw the death of Queen Elizabeth II. As someone who
lived to the advanced age of 96, to many people, she was the last of her
generation. The last of the 20th century, its tastes, behaviour and values,
died with her.

The culture of Generation Z reaches a tipping point

This is the answer to the question of ‘what happened next?’ and is the reason
you need this new, expanded edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing. After
spending a number of years evolving and developing, the culture of
Generation Z seems to have reached a tipping point. Its values are making
themselves felt. Older members of the Z generation will be 25 or even 26 by
the time you read this book, so there are more of them circulating in adult
society: voting, working, starting businesses and changing the economy. The
beliefs and values associated with this culture are becoming a mainstream
part of society and setting new standards.
I want to be very clear about what I’m saying here because I don’t use
phrases like ‘Generation Z’ in a gimmicky way. If you were to imagine the
history of human civilization as a huge, unfurling wave of ideas, I would say
that the water that is now crashing on the shore, right at our feet, is different
from what came before. Here’s where I see the change. To begin with, there
are all sorts of interesting shifts which are visible in daily life, like increased
public morality, public sensitivity and objection to insensitive corporate
messages, and a recent, seemingly global, campaign asking everyone to be
kind. All of this is expressed in a cheerful and optimistic tone. This is
substantial change in itself but while doing the research for this book, I
came to see that something more radical sits below the surface. Western
culture has not only achieved a state of self-criticism, which it did some
years ago, but is finally able to envisage a new and better future. This has
included the startling realization that there are many truths not understood
by white, middle-class Dick and Jane, many diverse lives being lived, many
stories being told, and much art being made, all of which hitherto have
eluded understanding. We now see that they have always been there, and
they are at last being given a platform by public institutions and also brands.
This new public mood, especially prevalent among younger generations of
consumers, is optimistic about the future because they see something that, as
yet, not everyone is able to see.
 INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION 3

Right now, the things I’m saying about cultural change may seem myste-
rious, but all is revealed in the substantial new chapters that I’ve added to
this book. By the end, you’ll be fluent in the new style of language and
thought that is emerging in the West, in global consumer culture and every-
where that there are traits of Western liberalism and individualism. It’s not
difficult to get up to speed as long as we stay focused on the big picture –
and if there’s one thing semiotics is cut out for, it’s being able to see big
pictures.

This book shows you the path

to new consumer insight and brand success
As you can see, there’s a lot going on among the consumers who are likely
your customers. I’m writing about it now because this new wave of culture
affects you, as a marketer, in one way or another.
You may feel that your company is very on top of the latest cultural
trends, embracing diversity, listening to customers and investing in sustain-
ability. In this situation, I commend you on being an early adopter and
driving change. I’m also certain that there are secrets in this book which are
new to you. I went on a mission, armed with semiotic tools for thinking, to
uncover the foundations and the pinnacles of these ideas. In these pages I’ll
show you how they’re connected and point out some important and valua-
ble pieces of the jigsaw which you might not have noticed but which can
breathe new life into your brand and marketing.
Alternatively, you may feel that your business is slightly late coming to
the new wave of culture. Perhaps you are uncertain where to start and have
been putting it off, concentrating instead on making a quality product. I
have to tell you that the new culture has gone past the point of being ignored.
The time to respond is now. In this book, there’s a wealth of new informa-
tion but I have gone out of my way to make it digestible and easy to put into
practice in your marketing, with step-by-step instructions. There can be a
certain amount of jargon and technical language in this new culture; I break
it down as simply as possible throughout, so you won’t get stuck, and the
point of view of semiotics offers a guiding light on our journey towards new
frontiers. By the end of this book, you’ll feel a lot more confident.
4 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

How this book is organized

This book preserves the content and structure of the original first edition.
Chapters 1–12 comprise a complete, self-guided course in semiotics. It can
be used by anyone, with or without experience in semiotics, to see: when
semiotics can impact profits for brands; how to plan and execute semiotic
research; how to turn findings into marketing strategy and publish the
results. The original course will only be three years old by the time you read
this, it describes a method that took a century to evolve, and is designed not
to go out of date. Therefore, I edited these chapters very lightly; no impor-
tant case studies or facts have been removed – my main aim was to preserve
the original intact.
Chapters 13–15 are entirely new. They are thick, juicy chapters, in length
equivalent to about four-and-a-half chapters of the first edition. These chap-
ters provide two kinds of instruction, as you might expect. First, they
demonstrate semiotic thinking concerning topical issues and encourage
readers to join in. Second, they give practical instruction to marketers and
market researchers. In this way, the new content continues the reader’s jour-
ney that they began in Chapters 1–12, while at the same time providing an
exciting view of consumers, their priorities and their lives in the 2020s.

And now, a quiz

Your cognitive style reveals your true generation
Have you ever wondered if you were born at the wrong time? Feel much
older or younger than all your peers? This super-scientific test reveals who
you really are. Add up all your As, Bs and Cs and read the results at the end.

1 A company announces a time-saving consumer product. What’s your

instinctive reaction?
a. Great! I love innovations, especially ones that save time.
b. Sigh. Anyone can see that the product is not going to save time.
c. This could be a good product with a few minor hacks, I’ll do that now.
2 A co-worker becomes emotional during a casual chat as you are eating a
sandwich in the break room. What are your feelings about their feelings?
a. I feel sorry for them but it’s a bit sensitive for the workplace and I
wonder if HR should handle it.
 INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION 5

b. I feel sorry for them and that’s mixed with anger at the society which
caused this problem. I managed to make them laugh with my pithy
remarks and on-point critique.
c. I’m so pleased that they trusted me enough to open up. Relationships
are much better when we make them a safe place to share our feelings.
3 You have an opinion that you want to express, but it could be seen as
critical and others may be offended. How do you handle it?
a. In general, one should try to be polite. Doing otherwise causes trouble
and lacks decorum. Respect your elders and don’t be cheeky to the
police.
b. Of course it’s critical, that’s the point. Anyway, people are often
offended by rebels.
c. You can express your opinion, including being critical, but strive to
do so with the utmost compassion; there are people on the receiving
end of your criticism.
4 What’s funny?
a. Jokes about marriage, parenting, ageing. All the big challenges that
define the stages of a person’s life.
b. Jokes that involve skewering celebrities, authority figures and the
conventional lifestyles of normies.
c. There’s this dog and it’s standing on some drinks cans. The image is
deep fried. The dog says ‘Bjark’. Ha!
5 Who are you?
a. I’m a director at a medium-sized company, we own a brand. I’m on
the board of two local charities. I’m pleased that my company has
been able to create so many jobs.
b. I work in marketing. I’m really good at it. I can find an attention-
getting and different point of view on any topic, which is helpful to
brands. I constantly question the ethics of this job and try to make
ethical decisions.
c. I’m an activist and educator. I’m also an artist, making multimedia
works about identity. I prefer companies that are making a difference
and products that people made themselves.
6 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

6 How do you feel about the future?

a. I’ve been here watching it unfold and there has been progress.
Technology makes people’s lives better and families are not as poor as
they were a century ago. We can cure a lot of diseases now. Religion
and science both offer some universal truths which help us get better
over time.
b. I’ve been here since digital culture took off and there is a lot of chaos.
There are certainly no universal truths except maybe ones used by
huge corporations to make money. Democracy is in trouble and our
future lives will experience more surveillance and a tighter grip by
private companies and the state. It’s not looking good.
c. I’m 100% committed to building a better future. I’m not happy about
the state of the world and I’m here to change it. I’m not being naïve
about this, I’m well aware of how bad things are and how many
things need to change. That’s why I accepted the challenge. What are
you doing?
7 What’s your superpower?
a. Flight.
b. X-ray vision.
c. I am the light and colour of the world.

Quiz results
Remember, these are not exactly types of people but styles of thought. You
could be a teenager who scored mostly As or you could be an older person
who scored mostly Cs. What’s more, people are very adaptable. So if you
grew up thinking mostly in terms of As and Bs but you would like your style
of thought to be more C, that’s totally achievable. And now, here are your
results.

MOSTLY AS: MODERNISM

Modernist thinking is often, but not always, found in Baby Boomers and
their parents. Modernist consumers like brands that are recognizable, widely
trusted, perform well and offer rational reasons to believe. Value for money
and quality are both important. Modernism likes clean, economical design –
it is where minimalism comes from, like your Apple iPhone or The Ordinary
 INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION 7

skincare. Modernism likes rules, certainties and economic growth that is

detectable in the incomes and lifestyles of ordinary families. Modernist
thinking in business has resulted in some very large, very stable companies
which employ people and generate wealth. Modernist businesses sometimes
pay for their size and rule-bound routes to success with a corresponding loss
of agility and difficulty with change.
If we’re measuring success in terms of individual happiness and content-
ment, modernist thinkers are prone to be fairly happy. They know that their
lives are much easier and better than their parents had to put up with and
some of them have assets such as savings or property which have increased
in value.

MOSTLY BS: POSTMODERNISM

Postmodern thought is often, but not always, exemplified by Gen X and the
older end of Millennials. Postmodern consumers often dislike the very idea
of ‘brands’ while at the same time loving certain brands and products for
their semiotic power to signify rebellion, refusal and difference. A pair of Dr.
Martens boots, a Zippo cigarette lighter, vinyl records, coffee, energy drinks
and retro video games are all able to inspire affection. Consumers who use
this style of thought are also capable of getting behind companies, causes
and brands that exemplify their perspective on the world or their sardonic
sense of humour. Postmodern thought is very relative, so a person could
simultaneously be a vegan while regarding the climate and sustainability
with indifference.
Postmodern thought does not encourage its users to join or build giant
organizations, which it mistrusts. The way to target customers who think
like postmodernists is by wielding a brilliantly flashing, dark sense of humour
like a dagger.
Postmodern thinkers are not known for being particularly cheerful but
they pride themselves on their own wit and love insider jokes. Some postmod-
ern artists become wealthy but most postmodern thinkers have an ambivalent
relationship with money and don’t hoard it.

MOSTLY CS: METAMODERNISM

Metamodern thought is often, but not always, evident among younger
Millennials and especially Generation Z. Metamodern consumers are entre-
preneurial. They prefer products and brands which were made by themselves
and their peers, and they like companies of all sizes to have and demonstra-
bly enact commitment to some social purpose. Metamodern design is always
8 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

inclusive and it’s vital that companies learn how to communicate inclusivity.
Metamodern design ranges from cute and wholesome cartoons to unfiltered
portrait photos to clashing and pixelated digital design.
Metamodernism rejects absolute rules while recognizing that they contain
grains of truth. It rejects what it sees as postmodern pessimism while at the
same time relying on signs and symbols (the currency of semiotics, a post-
modern discipline) to interpret messages and communicate with others. A
person who embraces metamodern thought may adhere to some values that
it sees as universal, such as fairness and kindness. At the same time, they
may show great relativism with respect to key concepts such as identity,
which is regarded as almost infinitely individual, layered and complex.
Metamodern thought is pragmatic. It has clear objectives and goals,
organized around a central principle of ‘build a better world’. It can accom-
modate business, brands and capitalism as part of that plan if necessary.
Because young people are over-represented in metamodernism, people who
use this type of thought are mostly not wealthy and some resent previous
generations for their better fortune. However, a few are very successful in
using this new philosophy and are able to support themselves by starting
social enterprise projects.
Metamodern humour is often absurd, often self-effacing and endearing.
Despite immense challenges such as climate change and the struggle for
economic survival, metamodernist thinkers are possibly the happiest of the
bunch. This is perhaps because they tend to be engaged in taking action and
making change, not just passively watching things get better or worse.

The new chapters of this book take you on a guided tour of metamodern-
ism, and show what it means for marketers. At the same time, because Using
Semiotics in Marketing is a book of method, throughout the new chapters I
demonstrate how to use semiotics to find your way through the proliferating
jungle of consumer culture, how to discover insights and how to convert
them into marketing strategy.
Thank you for coming with me on this new journey. Let’s begin.
 9

Introduction to the first edition

Consumers and their spending

In 2018, a bride-to-be in the United States issued a set of instructions to her
wedding guests that was so demanding that it went viral, spreading from
Facebook to Reddit to Twitter and finally to the traditional news media. The
bride intended to hold her wedding at a venue in Hawaii and had very
specific ideas about the way that guests should look and behave. There
would be synchronized dancing on the beach, guests were informed, in
which they should feel honoured to participate. A very strict dress code was
organized by sex and also by weight. Women weighing under 160 pounds
were to be the most brightly coloured and also the most expensively attired,
adopting a uniform of a green velvet sweater, orange suede trousers, a
Burberry scarf and a pair of red-soled Louboutin heels. Guests were expected
to pay for their own outfits, and some fashion bloggers noted that the shoes
would start at about $700 and the scarf at over $400. Men weighing under
200 pounds were instructed to wear purple and white. Children were to be
in red (a precise shade). Guests over the prescribed weight limit were to
shroud themselves in head-to-toe black (women) and camouflage (men).
Additionally, guests were instructed to change into formal evening wear
after the dancing. The bride specified that each guest’s outfit for the evening
should have a value of at least $1,000, generously noting that this amount
was permitted to include jewellery and hairdressing. After this list of
demands spread around the world, being widely criticized, the furious bride
issued a second statement. She asked her guests to realize that they were not
obliged to take part in the synchronized dance if they were unhappy with
the dress code. They were offered alternative activities such as clearing away
dinner plates, making a video of the dance or handing over a cash contribu-
tion to the honeymoon (for example, see Metro News, 7 December 20181).
If you own a business that is part of the wedding industry, or if you are
thinking of getting into it, now is a good time. The amount that couples
10 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

spend on their weddings has shot up, even within the 12 months spanning
2017 to 2018. On 23 July 2018, British newspaper The Independent
reported that the average wedding in the UK costs £30,355, an all-time high
and a bulky increase of 12 per cent on the previous year. Also in 2018,
Brides magazine, which some regard as being substantially responsible for
setting wedding trends, reported on the equivalent figures for the United
States.2 In 2017, an American wedding cost $27,000, but in 2018 it increased
to a bulging $44,000. Brides additionally noted a change in who is funding
these lavish events. The last several decades showed a gradual shift away
from weddings that were paid for by the bride’s parents, a practice that was
somewhat explicable in the days when women were expected to remain in a
virginal state at home until the wedding day arrived. As young women
became more independent, age at first marriage in North America and
Western Europe gradually rose from 20 (the Baby Boomer generation) to 30
(today) and couples lived together before marriage, usually as part of a dual-
income household. As a result, it became common practice for couples to
fund their own weddings. However, skyrocketing wedding budgets have
suddenly reversed this situation. Once again, parents are picking up the bill.
In 2017, half of the couples surveyed by Brides paid for the whole wedding
themselves and three-quarters made at least some kind of contribution. But
by 2018, following a year in which the cost of an American wedding
expanded by 75 per cent, as many as 42 per cent of couples allowed or
required their parents to pay for the whole thing.
What is going on? A cursory examination of the wedding industry shows
that younger Millennials and Generation Z are, in many ways, relatively
thrifty. This is what we might expect from a demographic that cares for the
environment, dislikes waste, is concerned about sustainability, enjoys a
rustic aesthetic, and so on. On 27 March 2019, the business journal Forbes
quoted remarks made by fashion search platform Lyst: ‘According to Lyst,
“there has been a 93 per cent increase in views of pre-owned wedding
dresses, with a 42 per cent combined increase for wedding dress searches
including the words ‘vintage’ and ‘second hand’ year on year”.’3 The same
Forbes report highlights the success of the peer-to-peer selling platform
Stillwhite, which allows users to sell their wedding dresses to each other
(and it even has a logo similar to Airbnb). Stillwhite operates in 16 countries
and has reportedly generated $26 million for its sellers. Added to this, jewel-
lers report that younger couples are gradually moving away from diamond
solitaire engagement rings to more unusual and ethical stones including lab-
grown gems (for example, see Fashion Network, 1 February 20194
 INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION 11

and WeddingWire, 30 November 20185). Wedding cakes are ‘naked’ now,

meaning that the stiff, ornate royal icing of yesteryear has been abandoned
in favour of soft, blurry buttercream, sparsely applied to the cake’s outer
surfaces. And for the last several years, couples in the United States, in
particular, have leaned hard on a rustic theme, decorating their weddings
with recycled Mason jars holding flowers and scratchy hessian table runners,
bunting and chair bows which are a perfect fit with the famous Millennial
quest for authenticity.
In light of these entirely predictable Millennial tastes and habits, why is
the cost of weddings suddenly so high? And where did the demanding bride
suddenly spring from, with her synchronized dance routine, expectations that
guests would perform various services and extravagant wardrobe require-
ments? It is not just a case of suppliers such as venues and caterers raising
their prices. A large part of the answer is found in the increasing public visi-
bility of weddings and also wedding trends as a result of digital culture, by
which I mean platforms such as Instagram, on which couples and guests
avidly display photos of their weddings, and Pinterest, which up to 40 million
people use to source ideas for their weddings.6 Dresses may be second-hand
but they are often second-hand couture dresses, costing thousands of dollars.7
Rings may be less likely to involve precious stones, but the trade-off allows
couples to purchase larger, flashier rings (the cost of buying a small ring is
that you may become the victim of ‘ring-shaming’, an aspect of digital culture
in which consumers use public platforms to viciously mock each other’s
engagement rings, for being too small, too cheap-looking or in any other way
failing to comply with current tastes). Cakes may have less frosting but they
often have several tiers and can reach gravity-defying heights.8 Decorations
may involve Mason jars and hessian but today’s weddings also involve a host
of other features not seen previously such as flower walls (a backdrop for
wedding photography), elaborate gifts for guests, especially bridesmaids,
photogenic lighting, minimoons (a short vacation taking place before the
wedding and in addition to the traditional honeymoon) and increased use of
wedding planners to organize an event that has now exceeded the DIY skills
of brides and grooms.
The sudden upswing of the already profitable wedding industry is great
news for business and understanding the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s
engaged couples is far from a matter of the quirks of their individual psychol-
ogy. If wedding tastes were a matter of individual preferences, weddings
would show far more variation than they actually do. In fact, with their
towering cakes, ballooning ball gowns and parties of bridesmaids which
12 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

have grown over time from one or two to six or eight, the better to create a
dramatic effect in photographs, the contemporary Western-style wedding
shows a high degree of conformity. Weddings regress towards an increas-
ingly costly norm.
The norms towards which individual weddings lean are cultural norms.
They are not individual but shared. They derive from culture, as when a
bride-to-be goes to Pinterest to be educated in the matter of how her wedding
‘should’ look, and they sustain culture, as when guests post photographs of
every detail of the wedding on social media before it is even over.
This is why you need semiotics if you supply wedding goods and services
and especially if you are in the business of marketing those services. Indeed,
this is why you need semiotics if you are in any industry that provides goods
and services to consumers, particularly on a large scale and in multiple
countries and regions.
Semiotics is the study of consumer culture. Rather than traditional forms
of market research that concentrate on asking individuals questions about
their attitudes and preferences, and then aggregating the results, semiotics is
a research method that finds out where those ideas come from. It is a research
method that is specifically engineered for decoding cultural practices and
tracking and predicting change. It does this with particular reference to
semiotic signs: objects, visual images, bits of language and other items of
communication that are loaded with meaning. The red soles of Louboutin
shoes are a semiotic sign for wealth and prosperity, as is the brand name.
Ball-gown dresses with large skirts and long trains are a semiotic sign; for
many brides, the meaning of the sign is ‘Disney princess’ and it is not a coin-
cidence that Disney now has its own range of wedding jewellery. A rack of
eight silk dressing gowns, each one embroidered with the name of a brides-
maid, hung on matching, personalized hangers is a semiotic sign, one that
says ‘this bride truly cares for her friends’.
Every consumer decision that an engaged couple makes ahead of their
wedding, right down to their choice of processional music and the style of
their Save the Date notices, involves semiotic signs. If you are a marketer,
being able to recognize, decode and organize semiotic signs gives you a huge
competitive advantage. You know what types of products and services to
offer to consumers, why those items are desirable and how to sell them. You
become capable of inventing new products and services that are in line with
current needs, even though consumers do not know that they want those
items until they see them. Excitingly, you can design your business proposi-
tion and marketing strategy based on a deep understanding of global culture,
regional variations and changing trends over time.
 INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION 13

This book is a self-contained course in semiotics. It is a practical how-to

guide that will equip you with the same skills that I amassed over a 20-year
career in which I have worked with brands in almost every consumer-facing
category. If you read the whole book and do all the exercises, by the end you
will have achieved a deep and penetrating level of understanding of consumer
culture and your brand and its marketing will become more profitable, now
and into the future.

How this book is organized

This book is divided into 12 chapters, arranged in a sequence that takes you
on a guided course in semiotics. It assumes zero knowledge of semiotics to
begin with. By the end of the book you will have gained not only skills in
semiotic analysis but also skills in project design, implementation and
debriefing. Whether you work for a brand-owning organization, an ad
agency, a brand strategy consultancy or a market research agency, or whether
you are a self-employed researcher or marketer with an interest in semiotics,
this book will expand your skills and give you a radical new perspective on
how to sell things to consumers using cultural insight.
The first two chapters concern the business context for semiotics. Chapter
1 describes the changing shape of marketing and corresponding changes in
market research and the methods we use to achieve consumer insight. It
explains how semiotics is used in research and marketing and answers some of
the questions that people have when they first encounter semiotics as a disci-
pline. Chapter 2 presents a landmark case study which shows how semiotics
improved the fortunes of a household brand, far exceeding the expectations of
the brand owner and boosting the brand to new heights of success despite
challenging circumstances. Chapter 2 is also the place where the reader is
encouraged to begin their own research project using semiotics, applying it to
any of a wide range of commonly encountered marketing problems.
Chapter 3 is a standalone chapter that condenses the entire process of
conducting a research project into just a few pages. It offers a blueprint for
designing, implementing and delivering semiotic projects. When you have
finished with the more in-depth chapters of this book, Chapter 3 is the one
you will want to return to for a concise reminder of how to run a project
from start to finish. It also offers guidance in writing research proposals that
incorporate semiotics and as such it will be especially useful to market
researchers and consultants.
14 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

The following three chapters form a section that gets into the detail of
how to do semiotic analysis. Together, they help you identify what kind of
data you should be using and how to process it. Chapter 4 gives specific
instructions on decoding items such as ads, web copy and packaging. It
explains how to recognize and decode individual semiotic signs such as
visual images, words and phrases and physical objects. Chapter 5 moves
from a micro-perspective on semiotic signs to a macro-view of trends, social
change and consumer culture. It shows how to decode and explain large-
scale aspects of consumer habits and needs as seen in the rapidly expanding
yet deeply conformist wedding industry described above. This is an aspect
of semiotics that is barely addressed in print outside of academic literature
and will be invaluable in helping you to develop a complete skill set. Chapter
6 delves into another rarely discussed set of skills in semiotics which concern
creativity and innovation. Semiotics is full of useful techniques for inventing
new things that any marketer can learn to apply and Chapter 6 is where you
will find step-by-step guidance and demonstrations of what to do.
Chapters 7 and 8 offer new ways of collecting data and organizing semi-
otic research that you may not have thought of, even if you are used to the
decoding-signs element of semiotics. Semiotics is often thought of as a form
of desk research but in fact there is every reason for going out and doing
some field trips as a data-gathering exercise. Chapter 7 explains what to do.
Chapter 8 shows how the enterprising researcher can combine semiotics
with two other, closely related, research methods: ethnography and discourse
analysis. These methods are linked by their shared focus on culture and as
such they go hand in hand. Chapter 8 shows how they are related while at
the same time highlighting their differences and offers guided practice in
applying these similar yet distinct analytic approaches to a single data set.
Chapters 9 and 10 show you how to bring your own research project
using semiotics to completion after data collection and analysis are complete.
Chapter 9 shows you how to identify worthwhile insights and convert them
into actionable marketing strategy, taking as examples several commonly
encountered marketing problems. Chapter 10 offers guidance on sharing
the findings of semiotic research, including practical advice on avoiding
common pitfalls. It will help you to ensure that your output has credibility
and gravitas without being too wordy. You will be able to ensure that noth-
ing in your report is wasted and that you only include things that
stakeholders in your research will be excited to apply. If you do all the exer-
cises in this book, by the time you reach the end of Chapter 10 you will have
 INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION 15

conducted a thoroughly professional research project using semiotics which

is now ready to be published and disseminated to an audience.
Chapter 11 takes a look at the future of semiotics with a special focus on
two issues. The first is the role of technology. The rise of technology is
perhaps the defining hallmark of social change and Chapter 11 explains
how you as a semiologist can make the best possible use of that change. The
second issue concerns the spread of semiotics around the globe. As semiotics
has caught on as a form of market research, it has acquired its own unique
flavour in countries such as India and China. In the future, semiotics will
become increasingly diverse and multi-cultural as scholars and marketers in
various countries adopt it, expand on it and add their own local expertise.
The final chapter offers inspiration for your own continuing self-education
in semiotics. Far from a mere reading list, it is a curated guide to some of the
many things that I do to keep growing my skills in semiotics and refreshing
my knowledge of consumer culture. It is a place to begin designing your own
programme of continuing self-development, a programme that will eventu-
ally become unique to you, according to your own special interests and ways
of engaging with the social world.
This book is the culmination of a long journey. I spent nearly seven years
in higher education, gaining a BSc and then a PhD in psychology. I followed
with 20 years of commercial practice, in which I have used semiotics to
solve problems for brand owners and marketers in upwards of 20 countries,
starting at a time when commercial semiotics was barely in its infancy and
continuing today. It has been a wild ride and has equipped me with an
original point of view on virtually every aspect of brands, consumers and
marketing. In this book, I invite you to accompany me on that journey. It
will change your career and eventually it will change your life. Once you
start, you will not look back. Here it is, then; your complete handbook of
semiotics. Turn to Chapter 1 now and let us begin.

Endnotes
1 Scott, Ellen (2018) Bride who was shamed for weight-based dress code says
she’ll hold a polygraph party to find out who snitched, Metro, https://metro.
co.uk/2018/12/07/bride-shamed-weight-based-dress-code-says-shell-hold-
polygraph-party-find-snitched-8220178/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
BM2L-C7Z3)
16 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

2 Park, Andrea (2019) Here’s how much the average wedding in 2018 cost – and
who paid, Brides, www.brides.com/story/american-wedding-study-how-much-
average-wedding-2018-cost (archived at https://perma.cc/4984-PT92)
3 Roberts-Islam, Brooke (2019) Second-hand wedding dresses a sustainable step
too far? Forbes, www.forbes.com/sites/brookerobertsislam/2019/03/27/
second-hand-wedding-dresses-a-sustainable-step-too-far/#45ae0be23259
(archived at https://perma.cc/Q3B3-QVN2)
4 Lacombe, Gabriella (2019) Lab-grown diamonds on the rise in the millennial
bridal market, Fashion Network, https://fashionnetwork.com/news/Lab-grown-
diamonds-on-the-rise-in-the-millennial-bridal-market,1062777.html#.
XTdovujYqUk (archived at https://perma.cc/KP9T-S2T8)
5 Tynes, Jacqueline (2018) How to buy an engagement ring like a millennial,
Wedding Wire, www.weddingwire.com/wedding-ideas/how-to-buy-an-
engagement-ring-like-a-millennial (archived at https://perma.cc/R8FQ-N8Y9)
6 Jacobson, Ivy (2019) Guess how many people use Pinterest for wedding
planning every year, The Knot, www.theknot.com/content/pinterest-wedding-
planning-study (archived at https://perma.cc/ZF42-92CX)
7 I searched for dresses on Stillwhite from the UK in July 2018. Roughly 2,000
dresses were on sale at a price at or below £200. An equal number were on sale
at a price above £3,000, with an average price of £4,500. The dresses at this
upper end of the market were advertised as discounted by about one-third,
implying an original purchase price of about £6,750. Designers at the top end of
the market included Oscar de la Renta, Pallas Couture, Steven Khalil and
similar.
8 www.instagram.com/p/B0Q_TVjBAYG/ (archived at https://perma.cc/7XJ7-
FSKN)
 17

01

Semiotics will change your career

in marketing or market research

Business dilemmas
Marketing is changing and market research is changing with it. If you work
in these industries, here are just a few of the changes that you may have
noticed.
Selling is out of fashion. Relationship marketing and content marketing
are in. The rationale is that selling, which used to involve cold-calling,
advertising and spamming strangers with sales messages, existed to try to
make people do something, make them buy a product. Marketers have
realized that people don’t like being sold to and having their time used up
by other people with whom they have no common interests. The new style
of marketing uses a different logic. Its rationale is that people don’t want
to read advertising unless there is some added value in the form of content
that they would have enjoyed reading anyway and that they don’t feel has
wasted their time. It is also an approach to marketing that relies on the
idea of ‘help’. According to this new wisdom, your goal should be to help
people by giving something away – expertise, a solution to a problem – in
order to build brand equity. When your potential customer is ready to buy,
they will turn to you because they feel that they already know you and
think well of you.
In 2017 and 2018, consumer-facing brands invested heavily in influencer
marketing. The rationale was that a young and relatable fashion blogger on
Instagram who had managed to amass a few thousand followers could sell
your brand of watches or shoes much more effectively (and cheaply!) than
you can sell them yourself using more traditional methods. The key word
used in connection with this approach was ‘authenticity’. Brand owners felt
18 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

that young bloggers who love their brands and who are not professional
marketers were trusted by their followers and had an aura of authenticity
around them which traditional sales methods could not match. Ironically,
and because nothing is ever as straightforward as it first appears, some of
the young influencers turned out to be less than completely authentic,
buying thousands of followers in the form of fake accounts to make their
reach seem larger. A larger reach enabled them to charge larger fees to
brand owners, whose products they then promoted to a somewhat fictional
audience. Although brand owners have now wised up to this practice and
are more careful about spending money on influencer marketing than they
used to be, the practice persists and agencies who act as intermediaries
between brand owners and influencers now make a display of tools and
software that they have developed to ensure that only the most authentic of
influencers are on their books.
Content marketing and influencer marketing are two aspects of digital
marketing, in which brands try to get closer to consumers by targeting them
in the places where they are known to spend their time – their Facebook
accounts, YouTube, Twitter. Improving digital marketing is a highly sophis-
ticated business in which marketers weigh up the merits of Facebook pages
versus groups, the advantages of a meme on Instagram versus a video on
YouTube. Memes reach more people, more quickly. Videos reach a smaller
audience because people are short of time but those who do watch are
considered to be more deeply engaged with the message.
Alongside this sea change in marketing, there’s been a change in market
research. More companies are taking the view that they can do their market
research in-house, now that online surveys are easier and cheaper to design
and implement than ever before. Qualitative research, too, is being brought
in-house and is prone to being technologized – why pay an agency to do
individual, face-to-face interviews when you can form a WhatsApp group of
potential customers and fire questions at them as you happen to think of
them? If you work in market research and your business centres on tradi-
tional methods such as focus groups, you may have noticed that clients are
less impressed with those methods than they used to be and that they expect
you to offer something new and different in your proposal.
These changes do not spell the end of market research, but they do reflect
a different focus on the part of people who use it. This new focus is not
solely about doing research faster and more cheaply. It also includes an
element of recognizing that researching people as discrete individuals, who
need to be individually questioned about their brand preferences, isn’t
 SEMIOTICS WILL CHANGE YOUR CAREER IN MARKETING OR MARKET RESEARCH 19

necessarily the best way forward when it comes to understanding a popula-

tion. A better way to understand populations, in this view, is to recognize
that large numbers of people behave in similar ways. They watch YouTube
videos for similar reasons, which can be accurately predicted by making
small changes to video titles, even as the content remains the same. They
follow certain celebrities for similar reasons – fans of Kim Kardashian have
more similarities than differences. They gravitate towards digital platforms
such as Mumsnet and Reddit to find people who have common interests
and share their views.
This is a macro view of the consumer. More than ever, marketers see the
value of recognizing that individual consumers are not all that different
from one another, as evidenced by their behaviour, and that’s why the tradi-
tional forms of market research which leverage depth and not breadth are
beginning to seem expensive and dated.
There’s still a role for research, though. Taking a macro view of consum-
ers does not make the mysteries of their attitudes and behaviour go away.
When large numbers of people reject one brand while embracing another,
or when a brand succeeds in one region of the world but fails somewhere
else, we still need to ask why. Happily, methods for getting to consumer
insight are evolving. The new buzzword now is ‘culture’. If you can under-
stand the culture of consumers, whether at the level of a geographical
region, an age group or a fashionable subculture, then you have under-
stood what moves them and you are better able to engage them and
persuade them to buy your products.

A new focus on culture

The market research industry has a life of its own and evolves on its own
terms. Some 20 years ago, well before marketing took its recent turn, market
research was quietly introducing new methods which encouraged the users
of research to think about consumers at the level of culture rather than indi-
vidual psychology. These approaches were slow to take hold because in
talking about culture rather than individuals, the market research industry
was slightly ahead of the needs of marketers. Now that marketing has
caught on to the value of researching consumers at the level of their culture –
their shared beliefs, habits and tastes – those new methods have caught fire.
They amount to a large paradigm shift in market research: a profound shift
in perspective when we consider what we are studying. It is sometimes
20 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

referred to as a shift from the inside-out approach to the outside-in approach,

so it’s worth taking a moment to consider what those phrases mean.
Throughout the 20th century, all of market research was an exercise in
human psychology. The tools and instruments of market research were care-
fully constructed survey questionnaires, discussion guides and projective
tests and all of them came from psychology. The job of the market researcher,
in this traditional model, was to mimic psychologists and use their tools to
excavate psychological products such as attitudes, brand preferences and
beliefs that were assumed to be located inside people’s heads. This approach
later became known as the inside-out approach to research.
In recent years, a new approach emerged. It is the outside-in approach to
research and it involves a radical change of view. Instead of trying to get
psychological products out of people’s heads, it instead asks how those atti-
tudes, preferences and beliefs got in there in the first place. Where did they
come from? The answer offered by this new approach is that they come
from the surrounding culture of which every consumer is inherently a part.
A new family of research methods appeared in market research which
characterize this outside-in approach. Those methods are:

●● Ethnography
The primary research method of anthropology. A method devised to
investigate culture by watching human behaviour, regularly downgraded
to the status of an extra-long depth interview or accompanied shop by an
industry that has yet to fully appreciate its power.
●● Discourse analysis
The least-known of the culture methods, a radically different way to
understand speech and writing.
●● Semiotics
Possibly the most exciting of the culture methods, distinguished by its
unprecedented ability to decode visual images and spell out what they
mean to consumers. Semiotics is popularly defined as ‘the study of signs
and symbols’ but it is also the study of the art of persuasion. As such, it
is a powerful tool in the hands of anyone who works with brands or
consumers. It is an invigorating and far-reaching method that changes
the worldview of all who use it. Semiotics is the subject of this book.
Here you will find a thorough programme of self-education, with a dedi-
cated focus on commercial application. If you do all of the exercises in
this book, you will look at consumers and brands differently. You will
never look back and your career in marketing or market research will be
permanently refreshed.
 SEMIOTICS WILL CHANGE YOUR CAREER IN MARKETING OR MARKET RESEARCH 21

What is semiotics?
What do people in semiotics mean when they talk about signs and symbols?
Think of a piece of fruit. Is it an apple? Did you know that as late as the
17th century, ‘apple’ was a word for all kinds of fruit, including nuts? What
do you see in your mind? Is it red?
Now go to Google Images and type in the phrase ‘clipart apple’. Nearly
all clipart apples are red, even though most apples in real life are green, or a
mix of shades of green, yellow and red. In Western culture, tiny children are
taught to read from books that begin with the words ‘A is for Apple’ and the
illustration is invariably red. The idea that apples somehow stand for fruit
in general and that red is the ‘right’ colour for an apple even though that
doesn’t line up with real-life experience is an idea that is hundreds of years
old and to this day is instilled in consumers when they are so small they
can’t read or spell their own names.
How about an apple with a bite out of it, what does that mean? If the
ideas that come to mind are something like ‘loss of innocence’, ‘sudden
insight’ or even ‘sin’, that’s because you have had some exposure to the
culture and mythology of Abrahamic religions, in which Eve brings about
the downfall of humanity by eating from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.
Are you Greek or from a Nordic country? Then you may be able to detect
some meaning in the idea of a golden apple, meaning which is lost on people
who don’t share your cultural background. Pre-dating Biblical apples,
golden apples are very precious, they grow on the tree of life and make
people eternally young.
It’s beginning to seem as though Apple Inc made a great choice when naming
itself and choosing its logo. It has all these layers of meaning, such as the power
to represent and stand for entire categories (in this case, technology), clear
vision (thanks to Eve) and preciousness. Depending on your exposure to still
other cultural messages such as ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’, the
apple may acquire yet more valuable meanings, such as health.
If you are from other cultures, though, there might be different meanings,
good ones and bad ones. In China, the word for apple is ‘ping’, which also
means ‘peace’ (Chinese has a lot of homonyms – words that sound the same
but have multiple meanings). In Central Asia, apples signify romantic inten-
tions or even a proposal of marriage. But in Native American culture, ‘apple’
emerged as a slang term in the 1980s. It is a slur used to describe someone who
has ‘sold out’ to white America and lost touch with their roots (Trusler, 2015).
Now go back to Google Images and take a quick look at the rainbow apple
that Apple Inc used from the late 1970s for about 20 years. Depending on your
22 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

age and cultural background, rainbows may mean happiness, optimism, possi-
bly springtime, and that’s why they are found all over children’s brands and
products. Alternatively, the rainbow may signify ‘gay pride’ or ‘LGBTQ+ rights’
if you are from a demographic that is reached by international LGBTQ+ news.
Apple Inc operates in some countries which have conservative views
about LGBTQ+ people and using the rainbow today would likely be inter-
preted as a bold political statement, while in other markets it would be
recognized as a positive sign of inclusivity.
As we consider these examples, we have made a start with the practice of
semiotics. It is a process of deep cultural analysis that uncovers the exact
meanings of words and images to consumers in different demographics and
in different parts of the world. This process helps us to design better ads and
packaging, more appealing brands, engaging retail displays and sticky
websites. It helps us to understand why consumers react in certain ways to
marketing communications and it predicts those reactions. Ultimately it
gives control to marketers and brand owners who want to make sure they
get the right messages to the right people. If you are a market researcher,
semiotics will change the way you look at consumers and their culture, it
will expand your range of services and give you a competitive edge. You
need semiotics and this book will guide you to professional competence,
even if you are starting out with zero knowledge of the subject.

How is semiotics applied in marketing?

The example of the apple and its various meanings is a very simple demon-
stration of semiotics. It focuses on the idea of ‘signs and symbols’ in a
straightforward and literal way. Because it is easy to understand, this process
of detecting the meaning of signs and symbols and then discerning the impli-
cations of that for brands, such as whether they should use an apple as their
brand mark, was the first application of semiotics that marketers grasped
and bought into. To this day, a large part of commercial activity in semiotics
is applied to this kind of purpose: choosing a logo or brand mark; deciding
which elements to include in packaging; finding the right visual design and
tone of voice for company websites.
There’s more to semiotics, though, and sometimes marketers engage in
semiotic thinking without quite realizing it. In the opening section of this
chapter, I observed that marketing is currently focused on two very interesting
 SEMIOTICS WILL CHANGE YOUR CAREER IN MARKETING OR MARKET RESEARCH 23

ideas, which a semiologist would immediately recognize as semiotic signs.

The first one is ‘helping’, as used in connection with content marketing and
relationship marketing. The second is ‘authentic’, as used in connection with
influencer marketing and anything to do with marketing to young people.
When marketers recognize these words as significant to particular groups of
consumers – that is, to particular subcultures – and latch on to them, making
them the keystones of their marketing strategy, they begin to engage with
semiotics. They recognize that these words have a special value that is cultur-
ally specific rather than being a matter of individual preference. They realize
that embracing ideas that are culturally meaningful to their target audience
helps make their businesses more profitable.
Some companies that are experienced users of semiotics fully appreciate
that ‘help’ and ‘authenticity’ are semiotic matters. Rather than assuming
that they know what these words mean or splashing them around in their
own marketing copy without connecting them to any larger phenomena,
they engage semiologists. The job of semiotics is then to find out why these
words matter to specific consumer groups, whether there are variations
between demographics or around the world and, most importantly, what
else companies can and should be doing to present themselves as ‘helpful’
and ‘authentic’ beyond simply using those words. Semiologists tackle the
question by examining the products of culture. They don’t restrict them-
selves to looking at individual signs and symbols such as apples or rainbows.
They identify the target culture and then review as much as they can of the
total communicative output of that culture, looking for the ways that ‘help-
ing’ and ‘authenticity’ fit into a larger set of culturally specific ideas or
beliefs. In practical terms, this means that if you are trying to sell to young
people, you include in your data set as much as possible of the communica-
tions that they generate, and this certainly includes their blogs, Instagram
feeds, social interactions with each other in face-to-face situations and so
on. The semiologist will not simply remark that these words are useful but
make connections between the words and a larger set of values that are
prioritized by the target market. This is sometimes called ‘big semiotics’ or
‘top-down semiotics’ and it is the subject of Chapter 5. It is used by brands
to better understand consumers and stay ahead of their evolving needs.

How is semiotics used in market research?

To market research agencies that supply qualitative research, semiotics
solves a host of practical problems and adds depth and, I like to say, sparkle
24 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

to the analysis of qualitative data. Here are some examples that represent
my everyday working life as a practicing semiologist. They are the types of
problems commonly brought to me by researchers and marketers who
possess qualitative data or need to generate qualitative output:

●● They did some observational research and made video recordings of

people shopping or using a product. They can see the surface behaviour
but they want to be able to say what it means.
●● Their qualitative research asked consumers to collect and submit photos
but now they aren’t sure what to do with them.
●● Their qualitative research generated a lot of transcripts and they want to
get past reportage and uncover the psychological and social dynamics in
consumer talk.
●● They have collected ads in a specific business category and they need to
be able to explain how ads are different in a way that goes beyond surface
description.
●● Their client or boss has an ambition to express complex human emotions
through FMCG packaging. It seems like a tall order and they don’t know
where to start making recommendations.
●● They work in advertising and they need original insights on a well-worn
topic to develop a fresh, engaging campaign.

Added to this, some of them recognize that semiotics is not just a solution to
problems that arise from conventional market research but a complete research
method in its own right. It is absolutely serviceable as a standalone research
method, entailing skills and a procedure which are passed on in this book. The
distinctive appeal of semiotics as a discrete research method lies in the follow-
ing abilities, in which it excels relative to traditional research methods:

●● It shows how meaning is conveyed, by exposing the mechanisms of brand

and consumer communications. This helps marketers to design better
brands, ads and packaging.
●● It collects samples of data from consumer culture and uses these to infer
social and cultural structures such as cohorts (eg, Millennials, Generation
Z), systems of social class, political systems including identity politics and
special interest groups. This helps brand owners and marketers to design
brands and communications that speak to specific audiences.
●● It is amassing a body of knowledge about how brands and consumers
communicate meaning and understand each other in different regions of
 SEMIOTICS WILL CHANGE YOUR CAREER IN MARKETING OR MARKET RESEARCH 25

the world. This helps global brands that need to satisfy consumers in
multiple markets, and local brands that wish to expand their reach.
●● It tracks social and ideological change as well as changes in taste. This
helps marketers to understand and predict social trends and it helps
innovators design products and services which are right for consumers
now and in the future.
●● Semiotics is most famous for its unique ability to decode visual images.
While its focus on consumer culture overlaps with related methods such
as discourse analysis and ethnography, semiotics is the only market
research method to have emerged which provides a systematic, reliable
and culturally sensitive method for saying what visual images mean, not
just at the level of individual semiotic signs such as apples but also at the
level of complex visual messages that involve multiple signs working
together. This results in better ads, websites, social media content, retail
store design and merchandising.

Frequently asked questions

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and I thought that meant it
is used for decoding ads and packaging. How does it find things to say
about consumers?
When I wrote ‘De-mystifying semiotics’ back in 2002 (International Journal
of Market Research, vol 44), the market research audience for whom it was
intended was largely unaware that there are research methods that do not
require direct interaction with consumers. At that time, almost nothing was
available in the way of semiotics or discourse analysis and there was very
little ethnography. Almost the whole of the market research industry
consisted of making people respond to questions, whether quantitatively or
qualitatively. Semiotics is not the study of human individuals and the
answers they give to questions. It is the study of culture and the way that we
access culture, which would otherwise be hard to pin down, is by ­studying
the products of culture. The products of culture include things like build-
ings, fashions, prepared foods, social institutions such as business
and education, private and public services, retail and shopping and every-
thing that is the result of human endeavour. The building blocks of those
cultural products, the granular units from which they are constructed, are
semiotic signs. Semiologists study semiotic signs, not just because they enjoy
26 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

a­ ssembling collections of things in the manner of stamp-collecting or train-

spotting but because those signs reveal how culture works, how it exerts its
influence on consumers. If you know how culture works, you can design
brands and marketing communications that are culturally appropriate and
that people will like.
As it happens, an incidental benefit of semiotics as a research method is
that the requirement to go via consumers-answering-questions is removed.
For example, if we want to know how brands differ, using semiotics let us
go straight to brand communications and map them in terms of the values
they express and the meanings they convey. Lest we think we are leaving
humans out of the picture, there are two things to keep in mind:

1 The values and meanings that are being communicated are human values
and meanings. They are not products of nature and they were not handed
down by God. They are culturally produced, by people, the same people
that the brand owner is trying to sell to. When we do semiotics, we are
not removing ourselves from consumers, we are drawing closer to them,
but we are considering them collectively rather than making them fill out
surveys and interviews one at a time.
2 Just because we don’t absolutely need to talk to consumers to get the job
done in semiotics, it does not follow that we should positively avoid talk-
ing to them. In fact, everything that consumers say is full of semiotic
signs. In my own commercial practice, if I wanted to deliver useful insight
concerning the competitive set for (let’s say) a beauty brand, I would
prefer to consider the communications of brands in light of the things
that consumers say and believe about beauty, because naturally occurring
beauty-talk is abundantly available and we have to acknowledge that
that is useful and also that the designers, marketers and retailers who put
brands on the market are themselves consumers. There is no escape from
the supermarket. We are all paid-up members of one or another culture,
sometimes the same culture that we are trying to sell to.

Do I need to validate semiotic insights using qualitative research

such as focus groups?
Clients sometimes like to frame the relationship between semiotics and
other, more conventional, types of qualitative research in terms of valida-
tion. You will see an example of this in Chapter 2, where we consider a
famous case study, ‘Rebranding Charmin’. In this case, the client used
 SEMIOTICS WILL CHANGE YOUR CAREER IN MARKETING OR MARKET RESEARCH 27

semiotics to generate insights and recommendations, turned these into

stimulus materials and then tested the reactions of focus groups. This is a
perfectly rational approach and semiotics can be a great way to develop
concept stimulus materials and story boards which have a chance of
success, rather than taking a trial-and-error approach, which can be slow
and expensive.
There’s nothing wrong with co-ordinating semiotics with qualitative
research in this way. Alternatively, you may choose to reverse the order of
events. If qualitative data have been generated using focus groups or an
online community or some such, then applying semiotic analysis to the
topics at hand can help you discover whether your focus groups were anom-
alous or were saying things that are deeply conventional (and thus useful,
because they extend to the larger population).
There will be more discussion of sampling, reliability and validity in
Chapter 10 but for the sake of a short answer, let me observe that these quite
different research methods need their own tests of validity because they use
different frameworks and operate on different assumptions. The type of
market research that studies individual humans and makes them answer
questions about their privately held attitudes and brand preferences relies
on the size and quality of its sample of humans to achieve validity. This is
why qualitative research is perpetually on the back foot relative to quantita-
tive research, apologizing for its tiny numbers and convenience sampling
rather than random sampling. Semiotics is not the study of individual
humans, it is the study of culture. We are not sampling people, we are
sampling cultural output. One way to achieve validity is to make sure that
we cut a generous slice of culture for inspection. This will save you from
appearing to make claims about consumer culture using a single data point.
Success can be achieved by taking a wide range of data points and types of
representation into account.

Is there a place for quantification in semiotics?

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with incorporating quantitative data
in semiotics projects, in just the same way that there’s nothing fundamen-
tally wrong with paying attention to the things consumers say in focus
groups. However, we must exercise great caution in how we treat quantita-
tive data, for two reasons:
28 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

1 Numbers are a form of language. They are not outside of language and
culture, they are a part of language and culture. As such, most of the time
in your semiotic practice, you will want to treat numbers as a topic for
research and not as an explanatory resource. For example, if your analy-
sis causes you to encounter a food pack or ad that says ‘one of your five
a day!’ or ‘50% extra free’ or ‘8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas’, you will
easily recognize this as a semiotic move. It is a persuasive, rhetorical ges-
ture. Because of this, you should be equally alert to the irredeemably
semiotic quality of claims such as ‘our new, automated semiotic product
decodes 50 times the data, 50 times faster!’ and ‘customer satisfaction is
up 50% on last year’. The semiotic term for what you are looking at here
is ‘quantification rhetoric’. Quantification rhetoric is designed to appear
precise, believable and convincing. It is designed to draw you in. Your job
as a semiologist is not to fall for the story those numbers are trying to sell
you but to develop a critical appreciation of how the numbers are doing
a marketing job in selling the story.
2 The second reason why we want to be careful when dealing with num-
bers is because the activity of counting things relies on those things being
easily identifiable, present, visible and capable of being labelled and
sorted. Too much focus on ‘counting things’ in semiotics can lead to a
pedestrian type of analysis where large numbers of visual images are
counted in terms of their gross physical characteristics such as ‘image is
mainly red’, ‘image is mainly green’, ‘image shows an adult holding a
baby’ and ‘image shows automobiles’. Unfortunately, this type of semiot-
ics frequently results in spurious analytic claims, where the red images are
tagged ‘energy’ or ‘power’ even though in some cases they are merely
communicating a flavour variant, the green images are tagged ‘nature’,
even though some of them are photos of nuclear warheads, the adult-
with-baby images are tagged ‘nurturing’ even though some of them are
pictures of Donald Trump holding the babies of voters and the images
showing automobiles are tagged ‘freedom’ even though some of them
show homeless people living in their cars. This is definitely a situation
that we want to avoid and it is exacerbated when people try to automate
semiotics to do the counting for them. If your analysis is weak, then scal-
ing it up to impressive quantitative amounts just multiplies the problem
and makes it larger. In this situation, a small sample would have been
better because there is a better chance that a live human would have con-
sidered each data point before making a decision about it.
 SEMIOTICS WILL CHANGE YOUR CAREER IN MARKETING OR MARKET RESEARCH 29

Even more problematically, sometimes the interesting feature of an image

or other data point depends on what is absent, not what is present. It is
interesting because of what it leaves out, not what it includes. A stark,
minimalist shopping mall with no decoration. A princess posing outside
the Taj Mahal without her husband. A celebrity who has removed their
wedding ring. Missing tattoos. A party with no guests. A school classroom
with no chairs, desks or books. A car with no driver. If you are over-
concerned with counting things, you will lose sight of the valuable insights
that come from recognizing when things are missing or absent. It’s hard to
count things that are not there. Try to make analytic claims that succeed
because of their quality, not claims that rely on the impression created by
large numbers.

How do I explain to a client how semiotics will add value when I am

writing a proposal?
The answer to this question is going to depend on why you are including
semiotics in your project. Semiotics should not be something that you throw
into your market research project as an afterthought, to jazz things up.
Semiotics is a method of understanding culture and human communica-
tions, so use it when your business objectives and research objectives
irreducibly include those things.
Examples of ‘culture’ questions:

●● How can my client’s brand stay ahead of emerging health trends?

●● Our brand sells well in countries A and B but is tanking in countries C
and D. Is there something cultural going on that consumers are not
sharing with us?
●● Our brand is well established but customers are growing older. What can
we do to make it seem more youthful and relevant?

These are problems which explicitly concern culture and which consumers
cannot be expected to solve. Consumers are good at exemplifying cultural
issues in their talk but they are not analysts of culture.
Examples of ‘communication’ questions:

●● We want to communicate a particular message or concept with our

brand. How are our competitors handling it, are there any variations and
where is our opportunity to say something new?
30 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● Consumers say that our brand seems a bit remote, cold and off-putting
and we are worried that we are using the wrong tone of voice. Where is
the problem located and how do we fix it?
●● We want to respond to a trending social issue in our marketing
communications. How can we talk about it without offending people or
seeming patronizing?

These are problems which explicitly concern communication, whether

visual or verbal. Consumers are great at reacting to communications and
can tell you when there is something wrong but cannot be expected to
pinpoint the moments of failure and provide solutions.
If you have a problem that concerns culture or communication and that
consumers cannot be expected to solve for you, that’s when you need semi-
otics. It is a method that has been expressly designed to show how cultural
issues manifest themselves, how they make themselves apparent in everyday
life and how they are expressed in communication. It is a systematic and
orderly method that uses empirical evidence to reach its conclusions.
Where you can, include demonstrations, samples and tasters of semiotic
analysis so that the client can anticipate the kind of output that will result.

I need to answer some questions about a culture that is not my own and
I don’t speak the language. Can I still do semiotics?
Whether you are doing semiotics in a market that is part of your native
culture or whether you are investigating a culture to which you are a
foreigner, there are attendant hazards and rewards.
When you are researching your own culture, the advantage of that is that
you already have a lot of insight about how things work in that local market.
You speak the language, you understand the cultural landscape, you have a
feel for how brands and consumers behave and interact across a range of
categories. This can be very time-saving and get you to the results you need
more efficiently. The hazard of researching your own culture is that it is
relatively difficult to divorce yourself from a network of beliefs and assump-
tions that you have grown up with and tend to rely on in your everyday life.
There may be times when you cannot see the wood for the trees, when you
cannot see what is right in front of your face because it is so familiar to you.
In a workshop, one participant commented to me that a researcher in a
project that she had worked on did not think to report that people in her
country put deodorant on their clothes, not on their bodies. To that
 SEMIOTICS WILL CHANGE YOUR CAREER IN MARKETING OR MARKET RESEARCH 31

researcher, spraying deodorant on your clothes and not on your armpits was
a normal practice and did not merit a mention, even though the client found
it very unusual and interesting once it was picked up on.
Conversely, when you are researching a culture that is not your own, the
advantage of that is that you will not make these types of mistakes. You are
not fully assimilated within the culture, nearly everything is strange and
worthy of attention and you will be able to recognize the behaviour of
consumers and brands as culturally specific. Things will not be accidentally
overlooked because they seemed ‘normal’. The difficulty of researching a
culture that is not your own is that you may have problems understanding
what you are looking at, you may not speak the language, you may not have
a clear picture of how consumers and brands usually behave. In this situa-
tion, it’s a great idea to work with a local representative. It doesn’t need to
be a trained semiologist – an intelligent person from the client side or from
a local research agency will be ideal. I have had excellent results on projects
concerning Scandinavian taste and Chinese-language digital shopping by
working with local researchers who live and work in those regions. They
can translate foreign-language materials on the fly and will give you a crash
course in ‘how things are done around here’ as your analysis proceeds.

Developing professional competence in semiotics seems like a complex

task. Can it be reduced to a few key skills?
Becoming good at semiotics is a full-time job and it will keep you busy for a
lifetime. The longer you keep doing it and the more you put in, the more you
will get out of it and the more your analysis and business insight will improve.
Despite the fact that there is almost no limit to the ways in which you can
improve your skills in semiotics (an idea which is developed in Chapter 12),
at the very start of your journey, it can be helpful to give names to a few
essential skills that will help you to develop core competence. Here they are:

●● Make yourself familiar with the scientific method

Science is the cornerstone of rational inquiry and all market research
methods are based on its foundations. Semiotics substantially deviates
from this method, in its what-if hypothesis that everything is socially
constructed, in its scepticism regarding cultural products such as quanti-
fication and that which passes for nature, and in its preference for obser-
vation of spontaneously occurring behaviour over data that were
manufactured in a lab. If one is going to deviate from something, it is
32 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

better and you will be more successful if you fully understand what you
are deviating from. If you haven’t thought about the scientific method
since you were at school, remind yourself of its basic principles as prepa-
ration for beginning semiotics. It will keep you anchored to empirical
evidence, help you to answer questions about sampling and validity and
keep you from writing fanciful essays that belong in literary journals and
not in anyone’s marketing strategy.
●● Become clear about what is meant by key terms in semiotics and use them
precisely
A semiotic sign is any unit of communication that conveys meaning.
‘Sign’ does not mean ‘a picture of something’. A code is a sum of semiotic
signs which are regularly found clustering together, co-operatively creat-
ing meaning. A code may be normative in its effects, meaning that people
want to comply with it and hold each other accountable for non-­
compliance, but ‘code’ has a more specifically semiotic meaning than
‘norm’. ‘Deconstruction’ means to give a text (such as a TV ad) a close
reading and critical semiotic analysis until the mechanisms on which it
relies for its meaning break apart and their internal workings are exposed.
It does not mean ‘write an essay about something and pick out a few
semiotic signs’. If you didn’t break whatever it was, you didn’t decon-
struct it. Don’t worry if all these terms are not clear right away. One of
the purposes of this book is to make you confident in using semiotic
language. There’s a glossary at the back of this book where you can look
up the key terms in semiotics as you need them.
●● Get into the habit of asking what social or cultural purpose is served by
the things you are examining
This is the major way that you can keep yourself from merely describing
things instead of explaining them. If your interesting object is something
like an extravagant ice cream cone, piled high with scoops of ice cream
and scattered with sprinkles, your description of characteristics such as
the colour of the cone, the design of the label wrapped around the cone
and the size of the sprinkles are all of secondary interest. These may be
noteworthy semiotic signs but they are not the primary goal of your
­analysis. Your job is not to ask what the extravagant cone looks like but
what it is for. What purpose does it serve? How does it fit into the culture
where you found it? How does it respond to normative ideas in that cul-
ture about food, treats and health? Is it falling in line with those norma-
tive ideas? Is it rebelling against them? How might a c­ onsumer benefit by
 SEMIOTICS WILL CHANGE YOUR CAREER IN MARKETING OR MARKET RESEARCH 33

engaging with this object? What might be the costs? Are there some occa-
sions when they positively should eat it? Are there occasions when eating
it would result in negative attention and d
­ isapproval? Paying attention to
what things are for will not let you down. After that, your comments on
the appearance of the thing will be much more interesting and relevant.

In the next chapter we will take a closer look at how businesses apply semiot-
ics to marketing and how that directly affects their bottom line. In Chapter 3,
a ready-to-use recipe for conducting a self-contained research project using
semiotics is supplied.
34

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 35

02

An explosion of semiotics
in business

WHAT’S COMING UP

This chapter is about the real-world applications of semiotics to business.

By the end of this chapter, you will have:

●● a grasp of its commercial applications;

●● an understanding of how semiotic analysis of brands and consumers
affects the bottom line; and
●● a view of the market for semiotics.

This book offers a self-contained course in marketing semiotics and prac-

tical activity starts right here. In this chapter there are prompts to think
and write about business and marketing problems that you are experienc-
ing now or have worked on. By the end of this chapter you will have
selected at least one of these to carry forward as a project as you progress
through this book.
The case study in this chapter is the story of how SCA, a Swedish forestry
and paper company, used semiotics to transform the future of a brand after
SCA acquired it from Procter & Gamble, in a high-stakes business situation.

All projects in semiotics which are supplied commercially begin with some sort
of challenge or problem. Staying focused on that problem gives your research a
purpose. It helps you plan your project and apply a framework for analysis. This
is the best way to stay on track and make sure that you end up with results that
straightforwardly convert into marketing solutions.
36 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Activity: Find your challenge

This is the first of a connected series of activities distributed throughout this
book. If you do them all, you will have worthwhile insights at the end which
you can apply to solve one or more marketing problems. Our first task is to
choose a problem. Take a look at the list below. It shows lots of business
applications of semiotics. It is not an exhaustive list but it is comprehensive
enough that you should be able to find something in there which you can
relate to your own experience. Identify a challenge that you are facing now
or that you have worked on in the past, whether in your own business or for
a client, that is similar to one of the items on this list. If you find two or three
items that apply to your situation, so much the better. Start a journal and
make a note of the challenges you’ve chosen. We’ll work on these challenges
together as you continue the practical activities in this book.

Marketing Challenge Hotlist

Here are some of the many commercial applications of semiotics. Find at
least one item on this list that is relevant to your own professional ­experience:

●● Creating and launching new brands.

●● Repositioning brands.
●● Communicating the results of mergers.
●● Rejuvenating older brands.
●● Making marketing communications clearer and more motivating.
●● Making brands, products and services seem premium.
●● Communicating ‘value’ and ‘economy’.
●● Identifying emerging trends in product categories and in consumer
behaviour.
●● Finding new ways to engage shoppers in store and at fixture, merchandising
and designing retail stores and platforms. Note also that you can read
much more about retail in Using Semiotics in Retail (Lawes, 2022).
●● Giving local brands a more global reach and helping global brands to
address local audiences.
●● Aligning products and brands with the consumer needs of specific segments,
demographics and cohorts such as Millennials and Generation Z.
 AN EXPLOSION OF SEMIOTICS IN BUSINESS 37

●● Marketing to social groups which are organized around gender, social

class, ethnicity or other aspects of identity.
●● Generating creative ideas to stimulate innovation and advertising.
●● Identifying and crafting convincing and relevant brand stories.

Case study: Rebranding Charmin

In 2011, at a time when commercial semiotics as it exists today was still in
its early years and relatively unknown, a case study was presented to the
annual conference of the Market Research Society in London (Lawes and
Blackburne, 2011). It was nominated for Best Paper and the panel of confer-
ence judges described it as making the most compelling business case for
semiotics that it had ever seen. It made an impact because it told the remark-
able story of how a business used semiotics to transform the performance of
a brand from expected losses into a success that surprised everyone. The title
of the paper was ‘Rebranding Charmin’.1

Business context
The business owner was SCA, a Swedish company that makes household
products from paper such as kitchen paper, facial tissue and toilet paper
(this part of SCA’s business is now called Essity). SCA had a problem that
was giving it a headache. Already the owner of brands such as Velvet in the
UK and Zewa in Germany, it had managed to acquire the European licence
to the toilet paper brand Charmin from Procter & Gamble. This was a very
exciting acquisition. It was a brand that P&G had spent tens of millions of
pounds building up but the sale came with draconian conditions attached.
Within three years, SCA was required to drop all the brand assets that made
Charmin recognizable including the brand name, the logo and the famous
mascot, the lovable Charmin bear.
An extra factor playing in to this situation was that Charmin loyalists
were unusually loyal. Although Charmin was worth over £90 million, it was
far from the biggest brand in the UK, easily overshadowed by Andrex and
Velvet. Despite this, Charmin had 50 per cent more highly loyal customers
than Velvet, its nearest competitor. In focus groups, when SCA tested the
idea of replacing the Charmin bear with the Velvet mascot ‘Baby MD’, ugly
scenes were witnessed. There was a lot of brand equity in assets such as the
bear – but the bear had to go.
38 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

SCA knew that it had to expect losses as a result of taking away all the
things that those loyal consumers loved best. It took seriously the analysis
of Millward Brown which said that a brand in Charmin’s situation could
expect a loss of brand awareness of up to 26 per cent and loss of sales of
up to 20 per cent, taking three to four years to recover. SCA then brought
in Lawes Consulting to supply semiotics with a view to managing the
rebranding process and mitigating those losses as much as possible. How to
avoid upsetting those loyal customers? It seemed as though SCA needed to
change everything about Charmin while appearing to change nothing.
After some initial semiotics consultancy from Lawes, SCA decided to try
to make Charmin into a new brand in the UK. In Germany a different deci-
sion was taken, to subsume Charmin under the local power brand Zewa,
and this later provided a useful benchmark when assessing rebranded
Charmin’s performance.

Objectives
Having taken the decision to build a new brand, SCA was faced with the
pressing question of how to replace the valuable brand assets it was about
to lose, with minimal loss of equity among those loyal customers. These led
to objectives which included:

●● Finding a new mascot to replace the bear (while satisfying P&G’s lawyers
that the new character was not a bear).
●● Finding a new name.

These items could not be invented arbitrarily but needed to convey meaning
to consumers that was equivalent to the items they were replacing. Replacing
the iconic bear was a tall order as it was highly recognizable and had an
entire fictional world built up around it. Similarly, SCA knew that the
Charmin name meant something to consumers and needed a new name that
would deliver to consumers in a similar way.
These were not merely executional issues; they were issues that existed at
the deepest level of building a new brand. In order to identify that valuable
seam of meaning – details of which P&G had not passed on as part of the
sale – SCA therefore had research objectives for semiotics that would yield
insight for the whole brand and give a rationale to design recommendations.
These objectives included but were not limited to:
 AN EXPLOSION OF SEMIOTICS IN BUSINESS 39

●● Discovering the meaning and emotional value of the Charmin brand

versus its competitors. Here, we needed to consider each brand as a whole
but also determine the specific meaning and value of its name and mascot.
●● Discovering what connects these meanings and emotions to specific
aspects of visual and verbal design.
●● Revealing the ways in which the British public understand toilet paper
and how those ideas serve them, as evidenced in the way that the product
is treated (imagined, spoken of, depicted) in British culture. Toilet paper
is usually regarded as a low-engagement category that leverages functional
attributes such as softness, yet the mystery of the unusually loyal Charmin
customer remained.

As the research unfolded and semiotics made various recommendations, we

took the opportunity to check those ideas by running them past some focus
groups. This was deemed to be important because of the highly charged
emotional reactions witnessed in previous focus groups when changes to
Charmin were first being considered.
It is important to recognize that most, if not all, of the objectives are
explicitly semiotic. They did not concern individually and privately held
attitudes and beliefs about toilet paper. They concerned British culture, a
familiar product and the meanings that such a product is capable of commu-
nicating. These are not private, individual matters. They exist at the level of
culture and affect consumers in large numbers.

Method: How we used semiotics

In the next chapter, a recipe for semiotic research is set out that will, in
theory, fit any project. It can be regarded as a textbook model for doing
research. In practice, every semiotic project differs slightly in its exact proce-
dure according to the unique objectives at hand. In this case, we deployed
stages of analysis as follows.
We looked at the whole category and the competitive set first. We consid-
ered their packaging, advertising and overall branding. We wanted to detect the
conventions of meaning that existed in the toilet paper category because these
conventions are what consumers bring to the task of making sense of a new
brand. In particular, we wanted to get past the rational claims concerning soft-
ness, strength and absorbency which limit the things that toilet paper brands
40 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

are capable of saying about themselves and also limit the things that consumers
are capable of saying to market researchers. Doing this type of analysis certainly
involves identifying superficially visible features of brand communications
such as the presence of animals and settings such as domestic interiors and
forests. It also takes account of features which are conspicuous by their absence,
which could be adult humans and references to the actual function of toilet
paper. It then continues by asking top-down semiotic questions which concern
the reasons why these messages need to exist and whose interests they serve.
How do brands and customers benefit from communications which pointedly
include some semiotic signs while excluding others? What social purpose or
function is fulfilled by communications being designed in this way?
Then we reviewed the larger cultural context, which is to say that we did
some research to find out how the category of toilet paper represents itself
and how it is understood and treated in other parts of the world. This
enabled us to get a handle on what, if anything, was special about British
culture and its treatment of these matters. At the same time, we looked at the
history of personal hygiene and lavatorial matters, including the ad
campaigns of various brands in recent years and the longer-term historical
issues. These are top-down semiotic questions and the mechanisms for
asking them are explored in more detail in Chapter 5.
While we were doing this, we also took part in multi-agency workshops
which creatively generated dozens of possible new names for Charmin and
quite a few ideas for animal mascots. We then took the output of these
workshops through a bottom-up semiotic process. That is, we examined
each name and potential mascot in terms of its distinctive (linguistic or
graphic) semiotic signs, their meaning and the ways that meaning was
conveyed. For instance, we could immediately see that some of the ideas for
names denoted something obvious, such as softness, while others relied on
connotation, such as alluding to loving relationships or sounding as though
they originated in another language.

Findings: Semiotic insights

This research, which took a few weeks to accomplish, including time for
multi-agency workshops, resulted in quite a large body of interesting
research findings for SCA. These findings included a lot of useful informa-
tion about the British market, about how competitors were conveying
meaning and of course provided recommendations for names and mascots,
 AN EXPLOSION OF SEMIOTICS IN BUSINESS 41

with a clear rationale and visible evidence supporting the recommendations.

In the resulting conference paper and publication of 2011, SCA and Lawes
drew the audience’s attention to just a few selected highlights from all the
available insights:

●● British people are anxious and embarrassed about lavatorial matters, to a

degree that is distinct when compared against some other cultures. Their
embarrassment is mitigated and catered to when brands provide them
with what Freud might have called anxiety displacement mechanisms –
something to focus on that isn’t the cause of the embarrassment. Among
British toilet paper brands at that time, the brand communications of
every one of them were populated with anxiety displacement mechanisms
such as cartoon families in situations outside of the bathroom.
●● Anxiety displacement mechanisms were not random. They were not even
particularly diverse. While adults are expected to abide by strict rules
concerning where and how they excrete, British culture makes special
exceptions for other categories of creature such as babies, tiny children
and animals, including wild animals and domesticated pets. Adults are
much more comfortable with talking and thinking about the needs and
behaviour of these creatures than they are talking about themselves. This
is why the toilet paper ads we looked at were full of puppies, toddlers and
of course the Charmin bear.
●● Semiotic analysis of the Charmin bear showed that it had some special
features. As it appeared on pack and in advertising, it was not a photo-
realistic bear in the wild or in a zoo. It was not a mute toy bear. It was a
cartoon bear and it was very anthropomorphic; it had a lot of human
features. It walked upright, spoke fluent English, its family behaved much
like a human family. It had this in common with many other bears in
British culture such as Rupert Bear, Winnie the Pooh, Paddington Bear
and in bears which were imported into British culture, such as Baloo the
bear from Disney’s Jungle Book.
●● Further semiotic analysis of anthropomorphic bears in British culture
revealed that they have certain aspects in common. Importantly,
considering that bears in the wild are quite dangerous, anthropomorphic
bears are extremely non-threatening. They aren’t very agile and they don’t
have sharp teeth. They have rounded, heavy bodies with a low centre of
gravity, like Homer Simpson. They are affable and not highly intelligent
42 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

(Winnie the Pooh was famously ‘a bear of little brain’, which was a big
part of his appeal to children; Paddington was permanently bewildered).
They are of indeterminate age, some seemingly having the status of adults
while displaying child-like personalities and the bottom-heavy physique
of toddlers. All this helped us to see that the new brand we were creating
needed a mascot; it needed to displace anxiety by being something like an
animal and it needed to communicate cuddly innocence and naivety.
●● We reviewed numerous suggestions for animal mascots which had come
out of the workshops, rejected several on the grounds that they conveyed
the wrong meanings (too aggressive, too adult, wet, not cuddly or
vulnerable) and finally settled on an animal that fit the bill more closely
than any of the others. Koalas, which many British people have
encountered on holiday or seen in each other’s holiday photos, are widely
regarded as very similar to babies. British tourists love to get themselves
photographed cuddling koalas (even though they are not particularly
friendly in the wild) and even the adult animals retain their rounded,
babyish bodies and facial expressions of anthropomorphic cuteness and
slight amazement. In focus groups, we tested the koala alongside a few
other ideas and it was the clear winner among the Charmin loyalists. It
was doing exactly what those loyalists needed a brand mascot to do.
●● Analysing the names was a comparatively simple matter. About two
dozen of these had been generated in the creative workshops and the
process of eliminating them from consideration quickly revealed the
underlying rules that the new toilet paper brand name needed to comply
with. Linguistically speaking (and one half of semiotics is linguistics, the
other half being anthropology), Charmin had some distinguishing
features and assets within its name. It alluded to an emotional feeling –
the experience of being charmed, as by a cute animal or baby. It began
with the letter ‘C’, which was going to be important for continued
recognizability as Charmin migrated to the new brand. It had a soft ‘ch’
sound at the beginning, which suggested softness as a property of the
tissue. It is a sound that is commonly found in French words, which
British consumers tend to associate with femininity and elegance. We
systematically rejected names which lacked these qualities or which had
other, potentially confusing, meanings such as British regional slang and
colloquialisms. We eventually arrived at ‘Cushelle’ which exhibited all the
same linguistic properties as ‘Charmin’ while being different enough to
satisfy P&G. As with the animal mascot, we tested the new name in focus
groups, where it received an enthusiastic response.
 AN EXPLOSION OF SEMIOTICS IN BUSINESS 43

●● In light of these research findings, SCA went ahead and designed a new
brand, Cushelle, with an animal that has many of the same qualities as a
cuddly, anthropomorphic bear, if not more of those qualities. Even though
many consumers think of koalas as bears, they are in fact marsupials,
which was enough to satisfy P&G’s lawyers that the Charmin bear and
the Cushelle koala were not the same. SCA then designed packaging
around these new brand assets and launched a TV ad campaign to
introduce the mascot.

Applications and commercial results

Recall that re-branding a well-loved household brand with a fiercely loyal
customer base was a risky business. Prior to rebranding, the Charmin brand
was worth £90 million in the UK. Millward Brown’s analysis told SCA to
expect that the new brand would lose recognizability, lose up to 20 per cent
of its sales and take 3–4 years to recover the ground it had lost. In Germany,
where Charmin was gradually subsumed under the Zewa brand, losses were
incurred exactly in line with Millward Brown’s predictions. In fact, the
losses of sales amounted to 21 per cent, within 1 per cent of Millward
Brown’s calculations.
In the UK, something remarkable happened. Even though British consum-
ers initially had been very hostile to the prospect of anything changing in the
Charmin brand, there were no losses at all. In fact, and this exceeded SCA’s
ambitions, almost all the metrics associated with the Cushelle brand’s
performance started to go up from the baseline that Charmin had set. Data
collected by Kantar showed that penetration of the market, average spend,
rolls per buyer, spend per shopping trip and rolls purchased per trip all went
up. This held true even after controlling for confounding factors such as
promotions. The only metric that didn’t go up was purchase frequency. The
cumulative effect on sales was more than SCA had hoped for. Its ambition
had simply been to migrate loyal customers to Cushelle with as little damage
to sales as possible.
Several years have passed since SCA published this landmark case study
with Lawes Consulting via the Market Research Society and the World
Advertising Research Center, in 2011. Cushelle is no longer a new brand and
has had plenty of time to find its niche. When SCA acquired Charmin, that
brand was 20 per cent smaller in the UK than Velvet which was the second
leading brand. A market share report published in 2017 (Statista Research
44 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Department, statista.com) shows Charmin eventually overtaking Velvet. It is

now the second largest toilet paper brand in the UK, outside of retailer
brands. This continued growth is a testament to Cushelle’s powerful appeal
and ability to meet consumers’ unspoken emotional and cultural needs.

How to detect when semiotics may solve your problem

Writing briefs for market research, like most other activities which make up
the market research industry, has been shaped by the inside-out model of
research on which that industry was founded. That is, because the market
research industry has typically based its activities and insights on a model of
individual psychology, which tries to excavate attitudes and opinions from
the minds of individual consumers, it comes naturally to market research
professionals to write in psychological language. We have a long-established
habit of thinking of consumers as the start and the endpoint of the market
research process, with everything being framed in terms of questions that a
respondent can answer, activities and tasks that respondents can participate
in, some of which may be caught on camera, and internal, privately experi-
enced psychological phenomena such as motivations and brand preferences.
There are some cases where the psychological model and its accompany-
ing vocabulary are not the best method for fulfilling the business objectives
behind the research. In acknowledging this, SCA was very forward-looking
at a time when semiotics was still establishing itself as a commercial offering
and convincing case studies were few and far between. There were certain
aspects of the business situation which today are relatively easy to recognize
as calling for semiotics:

1 The Charmin brand already existed and had a large enough market share
that it was clearly capable of communicating some kind of meaning to
large numbers of customers (5.6 million British people by 2017). If these
meanings existed at the level of the individual and his or her internal
psychology, people would ‘like’ Charmin and Cushelle for highly divergent
reasons, yet this was not the case. Of course, new brands which are created
from nothing need to speak to large numbers of people as well but it was
a distinctive aspect of this case that the Charmin brand arrived in SCA’s
portfolio with a truckload of existing meaning (undisclosed by P&G) in
contrast to many smaller brands such as Nicky or Regina toilet papers
which have not managed to gain purchase on consumers’ imaginations.
 AN EXPLOSION OF SEMIOTICS IN BUSINESS 45

2 Use of the product amounts to a sensitive topic in the UK. Consumers are
not very comfortable talking about it. This makes the ­question-and-response
format of much market research less than ideal.
3 The changes that SCA needed to make, in line with P&G’s requirements,
were known to be something that consumers did not want. It’s hard to
get good quality direction from consumers on how a brand should change
when they are adamant that it should not change in any way – unless you
already have a better way forward to show them.
4 The business problem explicitly concerned finding ways to communicate
set meanings using alternative words and images. Consumers are not
anthropologists or linguists. They cannot be expected to use anthropology
to pinpoint the compelling aspects of cartoon bears, nor can we ask them
to use linguistics to break brand names into components, which are then
re-assembled to make something new. What consumers are good at is
reacting to things and displaying positive or negative feelings towards
stimulus. Because Charmin loyalists were particularly strong in their
reactions, we included them as a key feature of the study without trying
to make them do cultural and linguistic analysis for us.
5 The challenge demanded some level of creativity. It needed adult imagination
which was expansive enough to pull ‘marsupials’ and ‘consonant clusters
with French pronunciation’ seemingly out of nowhere, at short notice,
while effectively screening out non-starters such as apes, sea creatures and
words with regional and class inflections.

In nearly 20 years of supplying semiotics commercially, I have worked on a

huge variety of problems that spanned a range of product categories and
multiple countries. All of them featured some aspects of the business situa-
tion which helped the brand owner or organization to realize that semiotics
would be a good fit:

●● Keeping up with cultural change

A company that makes toys realized that something was wrong with its
advertising. It was a well-established brand that had been around for a
long time but suffered from being slow to keep up with cultural change.
Over the decades, people’s relationships with their children and the way
they thought about toys and children’s entertainment had shifted. This
was reflected in mass culture – consumers were being exposed to parenting
literature, YouTube videos, ads in other categories and many more
cultural representations of kids and parenting which expressed children
46 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

as having a new status. Semiotics was used to identify what the change
was and help bring the old style of advertising, which was respectable but
rather remote and prim, into the 21st century.
●● Adding emotion to your brand
A brand of dairy spread had big ambitions to attach itself to meanings
such as ‘comfort’ and ‘trust’. Like toilet paper, dairy spread is a category
that most people don’t spend much time thinking about. This makes it
difficult to articulate their feelings. It’s a category where a lot of the
competition focuses on functional health claims. The client wanted to
achieve cut-through by emotionally stimulating the consumer but did not
know how to translate deep emotions into the language of design decisions.
●● Addressing sensitive audiences
A bank needed to communicate a merger. It had previously operated in a
single country but had just merged with the national bank of a smaller,
neighbouring country. The customers of the bank in the larger country
were expected to be happy or indifferent towards the merger as it
represented growth. However, at least some of the customers in the smaller
country were expected to be nationalistic, intensely loyal to their national
bank and prone to resent perceived takeovers by foreign banks. Despite
their unease, the merger was a fact and had to be communicated somehow.
The bank used semiotics to deeply investigate the culture of the smaller
country. The findings, which identified semiotic signs and meanings that
the sensitive customers really cared about, helped the bank’s ad agency to
develop a campaign that made everybody feel good and provided some
basis for national pride.
●● Demonstrating the power of communications
A company that sells advertising space in shopping malls needed to
persuade media buyers of the value of those ad spaces compared to
cheaper equivalents outdoors at the side of the street. As part of a thorough
programme of research that included semiotic field trips (see Chapter 7)
and ethnography (Chapter 8), we identified the properties that make mall
advertising interesting based on the immediate context in that retail
environment and on consumers’ routine behaviours in malls. Together
with our client, we designed advertising based on these semiotic principles
for a fictional brand. The client placed these ads in its own ad spaces, in
both mall and street locations. Subsequently, quantitative research among
consumers who were found in these locations showed that engagement
and recall in the mall were much higher, justifying the higher prices. At the
 AN EXPLOSION OF SEMIOTICS IN BUSINESS 47

same time, the semiotics aspect of the study provided future media buyers
with style guidelines – practical techniques and tips which anyone could
introduce into their advertising to make the best of their captive mall
audience.

Activity: Write a brief for semiotic research

Return to your journal. Pick out the marketing challenge that you want to
take forward as you work through this book, making sure it is linked to at
least one of the items on the Marketing Challenge Hotlist.
Observe that the items on the list can be organized into groups that
suggest something about how semiotics can be applied:

●● At the simplest end of the scale, some of them concern brand and marketing
communications. There is a need to make communications clear and
motivating and to convey certain values and messages. In semiotics, this
type of analysis is often called bottom-up analysis, because it starts at the
smallest unit of granularity in semiotics such as single words and symbols.
It figures out what they mean and works up to conclusions about the
culture that produced them. We’ll go into the details of bottom-up analysis
in Chapter 4.
●● Some of them express specific questions about consumers, conceived as
segments, demographics, social groups and shoppers. They ask what these
groups need from brands and organizations and how to stimulate them.
You could imagine this as a middle level of complexity for semiotics.
Consumers are visible and tangible, they are not abstract concepts, but
answering this type of question requires more of a social science framework
for doing semiotics than simply making recommendations about
packaging, fixtures or other communications. There isn’t a specific name
for this type of analysis in semiotics, but you could see it as the point
where fine-grained bottom-up analysis and broad-brush top-down
analysis meet. Thinking about consumers is usually unavoidable at some
stage of a project in semiotics because when we examine signs and
symbols, we are examining cultural products which were made by humans
because they meet human needs.
●● Some of them ask questions about society, framed in terms of emerging
social trends, cross-cultural differences and global consumer culture. This
is at the most sophisticated end of the scale of difficulty in semiotics. Unlike
48 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

consumers, ‘society’ can be hard to see and operationalize. This requires a

conceptual framework for doing semiotics and a wide-ranging knowledge
base concerning social and cultural change. In semiotics, this type of
analysis is often called top-down analysis, because it starts at the largest
unit of granularity in semiotics such as matters of ideology, culture and
social change. We’ll go into the details of top-down analysis in Chapter 5.
●● Lastly, some of them are creative challenges. These are not necessarily the
most difficult challenges but they are among the rarer skills in commercial
semiotic offerings because practitioners are rarely aware of the techniques
for creative ideation that semiotics yields. We’ll learn more about this
topic in Chapter 6.

Identify what type of challenge you have on your hands. Which set does your
challenge belong to, or which set is most important to the project? Now you
have an idea of the type of questions you want semiotics to answer, try writ-
ing a brief that tells a supplier of semiotics what you want them to do.
As you write the brief, take into account:

●● The needs of stakeholders.

●● The difference between business objectives and research objectives. For
now, make a priority of the business objectives and we will dig deeper
into the research objectives in the next chapter.

The Rebranding Charmin project involved elements of all of the above types
of marketing challenges, but it started with a bottom-up question, namely
‘how can we replace our lost brand assets?’ As the project proceeded, it
opened up to include questions about consumers (why are Charmin buyers
brand-loyal?) and consumer culture (how do we get around the problem
that talking about toilet paper and its uses is somewhat of a taboo subject?).
Below is a sample brief that you can use for inspiration. It concerns
­shopping. It is a common type of research brief that has a primary focus on
bottom-up analysis. The brand owner, a fictional company called BNY
Foods, has the idea that semiotics should deliver a clear set of signs and
symbols that can be used in packaging and in store, at the point of sale. But
the brief also includes a larger objective concerning consumer psychology
and behaviour, and finally it makes some reference to the idea that social
trends, such as design trends, and institutions, such as cafés and restaurants,
might be important. You can see how close this is to the Charmin project
and it represents the type of project that brand owners are commonly using
to make their brands more profitable.
 AN EXPLOSION OF SEMIOTICS IN BUSINESS 49

A sample brief

PROJECT TITLE: SHOPPER ENGAGEMENT – BAKED BEANS

Background

Following some qualitative research, BNY Foods has new insight concerning the
baked bean shopper’s mindset and in-store behaviour. We have learned that
baked beans are a planned purchase rather than being spontaneous. Shoppers
appear to be on auto-pilot, quickly finding their usual brand at fixture and
moving on. There appears to be little or no browsing. Because of this, it’s
difficult to interrupt and engage shoppers at the fixture.
Getting consumers to wake up at the baked bean fixture is especially
important to BNY Foods as it has recently entered the category with a new
brand. Fancy Beans is a range of premium, flavoured baked beans that
commands a higher price than its nearest competitors. When Fancy Beans
launched, BNY Foods aimed to create standout and communicate a more
premium product with pack designs that have modern, simple graphics, in line
with contemporary design trends. However, there are some concerns that the
packaging looks recessive on shelf. BNY Foods wants to grow the Fancy Beans
brand and needs to understand more about the semiotics of baked beans to
involve shoppers in this more premium segment.
BNY Foods therefore wants to apply semiotics to help drive engagement at
fixture. We would like to know what we can do to bring engaging cues into the
store environment. What sensory cues could we introduce that would
encourage shoppers to browse the fixture and engage with the premium baked
bean segment? Can we import cues from cafés, restaurants and other premium
food categories and use them at fixture?

Business objective

Understand the sensory cues that can drive engagement at fixture and
encourage browsing or trying something new.

Information needed

We expect that semiotics will give us feedback on all the attributes of the Fancy
Beans packaging. It will show how shoppers use cues to navigate the fixture
50 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

and advise on how cues can be deployed at fixture to drive engagement with
the category.
The information will be used to develop a set of rules to help BNY Foods get
the baked bean shopper to snap out of auto-pilot.

Budget

TBC.

Time frame

We expect a thorough review of the semiotics of baked beans and need

deliverables in about four weeks.

Another sample brief

Here’s a second sample brief with a different emphasis. A marketing consul-
tancy needs snappy insights and creative ideas. As we can see from the tight
squeeze on timings and costs, the writer of this brief is not looking for a
large market research project but for an expert and original point of view on
a social issue (changing ideas of mental health) with practical consequences
for consumer insight and branding. This type of more concise brief with a
very short time frame is commonly issued by consultancies and ad agencies.

PROJECT TITLE: MATURE WOMEN AND MENTAL HEALTH

Our client is launching a range of dietary supplements that aim to instil a sense
of wellbeing and mental health. The core customer is mature women, a
segment that accounts for high spending on health and wellbeing. As part of
designing a marketing campaign, we need to understand more about the
mental health climate and how it affects mature women.
In particular, we would like to hear about two themes:

●● How do mature women understand and relate to mental health issues?

What problems do they encounter and how do they recognize good health?
●● How can we differentiate our brand and give it a unique voice in a
marketplace that is rather noisy with lots of competing health messages
from different sources?
 AN EXPLOSION OF SEMIOTICS IN BUSINESS 51

We have a very small budget for this and envisage it as no more than two days
of work. We would like deliverables in the form of notes and a telephone
interview by close of play this Friday.

The market for semiotics

The brief you have just prepared resembles those issued by brand owners,
marketers, ad agencies and research agencies every day as a matter of
convention and normal business practice. Twenty years ago, at the turn of
the 21st century, semiotics for marketing barely existed. It was unknown
to marketing industry bodies, trade journals, conferences, professional
associations, market research suppliers and their clients. Now there are
20,000 people on LinkedIn alone who say that it is their job. Semiotics has
its own marketing industry conferences such as Semiofest and is recog-
nized by governing bodies such as the Market Research Society with
awards and executive training programmes. It is being applied in research
for the private and non-profit sectors. It is used by businesses such as
Unilever, Procter & Gamble, retailers, banks, pharmaceutical companies
and healthcare providers, government regulatory bodies, the ad industry
and non-profit organizations, to name just a few. Now that semiologists
have learned to commercially apply what they do, semiotics has been
avidly adopted. Semiotics sheds new light on consumers and the world
they live in, stimulates creativity and innovation, prompts brand strategy,
guides the design of brand communications and finds solutions to market-
ing problems. The origins of semiotics as the marketing industry knows it
today are in Europe and the United States but semiotics has caught on
globally as brand owners and marketers in regions such as the Middle
East, China, India and Africa discover its applications.
Now that you’ve completed the exercises in this chapter, take a break
before moving on to the next section. Go to warc.com and plug the word
‘semiotics’ into its search engine. At the time of writing, in 2019, there are
95 case studies, 139 articles and 445 research papers that list semiotics as a
key word. Browse the case studies to get a feel for how semiotics is used in
different sectors and for what kind of business objectives. Return to your
journal and adjust your brief if you need to. You’re now ready for some
proposal-writing and a plug-and-play formula for doing semiotics, coming
right up in Chapter 3.
52 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Endnote
1 ‘Rebranding Charmin’ was published the same year that it was presented at
conference and is available to view on the website of the World Advertising
Research Center. Information included in this chapter is strictly limited to that
which is featured in the WARC publication and is in the public domain.
 53

03

How to do research using semiotics

A blueprint for marketers

WHAT’S COMING UP

This chapter attempts to summarize about 20 years of experience in

commercial semiotics into just a few pages. After you’ve finished with all
that this book has to offer, this will be the chapter that I hope you will want
to revisit to get projects up and running quickly. By the end of this chapter,
you will have:

●● a plug-and-play model project in semiotics that you can adapt to nearly

any commercial situation;
●● handy checklists of things to ask about, plan, do and remember when
you are designing projects in semiotics;
●● a deeper understanding of how to make your semiotic analysis
convincing and professional; and
●● the materials you need to write a proposal which you can use as a sales
tool in your job as an agency researcher or freelancer.

Understand your client’s brief

The single most important thing you can do at the start of a project in semi-
otics is to understand why your client has hired you and what they are
trying to achieve. This may sound obvious but in real-world commercial
practice it is too often the case that semiologists:

●● assume that what the client wants lines up with what the semiologist
finds easiest to deliver;
54 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● have not checked what the client thinks semiotics is and what they
imagine it can (and cannot) do;
●● have not asked why the client thinks semiotics is the right solution
compared to other forms of market research or hiring a branding
consultant; and
●● have not asked who the key stakeholders are and which other agencies
are involved in fulfilling the client’s business objectives.

You will want to investigate all of these questions before starting work because
they will have an effect on the way you design your research project. Semiotics
projects need to be designed, just like any other research project, because you
have options. You don’t have to repeat the same formula each time and it is
better if you have a range of things that you know how to do so that you can
adjust your research process in line with what the client needs from you.
It’s quite common for researchers who have had a little experience with
semiotics to grasp the idea that semiotics is about identifying ‘signs’ and then
grouping them into sets called ‘codes’. As a final step, they may then group the
codes themselves into sets and present these to the client as ‘territories’ which
a brand can occupy. Even though signs and codes will make an appearance in
most projects in semiotics, they are not necessary every time and reverting
automatically to a signs-codes-territories formula misses out project design,
planning and sensitivity to the client’s needs. It reduces creativity, even though
you may have been hired in the expectation of providing original thinking and
it produces repetitive work which harms repeat b ­ usiness.
Here are some of your creative options and things you may not have
considered including in your project design:

●● How do you want to balance the weight of bottom-up and top-down

analysis? Bottom-up is important for refining communications such as
packaging and ad copy; top-down is important for understanding
consumers and social trends.
●● Do you want to include consumer talk and behaviour in your data set
and do you want direct contact with those consumers? Do you want to
go out into the field and collect observational data? Sometimes, researchers
think that because direct contact with consumers is not obligatory, it
follows that consumers should never be included, but the things consumers
do and say may make a valuable addition to your data set.
●● Do you want to use special tools within semiotics to stimulate creativity
and spot opportunities for innovation? You can learn more about these
in Chapter 6.
 HOW TO DO RESEARCH USING SEMIOTICS 55

●● Are you required to provide a view of the future? If so, you’ll want to
obtain some historical materials concerning the brand or category so that
you can get a view of the past.

There are two kinds of analysis in semiotics. On most projects you will need
both but you should balance them in line with the project objectives.
Bottom-up analysis involves examining ‘texts’ which could be anything from an
item of packaging to a social media tweet to a 30-page focus group transcript,
and picking out meaningful elements, called ‘signs’. Top-down analysis means
using the conceptual tools of semiotics to produce a critical analysis of
ideologies and influences belonging to a particular geographical region or a
subculture of consumers.

Set your research questions

If you are a freelance or agency researcher, this step is going to be essential
for writing your proposal. If you are a brand owner or in-house, client-side
marketer, you still need to make sure that you know how to convert busi-
ness objectives into research questions without missing anything important.
Let’s revisit the baked beans brief that we took as an example in the last
chapter and identify some research questions that will get the job done.

Baked beans
The baked beans client, BNY Foods, has written a detailed brief that is fairly
precise about what it wants semiotics to do. Observe that the client has
already done some qualitative research with consumers: they have watched
consumers at fixture and noticed that shoppers are on auto pilot and there
is hardly any engagement. BNY Foods has the idea that one way to alter this
situation could be using ‘cues’ at fixture, which possibly could be imported
from cafés, restaurants and other premium food categories. This could lead
you to set your first few research questions as follows:

●● Across a range of supermarkets, grocers and other retailers where the

BNY Foods product might appear, what devices or cues at the level of the
fixture or in-store design seem to make shoppers wake up?
●● Across a range of cafés, restaurants, street markets, festivals and other
places where ready-to-eat food is sold, what cues are used that help to
make food seem more interesting, appetizing or experiential?
56 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● If no-one is browsing the baked bean fixture, then where do people

browse? Examples could be places that sell wines and spirits, books and
magazines, craft shops and confectionery stores. What can we learn from
these settings that could be imported to the baked bean fixture?

BNY Foods also has some concerns about packaging. It articulates a specific
problem. It aimed to be modern with its design but now it is concerned that
the result looks recessive on shelf. You will want to provide some feedback
on this very common problem that semiologists are regularly asked to solve.
Set your research questions as follows:

●● What are the semiotic signs on and in the packaging which deviate in any
way from the norm? To clarify, perhaps it is the case that BNY Foods has
made decisions about label design which mark the product as different
from ‘ordinary baked beans’, yet the label is applied to a tin can which is
absolutely standard for the category.
●● Which semiotic signs in the packaging are shared with competitors?
●● What, in practical terms, is causing the packs to look recessive? Is it that
they use colours that fade to the back next to the more dominant colours
of competitor brands? Is it that other brands are using the same design
elements but with a stronger execution? If so, what makes them stronger?
●● Within canned foods and within other foods found in the same stores,
what are the semiotic signs for ‘premium’? How much variation is there
within ‘premium’?
●● Within canned foods and within other foods found in the same stores,
what are the semiotic signs for ‘modern’ or ‘modernism’? How much
variation is there within ‘modern’?
●● How much overlap is there between the sets ‘premium’ and ‘modern’?
●● What are the client’s options for including semiotic signs on pack that
will yield a result that is premium, modern and more dominant than
recessive?

In this list of questions, which is quite long but still not exhaustive, we have
begun to translate the client’s expectations into a task list for the semiologist.
There is always more that we could add; in the interests of brevity, I haven’t
added questions about navigation – this will involve taking a close look at
the way that fixtures are laid out across several stores and drawing some
conclusions about how they invite shoppers to navigate them. I haven’t
explicitly tackled the word ‘sensory’, although it is a useful reminder that
cues can include sounds, smells and textures. Finally, I haven’t added any
 HOW TO DO RESEARCH USING SEMIOTICS 57

t­ op-down questions about the cultural meanings and expectations surround-

ing baked beans, even though these will be pertinent to the analysis. The
main thing to notice about what I’m doing here is that we are operational-
izing concepts that are used by the client. That is, when the client uses words
such as ‘browsing’, ‘engagement’ and ‘premium’, we are attempting to give
these words some practical, real-world meaning that allows us to know that
we will be able to find evidence of these ideas manifesting themselves in store.

Mature women and mental health

This brief is much shorter than the baked beans brief and it requires more
weighting in favour of top-down analysis. That is, the second topic in the
brief, ‘how can we differentiate our brand from competitors’ implies bottom-
up consideration of competitor messages, allowing us to identify any
weaknesses and gaps. However, the first topic in the brief, ‘how do mature
women understand and relate to mental health issues’, is much more at the
level of culture rather than communications. In this case, you might want to
set some research questions as follows:

●● Where do mature women encounter discussion of mental health issues?

List all the places where this might happen so we can examine how the
subject matter is treated. These could include: online communities (find
out where they congregate); GP surgeries and other community services;
mass media and popular culture such as women’s lifestyle magazines and
TV dramas.
●● In these locations and streams of discourse, what does ‘mental health’
amount to? What kinds of topics does it include? What does it exclude?
Is there any discussion at all of ‘good mental health’ or is it a residual
category that remains unarticulated?
●● To what extent are ‘mental health issues’ normalized or marginalized?
Are they framed as ‘stuff that happens to everyone’ or as ‘a rare experience
that most people don’t have’?
●● In these streams of discourse, where are solutions to mental health
problems seen to be located? Are they expected to come from within the
person themselves, perhaps in the form of developing a ‘positive mental
attitude’? Are they constructed as capable of being tamed by changes to
things which exist in the realm of the everyday, such as adopting an
exercise regime, taking a multivitamin and eating more vegetables? Are
they constructed as requiring medical intervention?
58 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● What do we mean by mature women? How would such a woman

recognize herself in mental health communications? Do women suddenly
find that they are on the receiving end of a lot of talk about menopause,
mood swings and hot flushes when they turn 50? Are there mental health
issues that affect younger people, which they are (rightly or wrongly)
presumed not to worry about? In short, is the mental health landscape for
mature women ageist? Is it racist? Is it biased in favour of affluent women,
does it discriminate against or exclude women on lower incomes?

These are top-down questions that concern cultural habits, conventions and
customs. They concern social practices and structures of belief. They ask
ideological questions about how social groups are included or excluded
from the discussion.
Preparing a list of research questions can be quite a time-consuming task
but it helps you to think ahead about the type of information you will want
to gather and what is going to be involved in collecting it. It helps you to
design a project that is fit for purpose.

Brainstorm with your client

Having a brainstorming session with a client is a great next step if your
client can make time for it. Ideally, make it a face-to-face meeting and
prepare all your research questions beforehand because it will trigger your
semiotic thinking on the topic and give you ideas to bring to the table.
In turn, what you want from your client is for them to educate you in
how they see their category, their consumers and how they understand their
problem. Treat the session as a kind of ethnographic interview. Your client
may not be the target customer for the product but they are a fully paid-up
member of their own micro-culture that exists at the company where they
work. If you are the client, in the sense that you are a brand owner or
in-house researcher and are running the project on behalf of your own
company, organize a workshop with stakeholders. Take the opportunity to
find out as much as possible about their unique view of the world and to
discover the things they take for granted as well as the things they regard as
conspicuously in need of explanation or commentary.
Don’t forget to find out whether there are any conceptual models or
truisms which the company has bought into and which they do not wish you
to challenge. Maybe the whole company is sold on the idea that all shoppers
are on missions or they have spent a lot of money on a segmentation.
 HOW TO DO RESEARCH USING SEMIOTICS 59

After the session, go back to your research questions and refine them
as necessary.

Sample data
You are ready to collect some data and your careful preparation has helped
you to know what kind you want and where you can look for it. Our two
projects above suggest that we will want to gather data from some of these
sources.

Our client or our own company

●● The client’s own ads, packs, marketing communications, web copy.
●● Equivalent materials belonging to competitor brands if the client holds
them.
●● Market intelligence, market research reports or original data such as
focus group or interview transcripts.
●● Possible design routes. Branding and marketing exercises which have
been tried, successfully or otherwise.
●● Photographs of fixtures, promotions and in-store displays. Planograms if
they are available.
●● Timeline for the brand – how long has it been around and what is its
history?

Field trips
●● Shopper behaviour – not strictly necessary on every project, but useful on
many projects where you can squeeze it in. Other locations where you
can observe people ‘behaving’ in real life.
●● Photographs of physical locations. Your client may have lots of photos of
baked bean fixtures but you may want to take your own photos in
locations such as cafés, restaurants, markets, book shops, wine shops and
also of items such as roadside advertising.
●● The mental health project might benefit from collecting some physical
literature such as the leaflets you can pick up in the waiting rooms at GP
surgeries, although note that in this case the timings are very tight.
60 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● Product shopping is revealing and also fun. It may be that your client has
sent you a high-res photo of their can of beans, but go out and buy a can
for yourself and set it on your desk next to some competitor products.
You will be able to handle it, feel its weight, inspect it closely and develop
a more intimate knowledge of it.
●● Physical encounters with consumers and opportunities to talk to them
are something to consider on projects where you don’t feel you already
know everything about how they live.

Digital platforms
●● Smartphone apps.
●● Websites, including naturally occurring online communities. ‘Naturally
occurring’ means any communication among consumers which was not
specifically engineered for market research purposes.
●● Other digital platforms such as Twitch and Discord, both used by video
gamers.
●● Digital archives can be a good source of historical advertising and other
cultural detritus. Even archives that are maintained by their own users,
such as Pinterest, can be surprisingly good.
●● Digital TV and movie services such as Netflix.

Libraries and print archives

●● An under-used resource, invaluable when the occasion calls for it. I once
went to the British Library in London and looked up official records
pertaining to a 19th-century Scottish industrialist when his life and family
became relevant to a client’s story about the origins of their brand.

How much is enough? How much data should you collect in order to say
that you have ‘a sample’? I use three guiding principles.

1 ‘In general, there is no such thing as too much data.’ If a client offers you
data, don’t turn it down. You can make clear that the time frame of the
project will not result in a detailed report on every item in the data set.
The point is that even skim-reading transcripts and browsing collections
of print ads is an opportunity for new and unusual phenomena to jump
out at you, whether it’s a striking image or a distinctive turn of phrase.
 HOW TO DO RESEARCH USING SEMIOTICS 61

As you consume data, you will soon get a feel for the norms in a category
and this primes you to be able to quickly recognize things which are not
the norm. These are the items you should set aside and pay special
attention to, because they are trying to tell you something.
2 ‘Your data set is large enough when it is no longer throwing up new items
that you haven’t seen before.’ Or, to put it another way, if your data are
still showing you new things, you don’t have enough. ‘Things’ could be
whatever you are looking for – bits of language, folk wisdom, advertising
claims, design decisions, representations of humans, product shots,
references to ‘baked beans’ and ‘mental health’ and so on, according to
the project. Continue until there are no more variations.
3 ‘You are sampling culture, not people.’ Qualitative market research is
plagued by the idea that its samples are not large enough. It is perpetually
on the back foot, apologizing, issuing disclaimers and behaving like the
poor relation of quantitative research. This is because quantitative and
qualitative have in common a psychological model of the consumer – the
inside-out model that I referred to earlier. They both study human
individuals and try to excavate the contents of people’s heads, in the form
of attitudes, brand preferences, motivations and so on. In this model,
individual humans are presumed to be all slightly different, each with
their unique personalities, so it’s imperative that you include enough of
them in your sample to aggregate their responses and generalize to a
larger population of humans. It’s very important to realize that semiotics,
in contrast, is an outside-in method. You are not sampling individual
humans; you are sampling culture. Culture is operationalized as pieces of
cultural, human-produced output, which semiologists call ‘texts’. A text
can be a can of beans, an ad, a transcript, an in-store display or any of the
items listed above. Follow the previous two rules to know when you have
enough texts in your sample to form reasonable conclusions about the
culture that produced them.

A favourite motto of mine is ‘there’s no such thing as too much data’. If you are
in the happy situation where a client has a lot of data to pass to you, in the form
of historical brand communications, market intelligence, recent market research
output, possible design routes, branding and marketing decisions that they tried
in the past and were not successful, take all of it. Do this even if you only have a
limited time for the analysis. A bigger data set gives you a bigger picture.
62 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Identify semiotic signs

Analysing semiotic signs is the topic of Chapter 4, where we will go into a
lot of detail, so here I will just make some short observations about what a
sign is and how to recognize one when you encounter it.
The semiotic sign is the smallest unit of communication in semiotic ­analysis.
A text such as a can of beans or a leaflet about mental health is composed of
semiotic signs such as colours, graphics (photos, CGI or i­llustrations),
language, fonts, use of empty space, persuasive claims (­ ingredients, functional
claims, experiential claims, claims about deliverables and benefits), physical
dimensions and materials and many more. In certain circumstances, even
smells and textures can be semiotic signs – think of the ‘new car smell’ that is
so alluring to consumers.
Because semiotics distinguishes itself among other research methods by
its particular capacity to decode visual images, it’s common for researchers
to think that a semiotic sign is ‘a picture of something’. This is a misconcep-
tion that needs to be dispelled. A semiotic sign is a small component of a text
such as colour, shape, icon, logo or whatever which has had meaning
invested in it. Meaning is invested not by individuals or even companies but
by cultures, over time. If the colour red is associated with being the first or
the original version of something, if it is taken to mean power and sex in the
West and good luck in China, that’s because entire cultures have used the
colour red to repeat and emphasize that meaning until everyone gets it.
Anything which has not had meaning invested in it is not a semiotic sign.
If you pick up a pen right now and scribble with it, that scribble is not a
semiotic sign, it’s just a scribble. Or, in words attributed to Freud, ‘some-
times a cigar is just a cigar’.
Go through your data set and list all the meaningful semiotic signs that
you can find; note where you found them. Don’t attempt to automate this
process, or, at least, don’t automate it without checking the results yourself to
see whether they make sense. Automated systems can detect the presence of
words in text files and they can detect colours and shapes in photos, but they
cannot detect meaning (a subject discussed in more detail in Chapter 11).

Identify codes
Codes are not the be-all and end-all of semiotic analysis and they are not
relevant to every project. However, they make an appearance in most
projects in one form or another, so it’s important to know what they are.
 HOW TO DO RESEARCH USING SEMIOTICS 63

The simplest description is that a code is a sum of semiotic signs which

regularly occur in the same place, at the same time. At many places of work,
there is a dress code. It is composed of numerous items such as ties for men,
shirts with collars, dark-coloured suits. The same dress code may specify
that women may (or even must) wear skirts but the skirt cannot be too
short. It may specify that women may (or even must) wear make-up, but
only in subdued, ‘natural’ colours, so no glitter eyeshadow or false eyelashes.
The code may specify that hair must be short or tied back, it may prohibit
nail polish, it may prohibit or require high-heeled shoes. The people who
work there attend other locations outside of work. They go to farmers’
markets at the weekend, they go to nightclubs and discos. At these places,
very different dress codes apply and their work uniform will earn them the
disapproval of others and perhaps even exclude them from entering.
In semiotics, codes are exactly like this. They are clusters of semiotic signs
which have no necessary or natural connection, but which are convention-
ally grouped together to achieve some effect. That last bit is important. In
just the same way that ‘a picture of something’ is not a semiotic sign until,
by common agreement, it is loaded with meaning, a group of items is not a
code until the code is working to achieve something. Codes tell people how
to understand the world around them and how to behave. Codes are not in
themselves ‘norms’ but they are normative. ‘Normative’ means that an
expected understanding or behaviour is set up, which individuals deviate
from at their peril. The office dress code is normative in the sense that if you
show up in a ball gown or a swimming costume, there will be trouble. A
‘health’ code in food packaging is normative insofar as it tells consumers
how to understand the food and when to use it. Eat this if you are trying to
lose weight or look after your heart. Maybe don’t serve it at Thanksgiving
or Christmas dinner because your family will be upset.
Codes can be regarded as containing sets of instructions for consumers
about how to understand what is on offer and how to behave. Your job as
a semiologist is to detect the meaning of signs and the normative function of
codes.
These are not casual distinctions. When semiotics fails, it often fails
because the researcher has failed to distinguish their activity from any focus-
group pack-sorting exercise. All over the world, consumers show that they
are perfectly adept at grouping items based on their appearances. If you give
them eight or ten packs of tea, they will have absolutely no trouble grouping
them into packs that are merely functional versus packs that are decorative.
Please do not repeat this behaviour and try to pass it off as semiotics, because
clients will not take you seriously. They may not be experts in semiotics, but
64 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

they know what focus groups are capable of and they are relying on you to
do better. Moreover, ‘signs’ that lack meaning and ‘codes’ that lack a
­normative effect will leave you struggling when it comes to making business
recommendations later on.

Remember that your job is to explain, not merely describe. Any focus group can
describe how ads and packaging are different, based on their appearance.
Completing the job means explaining why things look the way they do. Your
observations of semiotic signs should lead you to some conclusions about the
society or culture that produced them.

Detect social structures

We are now firmly in the territory of top-down analysis. This is the most
powerful end of semiotics and also the most neglected, because it suffers
from low awareness, people don’t know how to do it and it seems like a lot
of effort when you could just skip straight to the bottom-up analysis, iden-
tify a few signs and codes and leave it at that. Top-down analysis is the
subject of Chapter 5 where we will have the luxury of exploring it in detail.
For our present purposes, it will suffice just to say a few words about what
it is and why it matters.
Understanding the impact and relevance of top-down analysis is aided
when we consider the history and evolution of semiotics as a discipline. It
was born in the opening years of the 20th century, simultaneously in Europe
and the United States. In the United States, it was a branch of formal logic
and in Europe, quite unrelatedly, it was a branch of linguistics. Both versions
were very academic and heavy on the science. Semiotics might have remained
in logic and linguistics, being of purely academic interest, except for some
events which unfolded shortly after World War II. In a nutshell, anthropolo-
gists, who have always studied human culture and the structures of society
such as families and organized mealtimes, work, education, the law, and
everything else that pins the fabric of human society together, noticed that
semiotics contained some extremely useful insights. They noticed some
conceptual products such as ‘binary oppositions’, which we will learn about
later, which seemed to do more than solve problems for linguists. The
anthropologists asked themselves: ‘what would happen if we borrowed
these problem-solving devices from linguistics, which detect how language
works, and applied them to questions of how society works?’ The results
 HOW TO DO RESEARCH USING SEMIOTICS 65

were better than anybody expected and it led to a wildfire of semiotics in

social science and eventually in business.
Turn back a few pages and take another look at the research questions
concerning mature women and their mental health, which I flagged as top-
down questions. Observe that these questions do not focus on decoding
signs and symbols but are concerned with how meaning organizes, and is
organized by, wider society. What is ‘a mature woman’? What, in the culture
you are studying, are deemed to be her special problems? Is she expected to
be menopausal but not anorexic or suffering from gender dysphoria? What
kinds of solutions are offered for those problems – are they medical, are they
matters of her lifestyle or even just an internal change of attitude? Who is
included in this cultural story about mature women and their mental health
and who is excluded? Is it ageist? Is it a story about white women or affluent
women? Does it ignore the health and health problems of other women who
are just as deserving? Is it sexist? Does this story about mature women and
their mental health serve to diminish women, contain or dismiss their behav-
iour, make them into a joke, make them less desirable or less valuable at
work? As you ask these questions, you are not limiting yourself to bottom-
up analysis of texts. You are asking what kind of a society needed to produce
those texts. Why are they needed? Who benefits and who suffers or is
marginalized by their existence? Who has money invested in the version of
reality that these texts reinforce? Are things different in other parts of the
world or were they different at other points in history?
This is top-down analysis and it is where the real muscle of semiotics is
located. Don’t stop at picking out signs and codes. Figure out what kind of
a society needs those signs and codes to exist. Now you are capable of saying
something really original and insightful about brands and consumers.

Apply findings to your client’s business objectives

You have now concluded the analysis part of your project and you have
generated a lot of interesting findings. Your bottom-up work picked out a
lot of signs and codes. You can name their purpose and you can specify
which types of semiotic signs carry which types of meaning. Your top-down
work revealed a great deal about the society or culture which generated
these signs and codes. It enables you to make penetrating remarks about
why people behave the way they do (in the supermarket, in the workplace,
at discos, at family mealtimes) and you can say who benefits from this
behaviour and who pays the price.
66 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Return to the brief and take another look at those business objectives.
The baked beans company is going to be happy because you did a lot of
bottom-up work which can now tell them in considerable detail what kinds
of signs they can introduce in store, at the level of the fixture, to wake people
up, persuade them to browse, make the product seem more premium and
make it stand out on shelf. As an added bonus, you now know a lot about
the cultural meaning of baked beans which will allow your client to deploy
those semiotic signs with a reasonably complete knowledge of the way this
will cause people to understand their brand and the type of purchasing and
eating behaviour it will stimulate.
The mental health client is going to be happy because you devoted most
of your analysis time to top-down thinking. In short order, you can make
original remarks about mature women and the climate of mental health
which surrounds them. You can identify subsets of the target market who are
under-served. You can point out tired old tropes and stereotypes that a new
brand could challenge and thus appear innovative. You can show how
culturally dominant narratives about mental health benefit women in some
ways, like getting hormone replacement therapy for their hot flushes, but
cost them in other ways, like causing other people to see them as unattractive
and irrational. These are insights that the brand can use. As an added bonus,
you can point out some signs and symbols that you discovered in texts which
serve as evidence in support of your claims and which your client may choose
to use as shown, change or subvert in their own communications.
More information on making the move from data to insight to strategy is
found in Chapter 9.

Stay focused on your client’s business objectives, all the time. Semiotics is
intrinsically interesting and rewarding but you aren’t getting paid to reward
yourself. You were hired to address a specific business problem, so focus your
attention on that and resist the temptation to write long reports that wander off
in all sorts of directions with no reference to how that affects the bottom line.

Write your story

It’s time to write up your findings. Lots of detail on this topic appears in
Chapter 10 but this chapter is about providing you with a concise recipe for
doing semiotics, so here are my top tips for generating written and visual
output.
 HOW TO DO RESEARCH USING SEMIOTICS 67

Space out your ideas and use visual examples

I often write in PowerPoint because I like to include a lot of visual evidence
when I want to persuade clients of some insight or discovery. The baked
beans project is going to result in a fairly long document because the client’s
objectives mainly concern bottom-up issues so they are going to want to see
lots of clear, bright, visual examples of semiotic signs that they can use. Don’t
over-crowd those slides. Make one point on each page, with no more than
one or two lines of text, and include two or three visual images that show the
client what you are talking about or exemplify what you want them to do.
The mental health project will result in a shorter document because it is very
compressed in time and also because your key insights are conceptual rather
than simply tangible. Despite this, stick to the principle of not over-crowding
those slides. Make one key point and give an example that shows the client
where you got this idea or how it manifests itself in real life.
Don’t write Word documents if you can avoid it. They encourage rambling
and walls of text. It’s very easy to get carried away by your own creative
genius when you are doing semiotics and you will end up with a report the
length of this book. Your client won’t have time to read it and you will
struggle to find that one outstanding insight that is buried on page 262.
Writing text-only versions of semiotics in a way that people can use requires
a lot of discipline. Make everyone’s lives easier by spacing out the informa-
tion and give examples for everything you have to say.
If you need to manufacture a short document or there are technical
constraints on the number of images you can include (as in this book), then
consider supplying visual resources separately on a website or other digital
platform.

Stay focused on what your client or audience needs to know

Only include material that is relevant to your client’s business objectives. I
recently saw one example of semiotic analysis which concerned a newly
re-designed fruit drink that had an unusual shape. The author set off on a
flight of imagination about what the shape of the pack could mean. The prob-
lem was the lack of any indication that the pack conveyed this meaning to
anyone else. The client is not hiring you to tell them that their product reminds
you of your grandmother’s favourite dress or a mystical experience you had
while on holiday in Peru. They want you to tell them what the pack means to
consumers. The meanings of semiotic signs are agreed meanings, they are
68 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

publicly available meanings. If you can also discern a lot of private meanings
which are not going to affect your client’s bottom line, leave them out.

Supply adequate evidence in support of your claims

Try not to build a whole case study around a single text. It’s common for
students and early-career semiotic researchers to do this and it is not enough
to impress clients. One such essay appeared recently on a popular social
media platform and attracted negative responses from readers. It took as its
sole piece of data a still image captured from a popular TV sitcom. The
author had made a sincere attempt to decode the photo and show how
certain semiotic signs within – fashions, haircuts, furniture, interior design –
attached meaning to the human figures. The essay seemed to suggest that
these meanings held true for this particular sitcom, for sitcoms in general
and for the wider culture beyond TV. It attracted a negative response mainly
because the author concentrated on just one photograph. Readers said: ‘this
is pure fiction, it tells you nothing about real life’ and ‘you would have done
better to review a variety of TV shows if you wanted us to learn something
about TV’ and, most cruelly of all, ‘get a proper job’. This is something that
you want to avoid. Don’t make loads of effort doing semiotic thinking about
pop culture just so that people can tell you to get a job. Make clear why the
reader should care about this information and supply a sufficient amount of
evidence to give people a reasonable basis for agreeing with what you say.

Use clear, simple language

Don’t use long, fancy words. Express yourself using language that anyone
who is reasonably literate and numerate will be able to understand. If you get
deeply into semiotics and start to read research literature that comes from
philosophy and the humanities, you will find yourself in an ocean of long
words, some of them made up for the purpose at hand. These words exist for
a reason and it is a very good thing for an advanced practitioner of semiotics
to know what is meant by ‘liminality’ and ‘detournement’ and ‘slippage’ but
you do not need to wear all these things on your sleeve to impress and
bamboozle other people. When I was a PhD student, I used to think it very
important to make a display of how clever I was, which caused my supervisor
to give me this valuable advice. ‘The point,’ he told me, ‘is not to make simple
things appear difficult. The point is to make difficult things appear simple.’
 HOW TO DO RESEARCH USING SEMIOTICS 69

Activity: Write a proposal

You’ve patiently done a lot of reading in this chapter and it’s time for action.
Open your journal and use your notes and the brief you prepared to write a
proposal.

Background and business objectives

Summarize the whole brief in a couple of paragraphs or on one PowerPoint
page.

Research objectives
Try listing all your research questions first, then go back to the top of your
list and compose some research objectives that concisely summarize the
expected outcomes of the research.

Method
Write a few lines that explain why semiotics is right for the task at hand. If
your professional experience tells you that actually it would be a good idea
to combine semiotics with some ethnography or another qualitative method,
include that and explain why you are using that combination.

Materials
What kind of data will you work with? Give examples and say where you
will get them from or who is expected to supply them.

Procedure
Without going into excessive detail, indicate how you will weight your
­analysis between bottom-up and top-down and how that will affect the
expected output.
Remember to mention that brainstorming session you are going to have,
where the client will educate you about their business situation and you will
give them an insight into semiotic thinking.
70 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Discussion
Take one or two pages to give your client a tempting preview of the kinds of
topics you will discuss and the kinds of things you are liable to say about
them. A tiny bit of sample analysis doesn’t take much time to prepare and it
goes a long way.

Deliverables
Tell your (real or imaginary) client what tangible assets they will get at the
end of the project.

Timings and costs

This is a tricky one because it is dramatically affected by the following
considerations:

●● Are you including observational fieldwork or contact with consumers?

●● How large a data set do you need?
●● How many brands does the client consider to be in their competitive set?
How many of those brands are they asking you to comment on in
significant detail? Some brands, for example in mobile phones, only have
a small handful of competitors. Other categories, such as fashion and
confectionery, are extremely crowded. Don’t over-commit yourself to
supplying detailed analysis of large numbers of brands individually unless
the project itself requires it.
●● Is this a multi-country study? Will you require translation or local
partners?
●● Will you need to produce more than one version of your final report for
different audiences?

Despite these variations, it is possible to make some ballpark estimations. If

you return to our sample briefs, you will see that the baked beans client is
giving you four weeks to turn around a project that includes quite a lot of
specific questions and will almost certainly require some product shopping
or store visits. Meanwhile, the mental health client is giving you two days
and wants a phone debrief this Friday. These are typical scenarios for me in
my everyday working life, while another project that involves a lot of over-
seas travel and translation could take up to a couple of months. Estimate
 HOW TO DO RESEARCH USING SEMIOTICS 71

how long you think it will take you, calculate your day rate and charge your
client accordingly.
In this chapter I have outlined an approach for doing semiotics that will
fit any occasion. In the chapters to follow we will now take a deep dive into
analytic techniques, semiotic tools with specific applications and marketing
strategy.
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04

Images, language and other

semiotic signs

WHAT’S COMING UP

Welcome to Chapter 4, the first of two chapters which explain in detail how
to perform semiotic analysis. In this chapter we will be concerned with
bottom-up analysis, which is the well-known capacity of semiotics to
determine the meaning of signs and symbols. At the end of this first
analytic chapter, you will be able to:
●● tell the difference between a sign, a text and a code and apply that
knowledge to sharpen your analytic abilities in real business situations;
●● make conscious decisions regarding which sources of information you
treat as researchable data and which sources you regard as explanations
of data;
●● pay attention to both form and content when considering complex
messages such as advertising;
●● get started with decoding visual images, language and video clips,
generating worthwhile insights; and
●● discover insights about consumer psychology and behaviour based on a
functional analysis of semiotic codes.

Data and method

Bottom-up analysis is probably the most well-known aspect of semiotics. In
its simplest form it involves detecting small units of communication such as
a brand mark, a hoop of extruded breakfast cereal or canned spaghetti, a
74 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

signature colour, a sound such as a harp, a gong or a clash of cymbals. Some

small units of communication are words or short phrases. The job of the
semiologist is to say what these items mean. They qualify as semiotic signs
to the extent that they are invested with culturally specific meaning.
Most semiotic signs arrive on the semiologist’s desk or screen not in isola-
tion but as part of a text. A text is a complex message composed of many
semiotic signs. Texts are often overlooked in commercial semiotics which is
a pity because they are full of valuable meaning that helps semiologists
figure out individual signs.
After examining texts and picking out semiotic signs, researchers may
organize signs into groups which they call codes.
Codes sit midway between bottom-up and top-down analysis. Lots of
commercial semioticians have experience with identifying semiotic signs
and grouping them into codes. But doing this without paying attention to
texts may sometimes prevent them from successfully proceeding to top-
down analysis and it sometimes makes it hard to see what functional purpose
codes serve. Codes risk ending up as vague categories based on the surface
appearance of signs. In this chapter, we focus on both signs and texts as a
priority and this informs the discussion of codes at the end. Here’s a reminder
of what these essential words stand for:

●● Sign
A semiotic sign is a small unit of communication that carries meaning. It
could be a single word, a sound effect, a simple visual icon such as a heart
or a smiley face. Signs are invested with meaning by the cultures that
produce them. They are the building blocks of packaging, advertising and
other brand touchpoints.
●● Text
A text is a composite entity which is made of semiotic signs. A text could
be a TV ad, a retail store, a packaged product, a book, film or painting. It
could be a consumer’s Instagram account or a company blog. In their
rush to collect and identify semiotic signs, commercial practitioners
sometimes forget to consider texts, but they are full of useful information
about consumer culture and they are the context in which the meaning of
semiotic signs is created and sustained.
●● Code
A code is a sum of semiotic signs which often occur together and which
help to uphold versions of reality and prescribe behaviour. For example,
Scotland has a code of thistles, tartan, lochs, mist, castles and so on which
is mainly for exported whisky brands and tourists. It upholds certain
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 75

myths and beliefs about Scotland, while glossing over details of reality
that don’t fit. It tells tourists how to be tourists and it tells whisky drinkers
how to enjoy whisky, even and especially if they are far from the place
where it was created.

HOW TO SPOT TEXTS, CODES AND SIGNS

You receive an item in the mail. It is a folded piece of card inside an envelope
and it is delivered to your house. In semiotic language, the text is the whole
card, including its envelope and any writing on the outside. A sign is a small
component of the card that delivers meaning. In this case, there’s a picture of a
bunch of balloons on the front and also some glitter. The code that these signs
belong to is ‘parties’ – birthday parties or some other kind of celebration. Not
every birthday card and party invitation has balloons and glitter, but these
semiotic signs occur together as part of greetings and invitations often enough
that we – and the recipient of the card – are immediately able to detect what it
is trying to tell us.

Representation
‘This is not a pipe’, Magritte announces in a line of text, positioned just
below a clear depiction of a pipe. It is his famous painting, ‘The Treachery
of Images’, painted in 1929 when he was 30. As you may know, the chal-
lenge to the viewer is to pay attention to the way that we are inclined to
think that we see a pipe when actually we are looking at a painting. It is the
difference between looking through, as in looking through a transparent
pane of glass to a pipe on the other side, and looking at, as when we observe
the surface and design of an image of a pipe. Magritte is calling our atten-
tion to the problem of representation. Is it a pipe, or not? Maybe it has
something to teach us about what pipes are like but also the fact of it being
a very specific representation of a pipe is important.
The ability to switch between looking through and looking at is tremen-
dously important in semiotics. Out of habit, our tendency in everyday life is
to look through representations. When visual or verbal messages are offered
to us, we usually treat them as transparently offering information about
their subject matter. We pay a lot of attention to the content of the message.
Consumers do this all the time. Becoming skilled in semiotics means devel-
oping the knack of snapping out of that tendency and refocusing on looking
at the form and structural features of texts. It is a new focus on looking at
76 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

practices of representation. On close analysis, nearly all forms of human

communicative output turn out to be some sort of representation but some
data that semiologists are regularly asked to work with make the problem
of representation especially vivid. These data include visual images and bits
and pieces of language which attempt to depict or represent something that
exists beyond the text itself.

Form and content

Of all market research methods, semiotics stands out in its ability to decode
representations, specifying:

●● what they mean; and

●● how they achieve their meaning.

In a commercial setting, semiologists are regularly presented with photos,

video clips and printed materials. The semiologist also may be presented
with audio material such as radio ads and interviews with consumers. They
may be presented with written material such as positioning statements,
brand stories, web copy, language in advertising and other marketing
communications, and many different types of material which emerge from
research, such as transcripts of focus groups. Because they are representa-
tions, these types of texts invite us to look at two things:

●● Form
Is this a painting, a photo, a video clip, is it CGI? What are the material
aspects of this item you are looking at? This is an aspect of analysis that
we don’t want to leave out but it is often not the main event in commercial
research. Exceptions could be when you have been asked to look at a
client’s text as a complete product in its own right and comment on its
format. Examples I’ve worked on include reviewing printed magazines,
medical leaflets and patient information, official documents such as the
bills and statements that utilities suppliers send to consumers, images and
depictions on packaging design and giving advice on whether a brand
mascot needs to appear in ads as a 2D line drawing, a fully realized 3D
computer-generated character, or something else.
●● Content
What is the subject matter of this painting, photo, video clip or other
visual representation? What is it a picture of? Aside from the structural
features of this focus group conversation, what does semiotics have to say
about the subject matter the group is discussing? This is very often the
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 77

client’s main focus in commercial semiotic research. Examples I’ve

worked on include visual representations of parents and families in
advertising, consumers talking about genetic disorders, photos of retail
stores and fixtures, tweets and consumers’ self-portraits.

At the time of doing bottom-up semiotic analysis, we want to pay attention

to both these aspects of texts. Every text has both form and content. The
examples in this chapter include commentary on both aspects.

Texts as researchable data versus texts as explanatory resource

There’s another way of considering texts that concerns the way that we
want to treat them, for analytic purposes. This isn’t a decision about which
aspects of texts we want to focus on, but what we want to do with any
insights that they reveal. Do we want to treat them as authoritative, as literal
and transparent descriptions of the world? Do we want to treat them as
questionable and in need of explanation? This tension between two ways of
relating to insights and observations that emerge from texts can be summa-
rized as ‘texts as researchable data versus texts as explanatory resource’:

●● Texts as researchable data

A social media tweet that says ‘Nike is the greatest brand in the world’.
Interesting and in need of semiotic analysis but not particularly reliable
or authoritative.
●● Texts as explanatory resource
Sales figures which show that sales spiked following a controversial ad
campaign. The real-world constraints of the project require us to treat
client-generated sales figures as reliable and not part of what we are
expected to challenge.

This distinction between data, which we scrutinize and treat as potentially

unreliable, and explanatory resources, to which we look for insights and
truths, isn’t merely an academic point of theory. It is consequential for the
version of reality that we are going to buy into and present to our client. It
is consequential for what we are going to take as being the truth and what
we are going to offer to other people as being the truth.
How to make the decision? It’s partly a business decision. The client will
have certain things that they have to regard as indisputably true such as
their sales figures, measures of advertising effectiveness or a segmentation
that the company has bought into.
78 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

It’s also partly an analytic decision. While you can be flexible about what
counts as data or resource from one project to the next, you are still responsi-
ble for deciding how you want to treat your research materials. We want to
avoid exercising unconscious bias by deciding, for example, that academic
books, scientific journals and works by authors with prestigious jobs or letters
after their names are necessarily authoritative and simply believe everything
they say. At the same time, you want to avoid deciding that quite ordinary
sources such as market research focus groups and communities such as
Mumsnet can’t ever be a source of reliable knowledge on some specific topic.
That said, the reason why some people, like artists and academics, regu-
larly produce work that is helpful as an explanatory resource is because
thinking about semiotic questions is often their full-time job. Because they
are in the happy position of having the time and resources to think about
semiotic questions of meaning, representation and cultural practice on a
full-time basis, they have a better than average chance of coming up with
insights or fresh perspectives on consumer culture that a commercially prac-
tising semiologist will then benefit from using.
In this chapter, because we are mainly concerned with the bottom-up end
of analysis that focuses on signs and symbols, we’ll keep a focus on texts
which seem to serve as researchable data. In Chapter 5, where we explore
top-down analysis, treating texts as an explanatory resource will get its own
discussion and you will notice that academic literature and the arts get more
attention.

How are signs and texts organized in this chapter?

As we can see, texts can be complicated when you try to consider them
collectively, because they are so diverse in their internal characteristics and
also in terms of what you the analyst require them to do. To make things as
simple as possible, this chapter organizes texts as follows, guided by the
types of materials that marketers who use and buy semiotic insight will typi-
cally ask you to comment on.

Still images
Still visual images will regularly arrive on your desk when you take up semi-
otics. They are usually complex texts, composed of many semiotic signs,
such as high-resolution, 2D images of packaging, laid out flat, display ads,
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 79

web pages and so on. Still visual images are a great place to begin analysis if
you have a diverse data set. When I encounter these images, here are a few
of the semiotic signs I look for to get the analysis moving:

1 Use of colour. Is there a dominant colour? Is there a distinct colour

palette? Is it being used to convey a mood or culturally specific
information?
2 Is it iconic? Is it straightforwardly a picture of something such as a car or
a bottle of perfume? Or is it purely symbolic? Is it an abstract design as
seen in most brand marks? How is it directing the viewer’s attention
towards either content or form, and what effect is achieved?
3 Is it a portrait or a self-portrait? Are there human figures in the frame?
What is specific about them that could be expected to convey meaning?
How are they gendered, how old do they appear to be, do they seem to
be cast as members of a particular ethnic group? Are they members of a
subculture?
4 Is it attempting modernity, nostalgia or history? This is sometimes evident
in the form of visual images. Full-colour photography and sharp CGI
graphics connote modernity and even futurism. Hand-drawn illustrations
may connote nostalgia for the mid-20th century or for a rural way of life
that many consumers have never experienced.
5 Is the image being used to support a popular or political idea? How does
it support that idea? Western culture, among business people and
consumers, is full of talk about motivation and inspiration. We are awash
with memes that combine images with text in an attempt to produce an
uplifting and energizing effect.
6 How is this image managing the balance between things which are
familiar and everyday versus things which are remarkable, extreme or
exotic? What visual directions are included in the image to help consumers
know what to make of the scene being depicted?
7 If this is a photo, where was it taken and is there anything in shot which
is telling humans how to interact with the environment? For example, if
this was taken in a store, are there navigational signs in shot? Are there
shelf wobblers and price tickets? What can we infer about the relationship
of the photographer to the model or subject matter?

Let’s take an example and show how this type of analysis is applied. The
photo in Figure 4.1 is one from my own collection. It depicts tea and cake that
80 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

FIGURE 4.1 Tea and cake

SOURCE Rachel Lawes (c 2016)

I was served in a respectable café in London, England. Let’s review its features
to show that the above checklist works when applied to real visual data.

1 Colour. The first thing we notice is that this is a monochrome image. In

another text, such as a professionally produced advertising image, black-
and-white often signifies history. Here, it is offered by the author and
photographer as something of the present day and we may deduce that its
monochrome appearance is attributable to the fact that we encounter it
in a printed book. Moreover, it is a business book and not an art book or
a coffee table book, items which often have more images than text. (A full
colour version of this image is available on the website accompanying
this book.)
2 This is an iconic image. It is a realistic and simple depiction of some tea
and a slice of cake. It invites the viewer to treat it as documentary
photography. It purports to give a truthful account of something, such as
taking tea in a London café.
3 There are no humans in this image, but certain objects dominate the
space within the frame. It’s less a portrait and more a still life. Still life is
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 81

of course a tradition in painting that does more than show off the painter’s
skill, it is full of symbolism and information about the culture that
produced and valued the objects in the picture. In this case, the photograph
captures a still life of substances which in British culture, and in many
cultures around the world, are nearly sacred. A particularly British flavour
is lent to the ritual of afternoon tea by objects such as the saucer, the milk
jug and the tea pot.
4 If we accept this photo as a kind of documentary about a London café
culture or British rituals of afternoon tea, what we see is that the café has
certainly built nostalgia into its offering. In 21st-century Britain, most of
the tea that we consume is slurped from mugs or cardboard beakers from
Starbucks. Yet 50 or 60 years ago, or so we like to believe, tea-time looked
like this in households up and down the land. Bone china cups with
saucers. Milk in a separate jug, not in the bottom of the cup. Tea in a
separate tea pot, rather than a tea bag placed in a mug. There’s even a
tablecloth, something that a lot of households don’t bother with since
post-war kitchen design moved towards wipe-clean surfaces.
5 This is a political image insofar as it reinforces ideas which are connected
to the British class system. To begin with, taking tea in this particular
manner is now regarded as limited to the upper classes, who have the
time and leisure to serve tea in the traditional style and are not reduced
to running into Starbucks on their way to and from work. Secondly,
observe a clever manoeuvre. Even though the cup, saucer and plate are
delicately decorated bone china, nothing matches. The tea pot is quite
modernist and even the cup and saucer don’t match, despite their similar
design. Observers of the British class system like to note that it is the
middle class who have a particular habit of making everything match,
especially in their homes, as we can see in their interior design. The upper
classes seem quite comfortable with using non-matching or even slightly
broken things as long as they are of good quality and the explanation for
this is usually taken to be that they inherit their best possessions rather
than purchasing them. Here, the café has performed a clever sleight of
hand by allowing the choice of tableware to slip into upper-class
insouciance.
6 Observe that a lot of premium products and experiences are sold to
consumers as something exotic or novel. Think of holidays, or product
launches; they are overtly exciting. At other times, the consumer is invited
to be seduced by promises of the cosy, homely, comforting and familiar. As
82 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

a nation, the British default to the view that tea is the correct first response
to most situations. What we see on the table are tools for the enactment
of a domestic ritual that soothes as it delights. This will work just as well
for residents of London, British people on a day out and visitors from
other countries who enjoy a slice of British culture with a slice of British
cake.
7 There are quite subtle cues in this display which tell the photographer –
seemingly the same person who is about to have their tea – how to behave.
The tablecloth and the saucer say ‘take care, don’t spill anything’. The
small flower vase at the back of the table says ‘you are here to have an
experience and not just to slake hunger and thirst’.

The above list is not an exhaustive list of everything that could feasibly
appear in a visual image but it is a good beginning. As you advance in your
own semiotic practice, you will expand your repertoire of things that you
know how to look for. You’ll also find that the range of signs that you can
recognize is increased by doing top-down analysis in which you investigate
big questions of culture and society.

Activity: Decode an image

Return to your journal in which you are pursuing your own project in semi-
otics. Collect two or three complex visual images (that is, complete texts,
not individual semiotic signs) that you see as relevant to your topic. Apply
the seven points of investigation listed here. Note your findings and observa-
tions. Note any ways in which they clearly connect to your research questions
and business objectives. You’ll triangulate your discoveries later with your
insights from other data and other types of analysis.

Language: Speech and writing

Practising semiologists regularly deal with written words. These could
arrive in the form of on-pack text, advertising scripts, web copy, display ads
that use words or printed material such as direct mail, brochures and leaf-
lets. Magazines and newspapers may be available to you in both print and
digital formats. The client’s product may even be a whole book or a series
of books.
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 83

It’s also common for semiologists to take an interest in transcripts of live

conversations. We will reserve comments on live conversation for the
upcoming chapter on how to combine semiotics with methods such as
discourse analysis (DA). Analysing live conversation has its own specificities
which DA helps with. In the meantime, there are some things that nearly all
written texts have in common, which are the subject of this section.
When I encounter data which arrive in the form of written words, here
are some of the things I look out for.

1 What are the formal properties of the text? In what format does it
arrive? Where do I encounter it or where does the consumer encounter
it? Is it a roadside hoarding, a meme on a brand’s Instagram account, a
brand story on the company’s website?
2 What’s the language? Is it English, Arabic, Chinese or something else? Is
there a discernible dialect? Are there slang words or regional phrases?
Words and phrases, including brand names, are easily identifiable
examples of semiotic signs.
3 Usually, written and verbal messages bring with them a lot of implications
about the context of the speech. Specifically, who is the implied writer or
speaker? Who is the implied reader? What is the implied situation in
which they encounter each other? What does the text seem designed to
achieve? Does it tell a story? Does it issue a command? Does it make a
promise or offer an apology?
4 How many binary oppositions can I detect? Binary oppositions are
found when the meaning of a word, phrase or semiotic sign depends on
the existence of its exact opposite – which may or may not be explicitly
present in the text. The binary organization of words and their meanings
was one of the earliest discoveries in semiotics, by Ferdinand de Saussure
in the first years of the 20th century.
5 What is the linguistic structure of the text? Is it a three-word strapline or
a whole book? ‘Strapline’ and ‘book’ are semiotic signs in their own right.
6 Does it use humour or irony? Is it self-aware, self-conscious or ‘meta’,
meaning that it comments on itself as a text? Is there anything in the text
which is similar to Magritte’s painting, that warns us that we should not
simply take what we see at face value?

As with the analysis of still visual images, this is not an exhaustive list of
everything that it’s possible to look for in texts that are made from written
words, but it is a good sample of questions that will get your analysis up and
84 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

FIGURE 4.2 Store exterior

SOURCE Rachel Lawes (2017)

running. You should be able to detect these semiotic signs and mechanisms
in most texts that cross your path. They will continue to be visible to you
when you come to look at naturally occurring conversational data but we
are giving conversations their own special treatment a bit later because so
much is known about conversational mechanics.
Let’s take an example text and apply these ideas. Figure 4.2 shows a
photo I took in California, in 2017. It shows a display in the window of a
women’s clothing store called Loft. As you can see, the window does not
show mannequins dressed in the latest fashions. Instead, it places a large
poster just behind the glass. It is emblazoned with the face of a very young
woman who is smiling broadly. Her face is partly obscured by a written
message which it is now our job to decode:

1 The formal properties of this text are that it is a notice in a shop window.
This is a public situation. We can take it that it is not a secret message and
that it is intended to be viewed by a mass audience. We also might guess
that the clothes store is for young women. It’s helpful but not essential to
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 85

know that before encountering the photo because it does some of the
work of setting the scene for us.
2 The language is English. Note ‘For real’. This is a distinctively North
American turn of phrase and this is highlighted by the fact that it has
been made into a complete sentence with a full stop at the end. ‘For real’
is, in fact, a complete sentence in the urban vernacular of the United
States.
3 The implied situation is an interesting one. Loft the fashion store addresses
the passer-by, the potential customer. It addresses young women who
might recognize themselves in the accompanying image. Yet the store
does not address the customer directly. It pretends to be a message to
another entity, possibly a magazine feature or TV show that tells young
women what to wear.
4 Various binary oppositions can be detected in the message. Of these, the
most important is the idea of dressing to express one’s emotions versus
something else – the implied opposite would be dressing so as to satisfy
convention, to obey rules or to accommodate other people’s preferences.
This is the moral core of the text. In addressing its imaginary recipient, it
seems to speak on behalf of the consumer by rejecting rules about clothing
and advocating a spontaneous, celebratory approach to choosing an
outfit. This is despite the fact that few of us are free to wear what we
want all the time. In fact, people are often quite constrained in their
clothing options as we will see shortly when we come to talk about
semiotic codes.
5 The linguistic structure of the text takes the form of a letter, beginning
with the salutation ‘Dear’ and ending with ‘Love’. It uses an informal
tone and signs off with an execution of the brand name that resembles
hand writing rather than the Courier font used for the main body of
the letter. A hand-drawn heart connotes a young and possibly female
writer.
6 The text has an element of irony in that we know it is not a ‘real’ letter.
It mimics the conventions of a letter to make a point. The point appears
to be that people, specifically young women, should be free to express
their innermost feelings in their outward fashion choices. Loft presents
itself as a supporter of a cause which Loft itself has manufactured for the
occasion.
86 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Activity: Decode language

Return to the two or three complete texts which you picked out as relevant
to the project you are pursuing. Probably at least one of them will include
words. If you have data which are relevant to your project which are
composed entirely of words, such as a conversation unfolding on social
media, make a priority of that text. If you have a very long text such as a
focus group transcript, identify an interesting section to work with, as when
a particular speaker holds the floor for several minutes to tell a story. Run
through all of the items on the above checklist; this will give you a good
view of the whole text, its tone and structure.
When you are finished with the checklist, you’re then in a good position
to list individual semiotic signs because you already know what they mean.
Semiotic signs in the Loft photo include but are not limited to:

●● The smile of the young model.

●● The typeface, which is reminiscent of old-fashioned typewriters, which
are loved by hipsters.
●● The pronoun ‘we’, often used in rallying calls to action.
●● ‘Starting today’, a phrase imported from pop psychology, self-help and
self-motivation codes.
●● ‘Dear’, ‘Love’.
●● The signature, the heart.
●● ‘What to Wear’ – do some more research if any specific semiotic sign in
your text is making you think that it refers to something in the local culture.
●● ‘Feel’ – emotions, feelings as a benchmark against which external reality
can be evaluated and perhaps found wanting. A culturally specific idea,
not a universal human value. Note also that in this, the second edition of
Using Semiotics in Marketing, there’s lots of exciting new content
concerning feelings in Chapters 13–15.

TV ads and other time-based media

Time-based media may include gifs, cartoons and other animations, TV ads,
radio ads, ethnographic film, audio recordings of focus groups, music and
user-generated video content, including consumers who have Twitch and
YouTube channels. This type of media normally includes sound and also
evidence of visual editing. Even a short video may tell a story, be broken into
scenes, show alternative points of view.
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 87

As before, pay attention to both the form and the content of video data,
as both have the ability to convey meaning. Here is the basis of a checklist
that you can add to yourself as your skills develop:

●● Is the pace of the video fast with lots of action or is it slow and lingering?
●● Is there music? What kind? Folk songs, gangster rap, Korean pop, a string
quartet?
●● Is it professionally produced, semi professional or amateur? Has anything
been done at the editing stage to make it look either more professional or
more ‘authentic’ and home-made?
●● Are there human voices? Do they all belong to actors or is there a
disembodied voice of a narrator? Why is the narrator there?
●● If there are multiple scenes, how are they linked? Is someone using this
video to tell a story about events that are linked by cause and effect?
●● Are there closed captions?
●● Is this video clearly a work of fiction, does it claim to be unmediated
reality or is it somewhere in between the two?
●● Are there techniques such as split screen? How are they used, to convey
what kind of effect and set of priorities to the viewer?
●● How long is it? Is it three seconds, 30 seconds or two hours? Why does it
need to be this length and not some other length?
●● On what platform did you encounter it? What does this tell you about the
film makers, the audience and the cultural significance and probable
meaning of the film?

Physical data
There is a further category of data which may cross your path. This category
includes physical objects and live situations.
Objects could be three-dimensional packaged goods that you can hold in
your hands. They could be highly designed and engineered products, from
espresso machines to cars. They could be gifts which are offered with a purchase.
Live situations are any situations where there are human bodies moving
around. You are observing people at the mall or cooking a meal at home or
visiting a museum or in their workplace. You are physically present in a
location. You can smell the air. You can use local services, buy a pair of
88 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

shoes, get a hair-cut, attempt to find somewhere to sit down. You experience
physical sensations and you’re in a space where there could be quite large
numbers of people milling about, gesticulating to each other. You may even
be able to detect a certain mood, as when a salesman begins to rally a group
of customers.
Decoding physical objects and live experiences requires its own discus-
sion, and this features in the chapters on doing semiotic field trips and
combining semiotics with methods such as ethnography. For now, let’s just
observe that a thumbs-up gesture is a semiotic sign, as is a decorative pattern
of cocoa dust floating on a cup of coffee and a queue of young shoppers
waiting in the rain outside a branch of fashion brand Supreme.

From signs to codes: Moving towards top-down analysis

At this point in your personal project, you have carefully inspected some
data. You have observed that data tend to arrive in your possession not as
isolated semiotic signs but as complete texts which may convey quite complex
messages. You’ve considered the texts as whole products and then gone on to
break them apart to discover the semiotic signs which are their smallest units
of meaning. You’ve looked at your data very closely from a bottom-up
perspective, taking in the details. It’s now time to shift our analysis up one
level of granularity and start thinking about codes. This is where we can
learn something about consumer psychology and everyday behaviour and we
prepare ourselves to do the top-down analysis set out in Chapter 5.
Before we get into detailed discussion of what you should do with codes,
here’s another reminder of some key terms:

●● Top-down analysis. A type of semiotic analysis that applies semiotic tools

for thinking to large-scale questions of culture and society. When we
organize semiotic signs into codes, we are gradually moving up the scale
from bottom-up to top-down analysis.
●● Code is a word for a sum of semiotic signs which are often found in the
same place, at the same time. Codes are distinguished by having some
social function. They uphold some versions of reality while suppressing
others and they act as instructions to consumers in how to behave.

When we observe that codes exist, we are moving our analysis up one
level of granularity. We’re no longer talking about the simple existence and
meanings of semiotic signs; we’re ­talking about how they behave across
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 89

multiple texts and occasions. Every semiotic sign has its own friends and
they cluster together to produce certain meanings.
There’s a tendency in commercial semiotic research to try to group signs
into codes based solely on their appearance. This practice will keep you
from getting to the best insights that semiotics has to offer, so that’s why we
want to keep our minds firmly fixed on the idea that codes are about more
than appearance; they are about function, they serve some sort of purpose.
All codes originate in culture in one way or another but they may come
from specific sources which lend them some distinctive characteristics and
help you to detect what their purpose is, this being your job as a semiologist
and a task that consumers generally cannot perform.

Codes which are generated by brands, for consumers

Food is a great example of a category where we can see brands not only use
codes to talk to consumers but even invent their own codes. Businesses can
be seen dividing up food for consumers. Fifty years ago, consumers might
have thought in terms of discrete meals which were composed of things like
‘meat’ and ‘vegetables’ but after several decades of mass-produced and
processed foods, consumers have learned to understand that foods belong to
these types of semiotic codes:

●● Luxury
Foods which can be used to mark extra-special occasions. Food items
which make acceptable gifts. Foods which are exclusive and confer status
upon the person eating them.
●● Health
‘Health food’ is a large and profitable category and it is a powerful
semiotic code with many constituent semiotic signs, from ‘vegan’ to
‘isoflavones’ and of course ‘organic’ and ‘natural’. This code exists to
make people feel as though they are doing something positive to care for
their health and of course this can be a badge of social status in its own
right.
●● Fast food
Fast food has emerged as a category of food and it serves a useful social
purpose as a semiotic code. Its existence tells consumers that it’s OK to be
in a hurry; they need not sit at a table to eat. It’s OK to treat yourself with
tasty, less-healthy foods when you are on the move (that is, it’s OK to
compensate yourself with a burger if you are overworked and busy). Fast
90 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

food places huge emphasis on choice as well as speed of delivery – there’s

a powerful surrounding rhetoric of ‘have it your way’.
●● Restaurants
Restaurants as an industry use multiple codes. Some are ‘family’ brands
with Mom-and-Pop stories about the brand’s origins and apple pie on the
menu. Some use codes which are connected to popular ideas about
regions and nations. A French restaurant is expected to be intimate and
to have a good wine list. A Greek restaurant is expected to be lively. These
codes tell consumers what to expect and how to behave.
●● Street food
Street food has been fully absorbed into consumer culture and is part of
the theatrical apparatus of street markets which are often hubs of social
activity and discretionary spending for both local residents and visitors.
Street food can be found at festivals, on beaches, in shopping malls and
in public spaces where they are supported by the city as part of a larger
project of inclusivity or stimulating the local economy. Consumers know
that they are expected to enjoy exotic flavours, unfamiliar ingredients
and dishes and that they are there to consume entertaining and sometimes
informative experiences with a local cultural flavour.

Codes which originate in fine art and design

It’s very common for brands that want to convey certain messages to
consumers to borrow from existing and historical art and design trends.
They evoke trends which consumers may recognize only tacitly. Here are
some examples:

●● A rustic code exists in almost all cultures around the world but it is
particularly valued by affluent consumers who sometimes feel a bit
removed from nature. Whether it is a luxury hotel in India which provides
a sanctuary of peace and contemplation for wealthy guests or a hand-
woven rug from West Africa, signs include natural materials such as
wood and stone, plant life, undyed cloth, earthy colours, rough edges,
unfinished surfaces and all suggestions that an object was manufactured
by a human, using their hands.
●● Brands with European heritage often like to invoke the design codes of
the 18th and 19th centuries. Eighteenth-century European design was
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 91

extravagant. It involved bows, decorative scrolls, lavish textiles, jewel

tones and sugary pastels, gold details, paintings of bucolic scenes.
Nineteenth-century design was more restrained and dignified, using more
sombre colours and introducing small, dense patterns, especially with a
botanical or floral motif. Nike partnered with Liberty, a 19th-century
British textile design house, to make Nike trainers with a Liberty floral
print.
●● Modernism and Minimalism are design codes that appeared in the
Western world after World War II. Consumers may have most of their
experience with these codes as a result of their contact with everyday
brands because more people consume FMCG than go to museums to
look at the history of art. Modernism and Minimalism are a reaction to
and a rejection of the fussy and decorative styles of the previous two
centuries. They are used by consumer-facing brands across a range of
categories to communicate modernity, simplicity and freshness. Take a
moment to look up Kellogg’s Corn Flakes packaging on Google Images
or a similar search engine. The packaging has been refreshed numerous
times over the years but it is fascinating to see that the earliest versions,
circa 1958, and the versions that are in use today, stick carefully to the
basic principles of modernism. They use blocky, sans-serif fonts. They
allow empty space on pack to remain unfilled. They favour abstract
symbols over iconic representations.
●● Design in China as it finds its way into consumer culture is recognizably
split between design codes for ‘old China’ and ‘new China’. This presents
an opportunity for brands and occasionally a conundrum as they decide
which code they want to use. New China means personal freedom,
individualism and youth culture. Old China means elegance, tradition,
nature. Giveaway semiotic signs can be found in things like Chinese
script. On a text such as the cover of a magazine, there are choices to be
made, all of them full of meaning. The traditional Chinese character set is
Old China (and is very decorative and hard to read and write). The
simplified character set is New China (less graphic and packed with
historical meaning but more accessible to more people). Chinese
characters in a column running down the page are Old China; characters
which sit on a horizontal line are New China. Italics are New China
because italics don’t really exist in traditional Chinese, although the latter
will sometimes use cursive script.
92 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Codes which originate with consumers

Consumers are people and they have rich, full lives away from their concerns
about brands and shopping. The elaborate cultural and social systems which
they have set up are often manifest in the form of codes that everyone
appears to understand and which are used to maintain social order.

●● Dress codes do more than tell people what to wear, they tell them how to
behave. This is why consumers are able to understand and comply with
codes such as ‘business casual’, ‘wedding guest’, ‘Diwali outfit’ and so on.
Dress codes also help social groups to organize and recognize each other.
Hipsters famously have a code that includes beards, knitwear and button-
down shirts.
●● Interior design codes are closely linked to the function of buildings and
to issues of social class. Offices are designed to make workers visible and
arguably to keep them under surveillance. Very large homes and palaces
are often too large to be completely habitable, with their occupants living
in just a few rooms and causing the unused rooms to submit to codes
such as ‘guest suite’, ‘gym’, ‘cinema’, ‘study’, ‘ballroom’ and many more.
Middle class homes prioritize comfort and entertainment, arranging
upholstered furniture in front of a TV.
●● Architectural codes are linked to the history and future of cities. Much of
Chicago was rebuilt after a series of fires in the 19th century, accounting
for its many examples of 19th-century innovation on the part of young
architects who were discovering opportunity. Public housing projects try
to solve social problems but at the same time sometimes end up causing
them for reasons that include architectural features. Public transport
systems such as the Metro system of Santiago de Chile, conceived in the
60s and eventually opened under the Pinochet regime in 1975, convey the
vision of progress which exists at the level of cities and governments.

As you can see, the analysis of codes is about much more than noting that
some semiotic signs resemble each other. The appearance of semiotic signs is
less interesting than their function – their ability to convey meaning, regu-
late behaviour and organize society. It is this function which should drive
analysis of codes in semiotics. If you have a food client, it’s useful to be able
to tell them what ‘health’ means to consumers at the moment. It’s useful to
be able to tell them about two or three options for making a brand seem
premium, which may be global codes or regionally specific. Executional
details such as use of colours, patterns, textures, textiles and resistant
 IMAGES, LANGUAGE AND OTHER SEMIOTIC SIGNS 93

­ aterials, fashions, fonts and typefaces should be reserved to illustrate your

m
point, not to make the point for you. Avoid the temptation to posit codes
based on the superficial appearance of semiotic signs because you will run
out of ideas when your client wants you to apply your analysis to real
business problems involving brand launches, consumer behaviour and social
trends.

Activity: Find a code

Your brief for this exercise is to find at least one code in your data set. You
can make the task easier by taking in a wide variety of data. If your project
concerns wine, then collect texts which range across: examples of packaging
from different countries; photos of wine bars and wine stores; representa-
tions of wine on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram;
wine lists in bars and restaurants; references to wine in popular culture or
mass culture, such as songs and jokes about wine. You will soon begin to
observe that semiotic signs cluster in codes in such a way as to reinforce
certain versions of reality. Perhaps the list of very expensive wines in a top
hotel is written entirely in French. Perhaps the wines in your supermarket
are displayed with little cards that tell you very explicitly what you should
understand the wine to taste of as well as what foods should accompany it.
Perhaps your sweep of social media causes you to notice a consumer dispar-
aging Prosecco as the choice of ‘people who have signs in their houses that
say Live, Laugh, Love’ (a verbatim quote of a remark that I noticed recently,
referring to a currently popular style of interior décor). Perhaps you come to
understand that some demographics of consumers like wine to be pale-
coloured and fizzy while others benefit from the reflected depth and maturity
of a full-bodied red wine.
Codes are valuable because they tell you something about consumers and
the world they live in. They help to explain consumer behaviour and they
are a vital link between purely bottom-up analysis which focuses on
individual signs and their arrangement and large-scale top-down analysis
which attempts to decode society.
In the next chapter we’ll move to top-down analysis which is the largest
level of granularity and completes our set of essential analytic tools.
94

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 95

05

Society, culture and other big

influences on consumers

WHAT’S COMING UP

Welcome to Chapter 5, the second of two chapters which offer instructions

for performing semiotic analysis. In this chapter we are concerned with
top-down analysis, which involves applying semiotic tools and concepts not
to the small details of representation but to problems of society. Where do
trends come from? Do we need separate marketing campaigns for
Millennials and Generation Z? How can we make brands appealing both
globally and locally? How can brands respond to prevailing social problems
such as racism, divisive politics and culture wars? By the end of this chapter
you will be able to:

●● recognize and frame top-down questions;

●● gather information and data to support top-down analysis; and
●● perform two distinct kinds of top-down analysis.

Where do I begin? Recognizing and framing

top-down questions
In some of the examples we considered earlier, such as the baked bean project
and the mature women’s mental health project, we observed that the types of
questions for semiotics that appear in briefs often have a distinctly top-down
flavour. Some of the examples we encountered are shown in Table 5.1.
96 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

TABLE 5.1 Bottom-up and top-down research questions

The baked bean project mostly The women’s mental health project
asks bottom-up questions about mostly asks top-down questions about
semiotic signs culture and society

What signs and symbols can we include What is a ‘mature woman’? How does she fit
on pack to make the brand appear more into her local culture? How is she represented
premium? in global consumer culture and mass culture?
What is distinctive about her experience as a
member of this group?

What can we do to give the pack more What kinds of social and cultural influences
on-shelf stand-out? affect these women? What kinds of trending
ideas do they have a hand in creating? How
are mental health topics treated in these
trending and influential ideas?

What can we do at fixture to wake In popular constructions of mental health, as

shoppers up and get them engaged? encountered by the target customer, where do
the solutions to mental health problems seem
to be located? Who is held accountable for
their success or failure?

What cues can we borrow and import Are representations of mature women in the
from other sectors or categories? context of mental health inadequate or
partial? Do they exclude anyone? Who would
need to be included?

What are the norms of design in baked If the conversation around mental health and
bean brands and how is our brand mature women were to change, who would
showing that it is different? benefit? How would it need to change? How
could a brand be part of saying something new?

In this table, we have simplified the baked bean and mental health projects for
the sake of highlighting the differences between a top-down and bottom-up
point of view. It’s important not to be too literal about this because all activity
in semiotics has its bottom-up and top-down aspects. On the baked bean
project, even if we begin and end with questions about individual semiotic
signs and their use on pack and at fixture, at some point we will have to
consider sociological and cultural questions about the status of baked beans
in the collective imagination of consumers. At the same time, the mental
health project will eventually have its bottom-up aspects, no matter how
much the brief shows a commendable willingness to engage deeply with social
 SOCIETY, CULTURE AND OTHER BIG INFLUENCES ON CONSUMERS 97

issues. In this case, it seems that the client aspires to have their brand become
part of the mental health conversation. Perhaps they also want to develop
products, services and accompanying communications which all need to hit
the right note in the signs and symbols they use to get the message across.
As a general rule of thumb, it’s useful to reserve about one half of your
analysis time in a semiotic project for top-down analysis. You can do your
bottom-up and top-down analysis simultaneously, as the project gradually
unfolds, or you can treat them as two distinct stages of analysis as we are
doing in this book. The first option is faster if you have a lot of experience
with semiotics. If you are newer to semiotics, treating top-down and bottom-
up analysis separately helps you to be more organized about your project
and ensure that you don’t miss any important insights that might be lying
around, waiting for you to notice them.

Sourcing information and data

In order to start finding answers to your top-down questions, you will need
materials to work with. Recall that the last chapter included some discussion
about two different ways to treat the type of information and materials that
might be available to you in your commercial work. You may choose to treat
some items as researchable data, such as a social media post that says ‘Nike
is the greatest brand in the world’. You may choose to treat some items as
explanatory resources, such as your client’s sales figures or a segmentation
that the company has bought into. Sometimes an item of information may
benefit from both perspectives – it could offer a useful explanation of some
aspect of consumer culture while at the same time being in need of critical
analysis and inspection for its semiotic signs and ideological features.
If you are generous in the way that you collect materials for your project,
if you cast the net as wide as you can and include plenty of diversity in your
sources and sampled materials then you may not need to assemble a new
and separate data set for top-down analysis. Return to Chapter 3, which
summarizes how to do a whole semiotic project in one chapter. Take a look
at the list of data which it suggests that the researcher might want to gather.
The list includes products and packaging, own brand and competitor
marketing communications, market intelligence, photographs of physical
locations, observations of shopper behaviour, public information such as the
leaflets produced by community organizations, interviews or other meetings
98 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

with consumers, digital data, both contemporary and historical and materi-
als which are stored in public libraries. This is a pretty complete list and it
covers a diverse range of sources.
If you want to add to this list, to give your top-down analysis the best
possible chance of success, you may choose to include some materials which
have been introduced especially because they look like good sources of top-
down insights. These extra materials include: books and articles on semiotic
theory; fine art; academic writing from disciplines such as sociology, cultural
studies and the humanities.

Texts as an explanatory resource

Research and theory in semiotics
As you become experienced in running semiotic projects, the time will
come when you no longer need how-to books. It is a bit like cooking; at
first, we need basic and reliable instruction manuals that introduce us to
the language of cooking and tell us how to cream ingredients together or
make a white sauce. Later on, we no longer need basic instructions and we
start to benefit from the writing and demonstrations of top chefs who show
original dishes that they’ve created and talk about their philosophy of food
and cooking. When you get to this stage, put down the business books and
start reading semiotic theory, which emerges not from the business world
but from academia.
There are a handful of great writers on semiotics whose original work
will inspire you and help you develop a semiotic point of view as you look
at the world around you. Roland Barthes is many people’s favourite semi-
ologist: his book of essays, Mythologies, perfectly demonstrates how to give
a top-down analysis of French culture in just a few words, taking examples
such as wine and televised wrestling. After that, try the early and late works
of Jean Baudrillard, which cover subjects from fashion mannequins to
terrorism. Michel Foucault is the semiologist’s go-to source of insight
concerning power. As you get to know these writers you will learn about
their contemporaries who also led the way in developing semiotics as a
distinct field. These are famous names because these people have done more
than anyone else to shape semiotics into something that we can all use and
benefit from.
 SOCIETY, CULTURE AND OTHER BIG INFLUENCES ON CONSUMERS 99

Fine art and conceptual art

Generally speaking, semiologists in industries such as market research do
not pay a lot of attention to the art world. Industry has yet to figure out
what it is supposed to do with fine art and perhaps it has this in common
with some segments of the general population. But if you love fine art and
conceptual art, if you are stimulated and energized by looking at Edward
Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, or if you are entertained by a sculpture by
Jeff Koons of a metallic balloon dog, ten feet high and located in the middle
of a serious art museum, then top-down analysis in semiotics has great joys
in store for you.
With its focus on signs, representations and the co-operative, social
aspects of meaning, it’s no surprise that artists have enthusiastically
engaged with semiotics. Semiotics took off in the 60s and 70s, so art
works made during and after that period regularly show attention to
semiotic questions. Even art works made before this, especially if they
belong to fairly recent history, let’s say the last 200 years, can be a useful
part of semiotic analysis because artists have always paid some attention
to how society is organized and addressed various socially relevant themes
in their work.
To make a start, gather some examples of art works which address key
themes in your research, such as comfort food and comfort eating; foods
that come in cans; women’s lives; mental health. For example, consider
Andy Warhol’s paintings of cans of Campbell’s soup (which you can view at
moma.org) and Julia Kozerski’s autobiographical photos of 160-pound
weight loss (juliakozerski.com). No matter what aspects of consumers’ lives
you are considering, someone in the art world has got there before you and
has found insights that you will want to know about.

Sociology, cultural studies and other academic disciplines

As you engage with semiotic theory and with fine art, you will soon realize
how interdisciplinary semiotics is. It is no longer the exclusive preserve of
linguistics or of formal logic, as might have been the case in the first half of
the 20th century. Its rise in popularity after World War II took place in many
disciplines simultaneously. This is why the famous names you will encounter
on your semiotic travels come from such different backgrounds. Andy
Warhol painted and made screen prints. Baudrillard was a sociologist.
Barthes was a literary theorist.
100 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Because of this diversity of backgrounds, reading about the semiotics of

food or health or whatever it may be will soon lead you to texts which seem
useful but which are not explicitly semiotic in their point of view. You will
soon find yourself avidly reading books on the sociology of food and eating,
the history of medicine and feminist critiques of women’s health issues. At
this point, you will want to keep sight of how you are deciding to treat any
given text as an explanatory resource. Some caution may be necessary. For
example, you may find that your reading about youth culture leads you to a
book of straightforward, not particularly semiotic, sociology in which the
author reports survey results and statistics concerning the attitudes and
behaviour of young consumers, without any special concerns about repre-
sentation or other semiotic issues.
The way to handle this situation is to realize that you can find something
useful without deferring to it. You may choose to treat the statistics and report-
age as holding potentially useful insights while at the same time acknowledging
that the research it describes had cultural specificity and bias built right into it.
You can maintain a critical stance regarding the way a study is designed and
written about while still extracting value from it. The important thing is not to
go native. That is, in the same way that you wouldn’t suddenly start taking the
things that market research respondents say at face value after you’ve been
hanging out with them for a few hours, you don’t need to uncritically accept
everything that’s written in an academic book or journal just because it
included some useful details. Your job as a semiologist is to take a critical view
of texts, even texts which you regard as storing useful ­ explanations for
common phenomena, and even texts which you wrote yourself.

Beginning analysis: Time and place

Here is how to begin top-down analysis. It begins with asking questions of
your data which concern historical and regional specificity. How do things
vary in their appearance and meaning at different times, in different parts of
the world? Answering these questions helps you understand cultures which
are new to you and also your own culture. It helps you to step outside the
grand, rolling narrative of your own history and see how consumers of the
future will regard those of today as different from themselves. There are just
two technical terms that we need to get acquainted with, which are shown
in the box, below.
 SOCIETY, CULTURE AND OTHER BIG INFLUENCES ON CONSUMERS 101

●● Synchronic analysis takes a snapshot of cultural products and phenomena

at a specific point in time, in different regions of the world. It helps us to
understand the specificities and needs of local markets.
●● Diachronic analysis tracks the evolution of cultural products and
phenomena over time. Learning about the history of ideas and
representations helps us to see their trajectory and helps brands ride the
wave of emerging trends.

Synchronic analysis
Synchronic analysis helps you understand the specificities and needs of local
markets. Here’s how to do it, using a couple of examples.
I did some semiotic research into the status of family pets in preparation
for an early conference paper I gave for the Veterinary Marketing Association
in the UK. Marketing animal health requires deep insight into how consum-
ers anthropomorphize their pets, how they conceive of the differences
between animals and humans, how they attribute different traits to different
species. The way that humans think of and behave around their domestic
animals is culturally specific and it varies in different parts of the world.
When you are trying to analyse a region or category for a client that matches
your own, home culture, try to make a point of looking to other cultures
and regions of the world to find out how things are handled differently,
because it will give you a fresh perspective on things that are very familiar
to you. Of course, people love to take pictures of their pets and post them
online, virtual communities meet every day to chat and swap stories about
what their pets are doing. Sometimes they disagree with each other’s ideas
about pets and debates break out. Of all the many insights I was able to
harvest from a diverse data set, here’s a memorable one. British and European
consumers tend to be more comfortable than North Americans with the
idea of cats roaming around outdoors. Some Brits even fit ‘cat flaps’ in their
front doors at home to give the family cat the freedom to go out whenever
it wants to. Yet to some US consumers, the idea of ownerless cats on the
loose outdoors is alarming. Some consumers may think of these cats as
‘feral’, connoting danger and disease. At the same time, if we look at the way
that pet products are marketed to consumers on each side of the Atlantic, we
can observe a parallel distinction in the way that pets are depicted or
102 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

r­ epresented, in visual images and words. UK consumers expect to see tame,

friendly representations of animals that reflect their relationships to humans.
US consumers are used to seeing branding which emphasizes animals as not
just objects of love but also as belonging to wild and savage Nature. In this
view, cats and dogs were once tigers and wolves.
We can apply synchronic analysis in the same way to our two example
projects. The baked bean project will benefit if we gather some insights
about beans in other cultures. This is not merely of academic interest; it
gives us a view of the range of meanings of beans that consumers in the
target market are potentially going to be able to grasp, or may have been
exposed to, depending on their life experiences. It will not take us too long
to learn that our target customer has probably encountered ideas such as
rice and beans in contexts such as Mexican dishes which have been popu-
larized and brought to a worldwide market by brands. These dishes bring
with them certain meanings, such as ‘spicy’ and ‘exciting’ which are denied
to the canned haricot beans in tomato sauce that are common in the UK.
These are regarded by locals as reliable but bland. We might be able to
make some useful recommendations based on this about how to liven
things up.

Diachronic analysis
Diachronic analysis helps brands that want to see a little way into the future
and stay ahead of competitors in responding to changes in consumer culture.
Here’s a case study in which diachronic analysis was important. In 2018
and 2019 I worked on a project with a colleague, Jessica Herridge, which
aimed to answer two questions (Lawes et al, 2019). It began with the obser-
vation that there seemed to be an upsurge of occult and supernatural
practice, among the general public, on both sides of the Atlantic. We theo-
rized that this might be connected to what cultural commentators call the
post-truth era and we needed to find out more about it. The second question
we wanted to answer was how brands introduce and deploy magic in their
marketing campaigns, successfully or otherwise. Some brands do it very
successfully, others experience a backlash from consumers and we wanted
to know what made the difference. Jessica was primarily responsible for the
quantitative side of the research and I supplied some semiotic thinking to
the question of how magic is represented. How we represent it to ourselves
and how it is represented in marketing.
 SOCIETY, CULTURE AND OTHER BIG INFLUENCES ON CONSUMERS 103

While there’s a lot I could say about this fascinating study, let’s talk
specifically about change over time. One of the things I found interesting in
two waves of quantitative research was that respondents seemed able to talk
lucidly about how witches and magicians of the past are different from
those today. They remarked that historically, witches and magicians seemed
to have much more impressive powers while today their abilities are smaller-
scale. They can get results for individuals but maybe not change the world.
They also commented that witches and magicians in fairy tales are often
depicted as evil figures, but added that the modern-day equivalents are
usually on the side of good (whatever that may mean).
Note that here we are taking these interesting remarks of respondents
and treating them simultaneously as a research topic and an explanatory
resource. On the one hand, treating the remarks as researchable data, we
observe that respondents are capable of producing certain linguistic behav-
iour where they contrast the past with the present. On the other hand,
treating the remarks as an explanatory resource, we allow that they may
contain useful information. Respondents could be right when they say that
witches and magicians used to be represented as mostly evil and scary figures
while in today’s culture they get much better press.
This has implications for the way that brands respond to a growing trend
by trying to build magic into their marketing. Beauty brand Sephora experi-
enced a backlash in 2018 when it launched and then pulled a ‘Witch Kit’
which was the witchcraft equivalent of a paint-by-numbers kit, with
fragrance samples, a deck of tarot cards, a bunch of white sage and a piece
of quartz (for example, see Tempesta, 2018). Consumers felt patronized.
They didn’t believe that Sephora was taking them seriously and those who
were engaged with magical practice didn’t need painting by numbers. As it
turns out, on close semiotic analysis of brand communications, the way to
sell magic to consumers is to drop the us-versus-them approach that leads to
witch kits and speak to consumers as though you understand what they are
doing and you are on their side. Brands such as the beauty and lifestyle
brand Rituals, diamond seller De Beers and Coca Cola all offer good exam-
ples of how to speak to this trend. Rituals offers consumers a range of tools
to work with, such as home fragrances and scented candles which are themed
according to various spiritual traditions of Asia. Rituals seems to treat these
traditions with reasonable respect and the consumer is trusted to select only
the items she needs to conduct her own spiritual practice. De Beers is
currently running an ad campaign for diamond rings with straplines such
104 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

as: ‘It’s just a rock, technically. She can say no, theoretically.’ These straplines
align the brand with the consumers, in a relationship in which they affirm
each other’s belief that diamond engagement rings have magical properties.
Coca Cola is presently running a campaign that trades on the idea that its
unique glass bottles have kissed the lips of cultural icons such as Elvis and
Marilyn Monroe. The belief that objects can contagiously attract and retain
memories and qualities such as glamour is very common among consumers,
which is why people collect memorabilia. This belief becomes especially rele-
vant to marketers in a consumer culture where magic is on the rise.

Ideological analysis
After you’ve completed your synchronic and diachronic analysis, ideologi-
cal analysis is the next and final step. It will benefit you and your clients
commercially because it is specifically helpful to brands that want to be seen
as innovative, rule-breaking or even revolutionary. It helps brands that
would like to be seen as supporting popular social causes or would like to
be able to engage with the moral sensibilities of consumers in any other way.
It is possibly the most powerful aspect of semiotics because it reaches way
beyond individual brands and their communications and takes on society
itself. Here are some of the topics you’ll want to pursue in the name of ideo-
logical analysis. Over time, you will make your own additions to this list as
you develop your own semiotic practice.

Class and taste

Taste is one of the most-researched topics by the big names in semiotics.
Roland Barthes considered the tastes and cultural values of France and
wrote essays in which he decoded meaningful cultural products such as
steak and chips and red wine (Mythologies, 1957, 2009). Baudrillard,
coming a few years after Barthes, wrote The System of Objects (1968) and
The Consumer Society (1970) and showed how what passes for individual
taste in consumer goods is largely dictated by sociological structures such as
social class. As such, these goods, their purchase and use, help to organize
society. British photographer Martin Parr (martinparr.com) graphically
illustrates this situation in his photos of ordinary people’s lives and the detri-
tus of consumer culture, in the present day, in various regions of the world.
His photographs of souvenir holiday postcards, domestic interiors, clothing
and food illustrate semiotic theory.
 SOCIETY, CULTURE AND OTHER BIG INFLUENCES ON CONSUMERS 105

Taste matters to companies that make products because nearly all of

them want to communicate a certain standard of quality, many of them
want to appear premium and some of them have a clear vision of their
target customer, perhaps with respect to their income. I once worked on a
research project for a company that wanted to make an exclusive and luxu-
rious ­cell-phone. The project included travelling to various countries to
meet high net worth consumers. There we interviewed them about their
taste and asked them to react to drawings and photos of accessories and
personal items.
It immediately became clear, in a way that Baudrillard would have been
quick to appreciate, that among these high net worth consumers there was
Old Money and then there was New Money. They were all members of the
same elite group in terms of their wealth but the Old Money families had
their own culture, of which they were quite protective, and they had various
manners, tastes and other strategies which made it difficult for outsiders to
join the group, no matter how much New Money they might bring with
them. Semiotic analysis of the language and tastes of these two interesting
subcultures of consumers showed how they varied.
New Money respondents – people who had become wealthy because of
their achievements in business, sport, entertainment or similar, on being
shown photographs of high-end accessories, expressed approval with refer-
ence to their emotional response to the item. They would say ‘I like this one,
it’s gorgeous’ and ‘This is very appealing to me’, in the same way that they
would say ‘Nice to meet you’ or ‘Pleased to meet you’ on being introduced
to a stranger.
Old Money culture, the survival of which depends on maintaining and
upholding tradition, teaches its members to say ‘How do you do’ or some-
thing similar when being introduced to a stranger. They reference the other
person’s condition and do not give expression to their own emotional
response. Similarly, when Old Money respondents saw accessories that they
liked, they would remark ‘Oh, this is very smart’, smartness being a level of
respectability, meeting a certain standard for presenting oneself to others in
a manner that those others will find tolerable.
A wealthy Italian respondent in his fifties, a man from an old Italian
family, looked at some photos of women’s accessories and leather goods. He
memorably remarked to me: ‘I would never allow my wife to go out during
the day with a yellow or orange handbag.’ Observe that whether either of
them liked yellow or orange was not the issue. The point was that taste
dictated that some things, like certain colours and also any flashy details
such as jewels or sequins, are not appropriate for daylight hours.
106 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

As we can see, if our baked bean client aspires to appear premium and
convince people that their product is worth paying extra for, and if at the
same time they hope to attract a large segment of middle-class consumers
and avoid becoming too elite, the semiotic signs of taste and class are going
to be important to understand. Note also that Pierre Bourdieu, noticeably
absent in this short section on taste, gets lots of discussion in Using Semiotics
in Retail (Lawes, 2022).

Simulations
Let’s return to Baudrillard, who did so much to advance semiotic theory. Aside
from his early writing on taste and class, some of his most famous and useful
ideas concern simulation (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981). Baudrillard’s
position is that a consumer society exists in a state of advanced capitalism
where brands and products have power and currency as semiotic signs (of
wealth, status, class and so on). Within this economy of signs, in which people
use brands and commodities to infer things about themselves and each other,
there is a great deal of simulation. Images, copies and representations detach
themselves from the original and grow in circulation and influence. Often
these simulacra last longer than the originals, if there were any originals, and
are highly profitable.
If we take a broad view of what ‘simulation’ means, we can find examples
everywhere, because consumer culture is full of representations – things
which stand in for other things. Decals of Barbie dolls in the windows of
stores that sell fashion and cosmetics. The simulated beaches with imported
sand found at holiday resorts. Faux Maori tattoos on consumers who have
no connection to Maori culture. Whisky that is trying its hardest to look
Scottish. Posters of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara in consumers’ homes
which meaningfully connote ‘glamour’ and ‘rebellion’, no matter how vague
or incomplete the consumer’s knowledge of the real humans who once
existed behind the images. The auto-tuned voices of singers are simulations.
Reality TV is a simulation of reality. Twitter and Facebook are places where
people go to enjoy and sometimes argue with simulations of friends. If you
can develop the habit of asking whether something is a simulation the first
time you encounter it, this can be a fruitful line of enquiry for semiotics. It’s
a useful tactic because it helps you to stand back from familiar objects that
you think you know very well and find out their role in upholding or some-
times challenging the status quo, through critical thinking based on what
else is known (largely thanks to Baudrillard) about the way that consumer
society replicates itself and thus survives.
 SOCIETY, CULTURE AND OTHER BIG INFLUENCES ON CONSUMERS 107

How can we apply this insight to something like the mental health project
that we’ve been taking as an example? One way to research the status of
mental health and illness in a culture is to look at how those conditions are
represented. Let’s take as an example an award-winning piece of software
that deals with mental health and that particularly attracted the attention of
women in 2017 and 2018. That software is a video game, Hellblade: Senua’s
Sacrifice, by the game development studio Ninja Theory. It is an adventure
game, with a rich story, infused with Norse mythology. For context, the games
industry is worth roughly $135 billion (Batchelor, 2018). By most estimates
and taking into account all gaming platforms, women are about 50 per cent
of all gamers (for example, the 2019 annual report of the Entertainment
Software Association indicates that 46 per cent of gamers are female). What’s
more, a 2015 study by the Entertainment Software Association called ‘Video
Games: Attitudes and Habits of Adults Age 50-Plus’ found that 38 per cent of
adults over 50 play games. At least some of the women who were paying
attention to this game overlapped with our target audience for a new mental
health product, made for their gender and age group.
Hellblade stands out among other games and to women consumers, for
two reasons. Women like it because the lead character is female (and she is
the only option, you can’t play out the story as a male character). She has
psychological depth. She is dealing with and trying to recover from trauma.
She is damaged but she is a survivor. It stood out among other games because
it attempted to realistically simulate psychosis. Senua hears voices inside her
head, alternately supportive and mocking. Sometimes they give her conflict-
ing instructions. What’s more, she hallucinates. Sometimes, interacting with
the hallucinations as though they are real has real-world effects. The game
was developed in careful consultation with mental health experts and also
with people who have experienced psychosis and a substantial debate
opened up about representations of mental illness. It was a debate which
became part of a national conversation about mental health. Everyone
agreed on certain things. Mental health benefits from raised awareness.
People should learn about how those who aren’t neurotypical want to be
understood. It’s important to be sensitive and considerate to neuro-atypical
people and not persist with language or other types of representation which
could be harmful to them. In this game, its marketing and the public discus-
sion surrounding it, we find a valuable seam of information about how
women may encounter publicly available ideas and opinions about mental
health. It helps us map the semiotic landscape.
108 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Power
Consumer culture changes both very slowly and rather quickly. Some public
beliefs and institutions are very resistant to change. For example, consumers
generally like things more when they are more premium. They respond to
semiotic signs for ‘nature’ in food, even processed food. Other things can
change quite quickly. The political climate of a country can change dramat-
ically in just a few years and as a result, power changes hands. One of the
leading producers of post-modern theory that a semiologist can call on in
search of an account of power is Michel Foucault. Foucault was a philoso-
pher who did his most important writing in the 1970s (a good overview is
found in Rabinow, 1991). While not himself a semiologist, he used a type of
postmodern theory that semiologists found relevant and intelligible in their
own language. Foucault was very interested in power. He showed how
power manifests itself in architectural structures such as schools, hospitals
and prisons, in which bodies are organized, confined, moved around the
space and kept under surveillance.
He also showed how power is expressed and passed on through habits of
linguistic behaviour. Western culture is very confessional (its modern style of
expression is traceable back to the Confessions of the philosopher Rousseau
in the 18th century). To confess – and this is something that consumers do
every day on platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, even LinkedIn –
is simultaneously to give up power and to take power. There’s a loss of
power attached to deliberately making oneself vulnerable through confes-
sion. There’s also some power gained in the sense of taking control of the
terms of a conversation. Confessions help to frame and limit the type of
response that they are expected to elicit.
When we pay attention to power as part of our semiotic analysis, we are
operating at the topmost end of top-down semiotics. We are not preoccupied
with microscopic differences in packaging; we are attempting to give an
account of power as something that seems as deeply embedded in human
societies and culture as a system of blood vessels. This is valuable to business
because it allows semiologists to tackle big questions that affect the success of
organizations. In 2019, Gillette, a brand of men’s shaving products, published
a short film, titled ‘Believe’ (directed by Kim Gehrig of Somesuch) in which it
attempted to display support for trending social causes such as anti-bullying
and trending social ideas such as toxic masculinity. The film certainly attracted
attention and started a debate. It did not win unqualified support among
consumers and, due to its strong and quite provocative moral statement,
 SOCIETY, CULTURE AND OTHER BIG INFLUENCES ON CONSUMERS 109

Procter & Gamble would not have expected it to be universally accepted. In

fact, while the responses of consumers show that some men didn’t like being
lectured to about morality by the company that sells them their razors, other
consumers regarded this as Gillette finally doing something meaningful with
its long-established strapline ‘The best a man can get’.
From a semiotic point of view, almost all advertising (and also product
design, in-store architecture and merchandising, digital marketing and other
brand touchpoints) has built-in messages about power even when it is not as
explicit as Gillette’s. There’s a power structure that Gillette doesn’t talk
about very much which is the underlying power dynamics of shaving itself.
When Gillette’s customers shave, many or most of them are doing so because
they need to look presentable for work. Shaving is itself an act of deference
in a capitalist society in which people need jobs to live and they need to
shave and put on the uniform of a shirt and tie in order to get and keep jobs.
This is why even tidy beards can be seen as a gesture of rebellion and why
men who have managed to find jobs where they can sport a beard and
discard their tie are regarded as cool.
When you encounter materials such as ads which are unmistakably semi-
otic products, try to detect the built-in power structures. Who controls
meaning in this situation? Who is praised and who is accused? Who benefits
from things being organized in this way and who experiences costs? Follow
the money; it is a usually a good route to discovering where bases of social
power are located.

What to do at the end of analysis

In a commercial project in semiotics, at the end of top-down analysis, you
will have accumulated a lot of insights. If you follow the path set out here,
you will have taken in a wide range of data and generated some answers to
these questions:

●● How is this topic historically specific? How was it different in the past,
how is it now and what does this suggest about where things are heading?
●● How is it regionally specific? How does it vary in other parts of the
world? What does that reveal about the way things are done here?
●● What systems or mechanisms of class or taste are at work in this category?
How do consumers recognize items which are targeting them and how do
brands work at appearing superior within their category?
110 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● Is any aspect of this product, service or research topic a simulation? Are

aspects of my data set simulations? How is the simulation different from
reality? Is there a pre-existing reality? Which do people seem to prefer?
●● Within the category that this brand belongs to, and in the way that the
brand fits into consumers’ lives, how is power being passed around? Who
has most of the power? How is it being challenged? Is any of it without
challenge? How does society benefit from power relations being organized
in this particular way?

These are distinctively top-down questions and your job now is to return to
the level of granularity that your client is probably most interested in, the
level of brands, products and services on sale and in stores. Take your new
top-down findings and see how they connect to your earlier analysis of signs
and especially codes. You should see some interesting things happening.
Your bottom-up and top-down findings should tend to confirm each other.
If they don’t confirm each other or there are discrepancies or outlying bits of
data that you can’t account for, this doesn’t mean your analysis has failed. It
means you need to do a bit more research until you can fully understand the
variations in your data set. It should also be the case that as a result of your
penetrating, top-down analysis at the level of grand social structures, your
ability to notice detail at the level of signs and codes should improve. You
might have initially had a good view of the brand communications surround-
ing pet health or home fragrances and how they vary but at this point your
top-down analysis will have added something new to the mix and you will
be able to see their larger social implications and their position in a consumer
society. Ultimately, this will help your client see how to make progress with
marketing when they want to address newly emerged cohorts of consumers
and involve themselves with social issues as authentically as possible.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between society and culture? Does it matter?
These words are often used interchangeably but it’s useful to have some
grasp of how they are different. In a nutshell, ‘society’ means people. That’s
why we talk about social trends. A society is a sum of people who live in
proximity with each other and who may have developed institutions and
social structures such as families, health care systems and the law. ‘Culture’
 SOCIETY, CULTURE AND OTHER BIG INFLUENCES ON CONSUMERS 111

refers to the meaningful products of society – all its forms of communica-

tion, creative and artistic expression, politics, brands. Societies are found
wherever people live together. Cultures differentiate societies.

How is top-down semiotics different from ethnography or sociology?

This question is explored at length in the paper ‘Big Semiotics: Beyond Signs
and Symbols’ (Lawes, 2019). The short answer is that while sociology
observes society, and while ethnography takes a documentary approach to
culture, semiotics is uniquely concerned with representation. If you are
asking how your client’s brand can reproduce and represent meanings such
as ‘comfort’ or ‘liberation’, then you are doing semiotics.

When I write proposals, I have a hard time describing top-down analysis.

Clients regard it as ‘just context’, ‘background’ and ‘a nice to have’ and
then don’t want to fit it into their budget. How can I explain why it is
important?
When you are writing your proposal, find one compelling example of some-
thing interesting happening within your client’s category at a top-down level
that you can use for demonstration purposes. You could tell your baked
beans client about nostalgic school disco nights for adults and about cafés
that serve childish food and comfort food such as fish finger sandwiches and
breakfast cereal. You could invite them to speculate that adults return to
childhood things when they are stressed and needing reassurance. Maybe
there’s a place for premium baked beans in that – a sophisticated, adult
version of a childhood favourite.

Activity: Top-down analysis

Return to your own project that you are pursuing as you progress through
this book. Sort your research questions so that you can separate the t­ op-down
questions – these will usually be questions about regions, demographics,
present and future trends and subcultures of consumers.
Make some decisions now about how your own business problem converts
into top-down questions. Table 5.2 has a selection of items from the Marketing
Challenge Hotlist that we encountered in Chapter 2, plus a column that
112 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

TABLE 5.2 Matching business problems to top-down research questions

Business problems from the Top-down research questions which help to solve
Marketing Challenge Hotlist the problem

Create and launch a new brand. What are the tacit beliefs or foundational ideas that
underpin the category? Where are there contradictions,
tensions or gaps in meaning or puzzles that remain
unresolved?

Reposition a failing brand or What has changed recently for new cohorts of the target
rejuvenate an older brand. market? How are they different and how do they believe
themselves to be special?

Communicate a merger. What status do each of these merged brands hold

individually in the target culture? What do they mean and
where are the overlaps in meaning?

Make a brand seem more What versions of premium exist in the version of reality
premium. used by the target customer? What is valuable about
premium? How do ideas of premium tap into existing
ideological structures of taste and class?

Craft convincing and relevant What kinds of stories and narratives are currently
brand stories. circulating in the target culture? What are they for? What
social purpose do they serve? What are the hallmarks of
popular stories?

shows how top-down research questions arise from these challenges. How
does your project raise questions about ideology, culture and society?
Generate as many top-down questions as you can, then pick out one or two
that seem like potentially fruitful topics for analysis and have a go at answer-
ing them, using the techniques described in this chapter. When you are done,
review all your bottom-up and top-down findings and consider how they
endorse or challenge each other and how they make up a big picture.
This is the end of two chapters which concern the application of semiotic
theory to the sort of data that will cross your path when you are doing
commercial projects in semiotics. However, we have not reached the limits
of all there is to do with semiotics. As well as using it to determine the mean-
ing of specific signs (bottom-up analysis) and the large-scale forces in
consumer culture (top-down analysis), semiotics can accomplish some clever
tricks which are useful to marketers. These include tricks for thinking crea-
tively and spotting opportunities for innovation. They are the subject of the
next chapter. Later, in Chapter 9, we’ll look at how to turn great ideas into
strategy and business recommendations.
 113

06

Creativity and innovation

Semiotic tools for thinking

WHAT’S COMING UP

It’s very often the case that when semiologists are employed commercially,
we are not solely being asked to improve brand communications or tweak
brands so as to make them more relevant to changing markets. Fairly often,
we are hired because the organization, business or brand owner needs some
completely new ideas. They need practical suggestions for new products and
services. They need creative ideas to stimulate advertising and marketing
campaigns. This chapter can be used as a standalone resource,
independently from the previous two chapters on data analysis. It is what
you need when you don’t have any pre-existing research, data or insights
and you are required to invent something completely new. By the end of
this chapter, you will have four techniques for generating original ideas.

Truisms
The first technique I want to share with you is not especially difficult but it
is useful when we want to look differently at things which we think we
know well. If you get into the habit of using it, it will help you develop a
semiotic perspective, a particular way of looking at the world which semiot-
ics facilitates and which opens up new possibilities: new vantage points and
new ideas. Becoming good at working with truisms will also set you up for
some of the slightly more involved techniques which come later in this
­chapter. Let’s defer any more discussion of theory and get straight to the
details of how to work with truisms.
114 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

When to use it
●● There is a particular consumer culture or subculture that you need to
understand. Examples could be new parents; users of online dating apps
and services; entrepreneurs; vegans; people who do extreme sports; fans
of a celebrity, entertainment product or genre; supporters of a politician
or political movement.
●● There is a particular category of products or style of marketing
communications that you need to understand. Examples could be Korean
beauty products; pensions products; hotels, resorts and their loyalty
schemes; TV shows and channels which concern the paranormal;
recruitment campaigns for the armed forces.
●● You need to understand some community of consumers or brands or some
style of talk with which you are very familiar. You are yourself a member of
the culture you are studying or you work full time in the business category
that you are required to look at. The language of the subculture or category
is, or has become, your primary language. You have been assimilated into the
culture or category and its peculiarities have come to seem natural to you.

Materials
You will need:

●● A channel of communication or a sphere of discourse from which you can

draw common sayings or repetitive phrases. In the table that illustrates
this section, examples are drawn from two types of sources. Firstly, there
is the business community of LinkedIn, a social media platform where
people network, promote their businesses and advance their careers.
Secondly, there are communities which attract the general public such as
Instagram and Pinterest. On all these platforms, people spend a lot of time
trying to encourage and motivate themselves and each other and they
hand each other life advice, encapsulated in handy mottoes and aphorisms.
●● Writing materials. Don’t try to do this kind of work in your head; you will
get much better results in writing, where you can see what you are doing.

Method
Make a table like the one you see in Table 6.1, divided into two columns. In
the left-hand column, headed ‘Truisms’, record all the mottoes, proverbs,
maxims and other pearls of wisdom which are commonly passed around
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 115

pertaining to the subject matter that you are interested in, which is linked to
your brand or business category. Continue until you feel that you have
exhausted all the things that people routinely offer to each other as reliable
truths or incontrovertible facts when they are discussing this topic. Don’t
start analysis straight away. Fill up the left-hand column first.
It might take a bit of digging around in your category or community of
choice to make sure you have captured everything. This is because the qual-
ifying criterion is that the phrase or saying has to be repeated (this is how
you will know that it has some value or importance to the community you
are studying). Try not to make finding the truisms a five-minute activity. You
will have better results if you spend enough time with your source to discover
which are the often-repeated sayings beyond the ones you already knew
about before you started the task.
Now turn to the column on the right, headed ‘Reversals’. For each of your
truisms, find a reasonable statement that expresses something close to the
opposite of the truism. The key word is ‘reasonable’. For example, let’s say
your truism is ‘Nothing is more important than empathy for another human
being’s suffering’ (I found this on Pinterest, attributed to Audrey Hepburn).
‘Ignore other people’s suffering’ is not a reasonable oppositional statement, or
at least you would have to work hard to make it reasonable. To find a reason-
able opposition, we have to look further. In fact, there are various problems
with empathy, which are discussed in Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy
(2018). For example, empathy relies on a highly subjective impression of
another person’s feelings and the imaginary idea that whatever they are feel-
ing is what we are capable of feeling. Bloom argues that this leads us to
bias – we are prone to feel empathy for people who are similar to ourselves
and less so for people who we think are not similar. As a subjective, emotional
state, empathy also risks clouding our judgement and may actually prevent us
from making decisions which are designed to benefit everyone, not just our
own clan. Summarizing this into a reasonable opposition could result in
something like: ‘Justice requires a level head, fairness must take the needs of
all into account, not just people whose feelings we think ourselves capable of
imagining.’ As you’re reading the second edition of this book, note that there’s
lots of new information about empathy in Chapters 13–15.
Work through your table until all the empty boxes in the right-hand
column are filled in.

How to do analysis
Now you have a completed table, return to the left-hand column and take a
good look at it overall, as a whole. You will now have a new view of what
116 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

TABLE 6.1 Truisms and their reversals

Truism Reversal
Never give up. Know how to quit when you’re ahead. Be agile and
flexible enough to change course.
Run towards the thing you fear. Trust your instincts. Fear is a sign that something
is wrong.
Go large or go home. Save the pennies and the pounds will look after
themselves.
Be yourself. Everyone else is The individual is a fiction; we’re far more alike
already taken. than we are different.
Enjoy the little things. The little things were put in front of you to distract
you from the big things.
If you can’t handle me at my worst, Other people deserve your best. No occasion
you don’t deserve me at my best. deserves your worst.
Happiness comes from within. Happiness is fairly well predicted by external
factors such as social support.

all the items in the left column have in common. In Table 6.1, we can see
that the items on the left collectively espouse certain values:

●● There’s a conspicuous individualism. There’s a great deal of focus on the

individual self and correspondingly little interest in collectives such as
family, community or society.
●● There’s a wholesale subscription to the idea that individuals can achieve
anything they want to if they are sufficiently motivated and inspired. We
might think of concluding that this is an adaptive response in places
where there is advanced capitalism, where items which are essential to
human survival such as housing, heating and healthcare are owned by
private companies, and where not much is owned by the state. A person
whose survival depends on successful competition within a capitalist and
privatized economy is perhaps well advised to ‘never give up’ trying to
take care of their own needs.
●● There’s what seems to be a drive to conform and little sense of rebellion.
The nearest thing to rebellion is ‘if you can’t handle me at my worst’ but
this is a long way from ‘smash patriarchy’ or ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’.
For more robust rebellion, we would need to look far beyond the
conversations from which these samples were drawn – as far as the civil
rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, or as far as the French revolution.
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 117

How to apply the findings

What you do with these findings depends on what you want to achieve for
your cause, your brand or your business problem. If you are pursuing the
project described earlier, concerning the mental health climate of mature
women, then you could consider making two tables; one that captures the
rallying cries of today versus those of two decades ago. You might find that
mental health, or widely-held beliefs about mental health have changed
dramatically in that time. Has this led to a generation gap, leading more
mature patients to be under-served?
Truisms as an exercise encourages top-down thinking about ideology and
society. It helps you to step outside of everyday idioms and maxims that you
may have easily accepted as the simple truth up until now and denaturalizes
them. The point is not to prove that truisms are wrong, just for the sake of
being objectionable. The point is to realize that all truisms are historically
and culturally specific. When we recognize that, we break free from the
tyranny of the truism and we can start to be conscious and deliberate in
designing brands and communications which either conform or refuse to
conform. We are no longer locked in to the common-sense things that ‘every-
body knows’.

How to go further with truisms

If you become excited about truisms and want to go further with this tech-
nique, you will benefit greatly from exploring the work of Jenny Holzer.
Holzer is an artist who started making truisms in 1977 and continues to this
day. She is extremely adept at digging out the often-unnoticed truisms
around which societies are organized. Her work is on display in art muse-
ums around the world, can be viewed online and has been displayed by
means of projection on to the side of buildings, as well as many other unex-
pected locations. The unusual locations often reinforce or challenge the
truths which the truisms assert.

Activity: Find your truisms

Turn to the project that you are pursuing as you work through this book
and make a truisms table that lists as many truisms as you can find pertain-
ing to your category or business problem. These could be banal truisms at
118 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

the level of everyday consumerism, such as ‘baked beans are bland’ or they
could exist at the highest level of your organization such as ‘don’t deliver a
product, deliver an experience’ – an easily challenged maxim which has led
many organizations to attempt to elevate products to experiences, with
mixed success. Use your findings to challenge the built-in assumptions of
your category.

The semiotic square

Semiotic square is a name well-known to people who have had some contact
with semiotics in a commercial setting. It has become rather a victim of its
own success, in the sense that it has become appended to quite a wide range
of techniques which vary in their utility and which don’t have much in
common. At the most technical end of the scale, there is the original semiotic
square, which is a product of academia. It was developed by Algirdas
Greimas in 1966. Greimas was a linguist and he developed this tool for the
purpose of investigating the structural relationships among semiotic signs.
His original square, which can easily be found online, was not invented to be
useful to people in marketing but to academics, while most non-academics
find it moderately difficult. There are a few examples of the Greimas square
being used in marketing, notably in the work of Jean-Marie Floch (2001).
At the less technical end of the scale, I have seen commercial practitioners
use a square device as a means of sorting semiotic codes into groups accord-
ing to their similarity. Compared to the Greimas square, this approach has
the advantage of being easy to use. Its disadvantage is that it loses the preci-
sion with language that makes semiotics powerful. If you have lost sight of
what is meant by the words ‘code’ and ‘sign’, turn to the glossary at the back
of this book for definitions.
In this chapter I offer a version of the semiotic square which strikes a
balance between academic precision and ease of use. It has evolved over
time, with influences from academia, particularly anthropology, and from
commercial practitioners in semiotics, especially early pioneers such as
Virginia Valentine.

When to use it
The semiotic square shown here is a reliable tool for spotting new business
opportunities and unmet consumer needs. It works by mapping consumers’
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 119

expectations of the way the world ought to be, finding the areas where their
expectations are frustrated and plugging new brands or products into the
gap. Examples are given below.

Materials
You will need:

●● a good imagination;
●● writing materials – I like to work in pencil on large sheets of blank paper;
and
●● a little bit of foundational theory, which we will come to right now.

Essential theory
Here’s a short story about how the semiotic square in this chapter works. It’s
not the only story or the most complete story, but it is fit for purpose. Look
at Figure 6.1 ‘Why we need myths’ and I will explain what is in it.
Semiotics may have originated in obscure corners of philosophy and
linguistics in the early 20th century but it really took off after the Second
World War, when it collided with anthropology. Anthropologists and other
people who study culture noticed that tools which originated in the linguis-
tics part of semiotics turned out to be surprisingly useful for answering
questions which extended beyond language and which concerned the ways

FIGURE 6.1 Why we need myths

Good

Expectation How can this be?

Beautiful Ugly

How can this be? Expectation

Evil
120 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

that humans arrange themselves in societies and organize local beliefs,

expectations and meanings. One of these anthropologists was Claude Lévi-
Strauss, who was interested in myths, of which an example might be the folk
tales and fairy tales that you learned as a child and which persist down the
centuries. Lévi-Strauss recognized that myths existed for a purpose: to solve
a problem, to explain the mysteries and puzzles of the human condition (see
Lévi-Strauss 1958, 1964 and also the helpful overviews given by Chandler,
2022 and Oswald, 2012).
What kinds of problems, mysteries and puzzles am I referring to? There
is life and death: the problem of our own mortality. There are questions of
what makes humans different from animals, which can be seen as a matter
of nature versus culture. Especially relevant to this chapter, there are prob-
lems of injustice and puzzles of misleading appearances.
The just-world hypothesis (Lerner, 1980; Lerner and Miller, 1978; Lerner
and Montada, 1998) is a discovery in psychology. It describes a common
human tendency to invest belief in the idea of a world in which justice
prevails. It is a world in which things are what they appear to be, virtue is
rewarded and everyone gets what they deserve. In this idealistic view, which
most of us would prefer to see reflected in reality, given the choice, beautiful
things would be internally good. Evil things would evidence their badness
by being ugly. Healthy foods would taste delicious and junk food would
taste awful. A pretty face would indicate a trustworthy character and we
would be able to spot ne’er-do-wells by looking at them. How much simpler
life would be if this were the case.
A Straussian view of the just-world hypothesis will lead us to the obser-
vation that people are puzzled and dismayed when those expectations are
not met, for example because of misleading appearances. Some myths and
fairy stories tackle exactly this subject matter and a Straussian take on that
would be that they help us to process and resolve the ongoing anxieties that
are provoked by things not lining up the way they should. Beauty and The
Beast is a fairy tale about an evil-looking creature with a good heart. In the
folk tale Snow White, the wicked queen has exceptional beauty which is
matched only by the beauty of her innocent step-daughter.
This set of expectations and resulting dismay are exactly what you see
mapped out in Figure 6.1. There are a few highlights that I must point out
before we move on and see how the square is useful for brands:

●● Good-Evil and Beautiful-Ugly are expressed as points at each end of a

line. In semiotics, pairs of words with opposite meanings are called binary
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 121

oppositions. Consumer culture is packed full of them. Putting the

oppositional words at each end of a line means that two binary oppositions
can be placed in a cross shape, as you see here. Doing this results in a
square with four quadrants. Drawing a frame around the square makes it
easier to see.
●● When we have a couple of binary oppositions which have some synergy,
which ‘work’ together (and this is not a guarantee on any given occasion),
we will be able to observe interesting things about the four quadrants
that appear when we make a square.
●● Two of the quadrants will line up with our hopes or expectations, our
ideas about the way that the world would be, if everything functioned as
it should. On the whole, we would feel that justice prevailed if good and
evil things revealed themselves through a corresponding appearance.
●● Two of the quadrants are things which occur in real life but which are
puzzling or cause us problems. These are the types of things which we
invent myths to explain. Beauty and the Beast is our attempt to solve the
problem of good things which are ugly, Snow White concerns the problem
of things which are evil but also beautiful.
●● These quadrants are arranged relative to each other on a diagonal line, so
that beautiful-evil is diagonally opposite ugly-good. The quadrants which
represent our expectations also sit opposite each other diagonally.

That’s all the theory you need to make a semiotic square. Now let’s consider
a couple of cases where brands use this logic to carve out a space for
­themselves.

Spotting brand opportunities using semiotic squares

In Figure 6.2, you can see how the massively successful and enduring
Campaign for Real Beauty, a marketing initiative of the Dove brand, owned
by Unilever, sits within the same semiotic square that also houses the fairy
tale Beauty and the Beast. In commercial practice, it is usually the case that
of the two ‘problem’ quadrants, where myths are available to be created, one
doesn’t represent much of an opportunity while the other offers noticeable
promise. This is exactly what we see in Figure 6.2. From a business or market-
ing point of view, there doesn’t seem to be much mileage in trying to sell
something evil; this could be difficult to sell to consumers and bad for society.
The other quadrant, however, has something to offer. It is the quadrant where
122 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

FIGURE 6.2 Brands can be mythical

Good

Expectation Dove
‘Campaign for Real Beauty’

Beautiful Ugly

How can this be? Expectation

Evil

there is this problem or question of ‘how can it be that there are things which
are good and which are not conventionally beautiful?’ Dove steps in and
solves the problem with its Campaign for Real Beauty, in which a diverse
range of women, of all ages, sizes and ethnic groups, assert their beauty, in
mutual endorsement with the brand. Dove has created a modern-day fairy
tale. It is a myth. It is an enduring story that solves a problem.

Semiotic squares help you identify opportunities

FIGURE 6.3 

Success

Expectation Guinness
‘Good things come to
those who wait’
Get ahead Hang back

How can this be? Expectation

Failure

In Figure 6.3, you can see a new semiotic square which has a new set of
binary oppositions (success versus failure and get ahead vs hang back).
When they are placed in a square, we can see that there are two quadrants
which resonate with the expectations of most business people, in line with
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 123

global business culture. There is a conventional expectation that if you ener-

getically push yourself ahead, you will be rewarded with success. In response
to this, Guinness sets up a problem and then solves it. How can it be that a
person could hang back, yet experience success? The question is answered in
the brand strapline: Good things come to those who wait.

Activity: Identify a brand opportunity using a semiotic square

Take up your chosen project and follow these steps:

1. Consider your category (as with Dove) or the culture of your target
customer (as with Guinness). List as many binary oppositions as you can
which pertain to your idea. Aim for at least 20.
2. Taking the binary oppositions two at a time, map them in a cross shape
as you see in these examples. Draw a square frame around the design if
you wish.
3. Scrutinize the diagram you’ve just made. Is there any synergy between the
two binary oppositions? Are they different enough to offer some variety
yet close enough that they have something to say to each other?
4. Expect to make lots of attempts at coupling binary oppositions until you
start to get results. Make as many squares as you can, using the long list of
binary oppositions that you generated in step 1 and see what looks good.
5. If you have discovered a semiotic square with something to offer then
you will immediately be able to see where the two ‘expectation’ quad-
rants are on their diagonal line. Take your time examining the two
remaining quadrants. Of these one will look like dead space – it will be
an unappealing or out-dated idea. The other will represent an opportu-
nity where a brand or an innovative product or service could step in.

Write some notes in your journal about the opportunities for innovation
that your best semiotic square has revealed.

Build a meme
This fun technique for stimulating creative thinking can be used by the semi-
ologist alone at their desk, in a team or even with consumers. It involves
manipulating and altering visual images, specifically memes.
124 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Memes are a product of digital culture. Their sheer existence and the
types of topics they address are researchable matters in their own right but
for now let’s simply note their usual form. A meme is a concise message
consisting of a single, still image and a few words of text, placed in precise
locations. They are circulated among consumers to convey popular senti-
ments and the issues of the day. They are also used by many brands as part
of their digital marketing, such as Kellogg’s (mascot Tony the Tiger for cereal
Frosted Flakes) and the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (Unilever).
Individual memes are very often varying executions of a well-used
formula. Here are a few examples.

‘Distracted boyfriend’
Two young lovers are walking together in the street. One of them is distracted,
he is openly staring at an attractive passer-by. His partner has noticed and
looks dismayed. The conventional way to attach text to this image is to label
each of the three human figures, for example, a student might label the
distracted man ‘me’, the dismayed girlfriend ‘coursework’ and the passer-by
‘video games’. Distracted Boyfriend can be viewed at various locations
including https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/distracted-boyfriend.

‘Ridiculously photogenic guy’

The photograph shows runners taking part in a race. At the centre of the
shot is a runner who happens to be extremely handsome. As he runs, he
smiles towards the camera. The conventional way to attach text to this
image is to place a short line of text at the top and the bottom. Usually the
text makes a joke about the man’s remarkably attractive appearance, where
the top line of text is the set-up and the bottom line is the pay-off. For exam-
ple, the image could be labelled ‘Runs marathon and wins’ (top line) ‘my
heart’ (bottom line) or ‘Picture gets put up as employee of the month’ (top
line) ‘at a company he doesn’t work for’ (bottom line). Ridiculously
Photogenic Guy can be viewed here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/
ridiculously-photogenic-guy.

‘What if I told you’

The photograph is a still image from the 1999 film The Matrix. It is a head
shot of Lawrence Fishburne as the character Morpheus. He is wearing
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 125

sunglasses and an inscrutable expression. The usual way to attach text to the
image is to place a short line of text at the top and bottom, as in the previous
example. The top line always reads ‘What if I told you’. The bottom line varies
from one execution to the next but always communicates some sort of
­revelation, which may be ironic. Examples could be ‘that intermittent fasting is
really intermittent eating’ or ‘you’re 18 with 40 years of experience’. What If
I Told You can be viewed here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/matrix-
morpheus.

‘Not sure if’

The image is a screen capture of the fictional character Fry from the
animated TV series Futurama. The joke of Futurama is that Fry, an unas-
suming pizza delivery guy, has time-travelled to the future, where he is
regularly bewildered. In this meme, Fry wears a puzzled expression. Again,
there’s a convention of appending two short lines of text, at the top and
bottom of the image. The top line will always begin with the words ‘Not
sure if’ and remaining text on both lines is open for creative variations.
Examples include ‘wrong password or wrong username’ and ‘have head-
ache from too much coffee or not enough coffee’. Not Sure If can be viewed
here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/futurama-fry-not-sure-if.

‘But that’s none of my business’

The image is a photo, it shows Kermit the Frog (of Jim Henson’s Muppets)
in profile, delicately sipping a cup of Lipton tea. The joke always rests on
Kermit’s composed posture and refined manner. Text added at the top of the
image may be quite long and is left open for the user to invent their own
version. Text added at the bottom of the image always reads ‘but that’s none
of my business’. This meme is often used to launch criticism of something.
Examples of top-line text include ‘There’s probably an unflattering side to
this story that we aren’t hearing’ and ‘You have more followers [on social
media] than money in your bank account’. But That’s None of My Business
can be viewed here: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/782057-but-thats-
none-of-my-business.

Because all the memes described here have widespread appeal, you will find
many examples of them on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social
platforms where people share content as a way of conducting their social
relationships. You will also discover dozens of other popular meme formats
such as ‘First World Problems’, ‘Batman Slaps Robin’ and many more.
126 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Although memes can be useful to brands as a form of advertising, I intro-

duce the Build A Meme technique here because it can be a tool for exploring
and disrupting the norms associated with particular business categories,
brands or types of consumer behaviour. It is a technique that denaturalizes
culture, just like the truisms that we experimented with earlier. It helps us to
look afresh at things we thought we knew.

When to use it
●● You need new insights about a category.
●● You want to learn something about prevailing norms in consumer culture.
●● You need to get top-down analysis in semiotics off to a quick start.

Materials
You will need:

●● A selection of meme formats that you think might be relevant to your

brand or simply fun to experiment with.
●● Any software that will allow you to lay text over images. I regularly use
PowerPoint or you may enjoy using an online tool such as memegenerator.
com. If you want to make your own professional-looking memes, use the
Impact typeface for your text, in white with a black border.
●● If you have access to photo library stock or any other suitable photos
which show people looking distracted, inscrutable, confused, disdainful
or even innocently beautiful, you can substitute them for Morpheus, Fry
and Kermit. You don’t have to stick to the images shown in the classic
versions of each meme. In this chapter, I’ve used stock images to mock up
examples and indeed some memes such as ‘Distracted Boyfriend’
originated as stock photography.
●● A small gif or jpeg of your brand’s logo and that of competitors can be
handy and add the finishing touch to a newly-created meme, where doing
so will add or reveal new meanings.

Method
Choose a meme. Observe the rules of its construction, such as any line of
text that must always be held constant in its wording and placement. Identify
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 127

where creative expression can happen, in (usually) one or (occasionally)

more text locations within the frame. Add your own text so that the newly
created meme says something about your business category. As an optional
extra, add your own or a competitor’s brand mark to the finished meme to
see if anything changes. Photograph or save the results. Exhaust all your
ideas before you change to a new meme format. Keep going until you have
created a handful of examples that lead you to some interesting observa-
tions about your target category or consumers.

Demonstration
Here are a few examples of memes that I created for the projects we are
pursuing throughout this book: premium baked beans and also mature
women’s mental health.

FOR THE PREMIUM BAKED BEANS PROJECT

Figure 6.4 shows a version of the meme ‘What If I Told You’ created to say
something about premium baked beans. The challenge of Build a Meme as
a creative exercise is initially about finding an image that conveys the right
mood or emotion, but mostly about finding the right text to marry the image

FIGURE 6.4 What if I told you… beans

SOURCE Frank McKenna on Unsplash

128 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

FIGURE 6.5 None of my business… beans

SOURCE Darius Bashar on Unsplash

to your category or brand. In this case, the exercise has resulted in the insight
that lots of adults think of baked beans as children’s food. It could be impor-
tant to market the new, premium product to adults as though it were
exclusively for adults, helping to lift baked beans away from their usual
connotations of childhood.
Figure 6.5 shows a version of the meme ‘But That’s None of My Business’,
similarly adapted to baked beans. The essence of the None of My Business
meme is that it positions the speaker, usually depicted, as someone of supe-
rior knowledge or critical faculties. Here, this underlying dynamic of the
Business meme serves to expose and then challenge a culturally engendered
expectation that baked beans are acceptable as snacks, lunch or possibly
weekend breakfasts but not as a main meal in the evening.
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 129

FIGURE 6.6 Distraction… beans

SOURCE Caroline Veronez on Unsplash

In Figure 6.6 we see a version of the Distracted Boyfriend meme. Note that
this time I’ve added a logo for the fictitious Fancy Beans brand. In this
execution of Distracted Boyfriend, a man is led into a forest by an enchant-
ing young woman, whose flower crown enhances her resemblance to a
seductive fairy. This meme exposes and challenges the idea that baked
beans are boring and not something that an adult would choose to eat
every evening. Note also that as time passes, a new generation of memes is
emerging, a topic discussed in Chapters 13–15.

FOR THE WOMEN’S MENTAL HEALTH PROJECT

Figure 6.7 presents a version of ‘What If I Told You’ for the mature women’s
mental health project. The image shows a well-dressed, confident-looking
woman of mature years. The meme complies with the conventions of What
If I Told You by revealing a disruptive fact in the last line. In this case, the
revelation is that adult happiness reaches a low point at age 50 but then
starts to climb again, until happiness levels at ages approaching 80 are
nearly where they were before marriage, parenting, mortgages, work pres-
sure and similar trials kicked in during early adulthood (for example, see
Rock, 2018 and Rauch, 2018). It seems that many adults are unaware of the
post-middle-age uptick in happiness, yet this knowledge could give hope to
130 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

FIGURE 6.7 What if I told you… health

SOURCE Damir Bosnjak on Unsplash

those experiencing depression and anxiety. It could be generally revelatory

information that raises the expectations of consumers, increases engage-
ment with mental health services and challenges the idea that ageing is a
downward slide.
Figure 6.8 offers a version of ‘Not Sure If’ for the women’s mental health
project. It fully exploits the set-up and pay-off structure of jokes. The first
half of Not Sure, the set-up, offers the viewer something predictable and
expected. It is a stereotype of mature and older women that they experience
mood swings, often thought to be connected to menopause. The set-up plays
into those expectations and conventional beliefs. Note that ‘mood swings’ is
a euphemism for bad moods; the connotation is invariably negative. The
second half of Not Sure, the pay-off, turns the convention on its head. It
presents the viewer with the idea that women of a certain age may experi-
ence sudden bursts of joy, perhaps because they have time to go to the beach,
like the woman in the photo, or because they have engaged with the client’s
product or service and enjoyed the benefits of improved mental health. This
meme also nods to accounts of menopause such as those by feminists
Germaine Greer (1991, 2018) and Gail Sheehy (2007), who show that it is
possible to re-imagine life after menopause as a time of creativity, joy, release
and empowerment.
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 131

FIGURE 6.8 Not sure if… health

SOURCE SK on Unsplash

Activity: Build a meme

Take up the project you’ve chosen to work on as you progress through this
book. Decide on a commercial category in which your brand or your client’s
brand operates. Follow the method described above – collect lots of memes,
take note of their structure and rules, then generate creative executions that
are relevant to your category. The newly created memes will expose the norms
and expectations underlying your category. This may lead you to have ideas
about how the brand you are working with could challenge norms or ensure
that it conforms to emerging consumer needs. Record your observations.

Twig-to-branch
If you use all of the techniques in this chapter, or do all the exercises, by this
point you have assembled quite a mixed bag of observations and insights
about your category. This will be even more the case if you have conducted
semiotic research using bottom-up and top-down analysis as set out in
Chapters 4 and 5. Twig-to-branch is a tool for organizing your findings,
132 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

making connections among ideas and spotting new directions that brands
can take as they engage with evolutions in consumer culture. It helps you to
manage the results of your creative thinking and it stimulates creativity in its
own right.

When to use it
●● You are nearing the end of a project and you have generated lots of ideas
and insights which need pulling together into some sort of shape.
●● You are especially interested in making sure that a brand stays at the
forefront of emerging trends and ideology.
●● You want to know how to design for consumers’ emerging needs.

Materials
You will need:

●● Materials for drawing and writing.

●● A sense of adventure. Twig-to-branch is the pinnacle of top-down analysis
and you will use it to create a map of cultural change – an ambitious goal.
●● Willingness to source and consume some academic literature if it comes
to your attention that there is good-quality writing which tackles the
same changes that you want to describe.

Method
List all your observations, large or small. They do not all need to be earth-
shattering insights and they can include factual and statistical observations
such as sales of beans and incidence of mental health problems. Organize
them into groups based on the size of the main idea that they describe. Let
me explain what I mean by ‘size of idea’.
In the Truisms part of this chapter we discovered some qualities of the
local cultures of LinkedIn and Pinterest, which comprise large communities
drawn from the general public. Although the truisms at first might have
seemed quite natural and above criticism (depending on where you are
from), they were quickly revealed to share some cultural specificities. They
are highly individualistic, adapted to capitalism and additionally seem to
offer a palliative for troubled souls – happiness can be generated from within,
taking time to appreciate the little things in life is a route to happiness, and
 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 133

so on. They describe a society in which people are very driven, struggle to
survive and experience emotional unrest which they attempt to resolve as
individuals who work on themselves and not, for example, by organizing a
revolution and overthrowing the government. These are large observations,
the culture which these people are experiencing did not form overnight.
When a culture moves from collectivism to individualism, it can take a few
decades. These observations apply to a lot of different individual cases and
they describe things which are very enduring over time. Put them in the ‘large
ideas’ group.
In the semiotic squares that we considered earlier, we noted that Dove’s
Campaign for Real Beauty responds to a problem that was troubling the
public at least as far back as 1740 (when Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de
Villeneuve published La Belle et la Bête or Beauty and the Beast) and possi-
bly much further back than that. It is still troubling consumers today. It is an
age-old problem which is that appearances can be deceptive and misleading.
It is a problem wherein good things, moral and valuable things, go unno-
ticed because they do not conform to conventional ideas about how
appearances should be judged.
Although we take care to note that this is an enduring problem, it is a
problem on a smaller scale than the individual’s struggle for survival. It is a
more specific problem, being concerned with appearances. It is a particu-
larly acute problem now because digital culture (the internet, smartphones
and their apps, online communities and new, digital social relationships) has
elevated the appearance of things to a place of the utmost importance. It did
not emerge overnight but it has shown considerable advancement within the
last 10 years. Many consumers today live in a culture where they are
expected to document and display their lives on platforms such as Instagram,
and they are expected to consume the digital displays of those around them.
There’s been a democratization of some things, in the sense that everyone is
a photographer now, everyone is a model. There’s also competition in the
sense that people are constantly evaluating each other’s output and worry-
ing that their own life isn’t equal to the lives of their peers on Instagram and
Facebook. There’s great anxiety over appearances. Separate your observa-
tions and ideas which match this sort of scale – things which evolve over 10
years rather than several decades, things which manifest as specific prob-
lems and not the grand struggles of human survival. Put them in the
‘medium-sized ideas’ group.
While we were playing with memes, we also noticed a few small things.
We noted that the memes of the present day are pre-occupied with certain
134 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

situations and accompanying emotions. One of these is ‘What If I Told You’,

which constructs a version of everyday life in which individuals are ready to
be regularly amazed by perspective-shifting nuggets of new information.
This same dynamic can be found in other hotspots of popular culture such
as the Reddit group ‘Today I Learned’ in which contributors amaze each
other with similar, small revelations, exposing reality as something more
intricate and more interesting than they first thought. Another meme,
‘Distracted Boyfriend’, constructs contemporary individuals as having a
chronically short attention span. This same dynamic can be found in other
products of mass culture, such as the phrase ‘ooh, shiny’, which is widely
used today and is a way for speakers to jokingly acknowledge their own
distractibility when something attractive moves into their field of view.
Specific habits of language and representation such as What If I Told You
and ‘ooh, shiny’ can be assigned to a group of smaller ideas.
Now you have your ideas sorted by approximate size and scope, take a
large sheet of paper and sketch a rudimentary tree. You don’t need a lot of
artistic detail; this is nothing more than a tree-shaped spider diagram. Draw
a large trunk in the middle of your page, make a few thick lines extending
from it to represent branches. From these branches, draw a few thinner lines
to represent twigs. The tree is a visual metaphor to help you see how things
are connected. You are going to plot your variously sized ideas on the trunk,
branches and twigs of the tree as indicated in Figure 6.9.

FIGURE 6.9 Twig-to-branch model of ideology and trends

Twig
Micro-trends

Branch
Social trends

Trunk
Foundational ideas

SOURCE Fabrice Villard on Unsplash

 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION 135

FIGURE 6.10 A rudimentary tree

‘Wh y’
at i , shin
fIt
old ‘Ooh
you
’
is a
yone
Appe Ever ournalist
ara o-j
vs re nces phot

ism
’ ality
I learned
‘Today

ual
ivid
Ind

Feel free to draw more than one tree if you see that your ideas are taking you
in different directions; it isn’t necessary to map out the whole history of
humanity on one sheet of paper. The main point of plotting your ideas on
the tree is that it helps you see how slowly changing cultural movements and
ideologies facilitate rapidly changing ideas and finally small fads and micro-
trends.
In Figure 6.10 you can see an example of a crudely drawn tree that should
be within reach of anyone’s artistic abilities. On it I have plotted just a few
of the ideas which have emerged during this chapter, in the right places on
the tree according to their size. Do this with all your observations and ideas.
You will find that it soon turns into an enjoyable jigsaw puzzle as you make
decisions about which twigs belong on which branch.

How to use the completed tree

When you have finished filling out your tree, you have accomplished more
than an academic exercise. You have mapped trends and behaviours which are
prone to change, both fast and slow. When we want to think creatively about
opportunities for brands, we can use the tree to identify current consumer
needs as well as habits and anxieties that won’t go away in the short term.
Let’s close this chapter by returning to the baked beans and mental health
projects that we have been considering as ongoing examples. A tree for the
baked beans client might lead us to recognize that at least for some segments
of Instagram-loyal consumers, photographing food is as important as eating
it. What’s more, food needs to identify itself as at least somewhat interesting
or different to merit a photo opportunity – it can’t just be ‘baked beans
136 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

again’. Our client may benefit by developing packaging, recipes and serving
suggestions which lend themselves to portraiture, in contrast to the usual
baked bean offering which invites consumers to dump a serving of beans on
a slice of toast, in which context they are rarely photogenic.
A tree for the mental health client might lead us to notice that there’s a
current climate of increased incidence of mental health diagnoses, particu-
larly anxiety and depression. There’s increased awareness of mental health
as an issue that needs attention, partly thanks to social media. At the same
time, a great deal of existing attention is focused on younger people, even
though adults in middle age are known to be one of the least happy segments
of the population, while at the same time dealing with negative stereotypes
and beliefs about the symptoms and causes of their problems. This might
help the client to develop a product or service that specifically acknowledges
the obstacles and endeavours of the anxious or depressed mature individual.
A mental health product or brand could be tailored in light of these observa-
tions, perhaps something which helps people to feel that they are being
listened to and that their problems are important.

Activity: Twig-to-branch
Take up your project of choice that you have been working on throughout
this book. Organize and list the various observations, insights and creative
ideas that you’ve generated along the way. Sort them into groups according
to their relative size, scope and longevity and follow the twig-to-branch
method detailed here. When you have drawn a few trees, take time to list
your three best recommendations or opportunities for your chosen brand.
You may select your best ideas according to their closeness to the trunk of
the tree, representing their timeless or enduring qualities. Alternatively, you
may select ideas according to their placement on twigs of the tree, which is
where the latest, most fashion-forward trends are to be found.
This has been the third of three chapters which reveal the internal mech-
anisms of semiotics; techniques which originate within semiotics and which
can be applied to data, brands and business problems to yield insights and
original ideas. In the following chapters we return to the topic of how semi-
otics interacts with the outside world. Chapter 7 shows how to do semiotic
field trips, which are observational missions and a way to gather data that is
often overlooked in commercial semiotics. Chapter 8 offers guidance in
combining semiotics with the methods to which it is most closely related:
ethnography and discourse analysis.
 137

07

How to do semiotic field trips

WHAT’S COMING UP

Semiotics sometimes involves fieldwork. It is an observational method and

semiotic projects may require on-the-ground experience in various markets,
particularly when you are required to provide insights that apply to multiple
countries. This chapter explains what semiotic fieldwork involves, including
immersion experiences and encounters with individual consumers, in their
homes, in stores and in other locations in their local communities. If you do
all the exercises in this chapter, at the end you will be able to:

●● make decisions about when a research project in semiotics needs a field

trip;
●● plan and implement semiotic field trips;
●● involve other people, getting the best value out of suppliers and
partners and providing the best possible experience for clients;
●● strategically collect and record data;
●● identify the best insights from your field trips;
●● develop a more complete and thorough semiotic perspective which
equips you to comment on a range of behaviours and cultural practices.

Why do semiotic field trips?

This chapter may come as a surprise to anyone who has previous experience
with commercially available semiotics and has formed the view that it is
about desk research: sitting down and patiently dismantling advertising,
138 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

packaging or web copy. In fact, semiotics is a form of observational research

and some hints of this are found in the discussion of top-down research in
Chapter 5. In that chapter, we considered questions of class and taste – what
better way is there to understand taste than to go to places like consumers’
homes, where their taste is expressed in the way they choose and arrange
their possessions? Or how about shopping malls, department stores and
places of entertainment such as bars and theatres, places where people go to
see others and to be seen, where people can be seen modelling their own
clothes? We also considered simulation in Chapter 5. Lots of settings where
consumers are found can be regarded as simulations. Golf courses and holi-
day resorts simulate nature. The types of offices where the company signals
a youthful and trendy culture by installing bean bags and ping-pong tables
are simulations of recreation centres. Downscale stores sometimes try to
cheaply imitate their upscale equivalents. Another topic we considered in
Chapter 5 is power and there I remarked on Foucault’s writing on the ways
that power can be expressed through architecture.
Recall also the baked beans brief from Chapter 3. The client showed an
interest in how people navigate the baked bean fixture in supermarkets and
additionally wondered if useful cues could be imported to that fixture from
restaurants, cafés and street markets. While we can achieve reasonably good
insights from photographs, if they are abundantly available, there’s a lot to
be said for going to visit these places in person. Being physically present in
a space offers much richer opportunities for capturing interesting observa-
tions than looking at them remotely. We can see how people use services,
how they interact with the place itself and with each other, we can experi-
ence sounds, smells, textures and other semiotic signs which photographs
and even video are not good at recording. Every time we leave our desks and
go outside, we are exposing ourselves to semiotic signs in action, in the real
world, and it is something we will want to take advantage of, on at least
some of our research projects. In the end, if everything you do in semiotics
entails sitting at your desk, you will lose touch with the rhythms of the
cultures on which you are attempting to comment and your commentary
will become detached and remote. Go outside, take a look around, meet
some people.
The rest of this chapter concerns itself with the practical details of how to
organize a semiotic field trip and make sense of the things you observe.
Before we get into these practical matters, you may have one preliminary
question which deserves consideration. That question is, ‘how is this differ-
ent from ethnography?’
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 139

Ethnography and semiotics are very closely related methods. They are
both observational methods which set out to investigate consumer culture
rather than the psychology (the attitudes, opinions and personalities) of
individual consumers. They are both informed by anthropology. Ethnography
arises directly from anthropology and as for semiotics, ethnography is one
of its parents, along with linguistics. This different parentage is where we
discover how semiotics and ethnography acquire their different flavours:

●● Ethnography means to make a picture of (-graphy) the lives of ordinary

people (ethno-). In contemporary, commercial practice it usually entails
shooting a lot of video, because this is taken to be the best way of
capturing the routine behaviours that clients want ethnographers to focus
on. A typical ethnography project, when it is allowed to grow larger than
an extra-long in-home depth interview, records video of behavioural
routines such as people doing their laundry, making breakfast and
mending their cars.
●● Semiotics has a different focus. Its dictionary definition is ‘the study of
signs and symbols’ and for practical purposes, that means it is concerned
with matters of representation. If ethnography tries to capture the way
things are, one of the dangers is that the ethnographer risks ‘going native’,
meaning that they become so immersed in the world of consumers that
they begin to mistake their participants’ version of reality for reality
itself. They may come to accept that what consumers regard as natural is
indeed natural. They risk being taken in by consumer behaviour which
appears alluringly authentic but in fact is a type of performance for the
researcher’s camera. In contrast, semiotics takes nothing at face value. It
is concerned not with trying to get at an underlying reality which may or
may not be there, but with how reality is depicted, how it is represented.
To the semiologist, everything is a kind of performance and every aspect
of the living and material world that humans have been involved in
shaping is the result of an act of representation.

These may seem like fine or theoretical distinctions but they amount to the
difference between looking at something and looking past it to a version of
the world which is assumed to exist beyond acts of communication. Recall
that we encountered this same issue in Chapter 5 when we talked about two
ways to use research literature and other types of information such as busi-
ness or marketing intelligence. In that discussion, we considered that we
have a choice in how to treat literature such as a market research report or
140 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

an academic book. We may choose to treat it as an explanatory resource –

that is, we can choose to treat it as simply and reliably describing facts about
the people or category at hand. Alternatively, we may choose to treat it as
researchable data, as part of the culturally specific topic which requires
semiotic investigation.
This is the essence of the difference between ethnography and semiotics as
commercial activities. Ethnography video-records household routines and its
value is in capturing and explaining those routines as slices of ‘real’ behav-
iour – and indeed, they are far more real than the accounts of laundry and
breakfast which can be elicited by a survey or in a focus group. Semiotics
looks at all the objects and behaviours in consumers’ homes, stores and other
physical locations as representations of reality rather than reality itself. It is
at less risk of going native and adds explanatory power because of its ability
to detect simulation, performance and the myriad ways that consumers and
brands attempt to convince each other of one or another truth.
This sensitivity to the ways that people and brands construct versions of
reality and then try to convince each other of the veracity of those versions is
where semiotics differs from ethnography and makes contact with discourse
analysis. In the next chapter, we will look at how to combine semiotics with
ethnography and discourse analysis, but for the remainder of this chapter we
will concentrate on the semiotic field trip in its undiluted form. It is a topic
which has been almost entirely neglected by research methods literature on
semiotics to date, perhaps because academic semiologists feel that they don’t
need to be told how to do it if they have already developed a semiotic way of
looking at things, while commercial semiotics has been dominated by the
business of picking apart ads and packaging and looking for visual signs and
symbols, this being a common entry point to semiotics and yet far from the
whole story. My hope is that by the end of this chapter you will be keen to
leave your desk, go outdoors and play a game of I-Spy with semiotics. It is a
rewarding activity that will yield a host of new insights and which will posi-
tively boost your powers as an ethnographer or discourse analyst, rather
than undermining them, if those disciplines are already your speciality.

Learning from semiotic field trips

The best way to convey the value of semiotic field trips is by showing some
of the output of those trips. When I’m visiting locations for research
purposes, the main way that I record notes is through photography and I
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 141

have my camera with me at all times because I expect to be surprised – the

element of discovery is a major aspect of semiotics. If you go out with a set
list of objects and sites to photograph, imagining that you already know
what is going to be interesting and revealing about the location, then you
deprive yourself of opportunities to learn the lessons that the place is trying
to teach you. Here are some photographs, all of exteriors, from England and
the United States, each of which taught me something about the place I was
visiting.

Yorkshire, England
Yorkshire is a county in Northern England. This photograph was taken in
Skipton, a market town in that county. The name Skipton is said to have its
origins in ‘sheep-town’. Skipton and neighbouring towns such as Keighley,
Halifax and Bradford were once centres of sheep farming and wool-milling,
and some sheep farming persists to this day, although on nowhere near the
scale that made Yorkshire famous in previous centuries, before synthetic
textiles and globalization revolutionized the textiles industry. Today, a
significant part of Yorkshire’s economy is tourism. Visitors from other coun-
tries and also within the UK are attracted by its lush, green countryside but
also by its many historic buildings and by its apparent ability to preserve
aspects of English life and culture which have been wiped out by urban
development and economic expansion in other parts of the country.
This background knowledge of Yorkshire, representing the sort of
knowledge-­gathering one might do before visiting a place, helps us to under-
stand what we are looking at in Figure 7.1. At first glance, one might think
that we are viewing something very quaint and historic, a precious relic of a
traditional English way of life which has been nearly extinguished by progress.
In the collective imagination of foreign and domestic tourists, it’s possible to
conceive of an England of 200 years ago which was littered with tiny shops
that sold nothing but toffee and other such highly specialized products. In the
21st century, a thoughtful visitor might wonder how it is possible for a toffee
shop to sustain itself economically and this line of inquiry might lead them to
the realization that what they are looking at is not, in fact, a dedicated toffee
shop but a newsagent – that is, a convenience store which sells newspapers
and magazines, cigarettes, milk and various other essentials of daily life,
along with confectionery. It is possible to buy toffee in Dales Toffee Shop and
also fudge but a strictly accurate description of the shop might be
­something like ‘Dales Newsagent’ or even ‘Dales Convenience Store’. What
142 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

FIGURE 7.1 Dales Toffee Shop

SOURCE Reproduced with kind permission of Dales Toffee Shop

we see here exemplifies the difference between reality and representations of

reality, the latter being the main focus of semiotics. The reality is a newsagent.
The representation of reality which is on offer is a 19th-century toffee shop
and the exterior of the store is designed in this way to please tourists, make
them feel they are getting value for money and give them something to photo-
graph to commemorate their trip. It is not merely incidental that the items
displayed at the exterior of the shop include postcards, depicting the most
beautiful aspects of the Yorkshire countryside and its historic buildings.
These items are also offered to please and encourage tourists; there is little
reason why the local residents of Skipton would want to buy them, unless
they happened to be the photographer.
Before we leave Yorkshire and Dales Toffee Shop, let’s take a moment to
pay special attention to the sign on the wall to the left of the photograph, a
sign which conveys a headline from the local news. A close-up is shown in
Figure 7.2.
In this photograph you are viewing a metal frame which is designed to
contain printed posters which are issued by newspapers, showing the latest
news headlines. In this case, the poster was issued by a local newspaper, the
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 143

FIGURE 7.2 New Maypole for Grassington Children

SOURCE Reproduced with kind permission of Craven Herald

Craven Herald. Foundational questions and maxims in semiotics, to which

you will find yourself returning as you develop your skills, are:

●● How could this have been done differently?

●● Where there is choice, there is meaning.

These questions and maxims exist to encourage you to appreciate the things
you can observe, using your eyes, from a semiotic perspective. In this case, a
semiotic perspective invites you to consider all of the other news headlines
which conceivably could have filled this space, but did not fill it. It is not neces-
sary to imagine or invent these headlines because it is easy to find real examples.
At the time of writing this chapter, in 2019, I visited two websites. The first was
the website of the Evening Standard, a local newspaper in London. The second
was the website of the Craven Herald, a local newspaper in Yorkshire which
issued the headline shown in Figure 7.2. Here are some examples of headlines
from both newspapers that are on display at the time of writing.
Evening Standard:

●● ‘Squalid details emerge of Assange’s life inside Ecuadorian embassy’

●● ‘Stars pay tribute to slain rapper Nipsey Hussle at Coachella’
●● ‘PM’s dilemma: compromise and split Tories, do nothing and lose legacy’
144 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Craven Herald:

●● ‘Firefighters tackle blaze in the open’

●● ‘“Naïve” Skipton restaurant owner re-sentenced for tax offence’
●● ‘Meeting airs issues over Silsden housing’

These headlines are perhaps what one would expect from newspapers from
the capital city and also from the version of Yorkshire that affects the daily
lives of its permanent residents. The London newspaper is dominated by a
mix of national and international politics, crime and urban culture. The
Yorkshire newspaper is concerned with local emergencies, local businesses
and municipal issues such as housing. These are all headlines which could
have, but did not, appear on the poster which is displayed outside Dales
Toffee Shop. The headline actually reads ‘New maypole for Grassington
children’. Grassington is a nearby village. A maypole, if that word is unfa-
miliar, as it may be to readers outside of the Germanic countries of Europe
or to younger generations, is a tall, wooden pole which is erected in May or
June and which is ritually danced around as a folk tradition. Its origins are
mediaeval; the dance celebrates the arrival of warm weather. It is thought by
some to contain an additional layer of symbolism concerning fertility.
Maypoles were already falling into disuse by the 18th and 19th centuries,
the period which the toffee shop seems to allude to and today are regarded
as memorabilia of history, which is not to say that they are never used.
American readers of this book may have encountered maypoles if they have
ever visited the historical re-enactment events called ‘Renaissance Faires’
and from time to time maypoles appear in movies such as the horror film
The Wicker Man and TV series such as Mad Men, where their ability to
function as semiotic signs for a raw, pagan sexuality are fully exploited.
As we consider all of the things that the news headline poster outside
Dales convenience store could have said, but did not say, the peculiar histor-
ical and cultural specificity of what it actually says becomes more visible.
Just like the Toffee Shop, the headline ‘New Maypole for Grassington
Children’ reveals itself as not straightforwardly reality but as offering a very
special and particular version of reality, one which is almost guaranteed to
enchant and please tourists. It is not that the headline is false, I am certain
that the Craven Herald would not print the headline if no maypole existed,
but of all the news in Yorkshire and in the British Isles which the Craven
Herald could have chosen for a headline and which Dales could have chosen
to display outside its shop, it happened to be this one, which is perfectly in
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 145

keeping with the nostalgia and the fantasy of British history on which
Skipton’s tourism depends.

California, United States

The photograph in Figure 7.3 was taken in a business park in Irvine,
California. It shows a large structure which houses PricewaterhouseCoopers.
PwC supplies accountancy and other professional services. It is one of the
largest firms of its kind in the world, with a value of over $41 billion and
roughly a quarter of a million employees (Statista, 2019). It is a multina-
tional firm that operates in over 150 countries. Approximately one-quarter
of its workers are in the United States.
While maypoles and toffee shops may seem rather exotic to visitors to
Yorkshire from countries such as the United States, while appearing
commonplace to Yorkshire’s permanent residents, the reverse applies to the
corporate architecture of this business park in Irvine. To the people who live
and work in Irvine, who perhaps work in this building or who see it every
day, there may be nothing unusual about it, it is an expected part of the

FIGURE 7.3 PricewaterhouseCoopers

SOURCE Reproduced with kind permission of PricewaterhouseCoopers

146 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

landscape. To a visitor from another country with different architectural

styles, it may stand out as something unusual. One aspect of developing skill
in semiotics is cultivating the ability to look at familiar objects as though
one had never seen them before. This is also a key skill in ethnography and
is sometimes called ‘ethnographic strangeness’ (for example, see Jong,
Kamsteeg and Ybema, 2013). If you are a reader from the United States and
you can see easily what is strange or unusual about Dales Toffee Shop, while
the offices of PwC appear perfectly normal, let me point out some features
that we would hope to attend to for semiotic purposes.
First, measured against the size of the average human, this is a large build-
ing. You can gain an idea of its size by looking at the height of the front door,
framed by two of the smaller trees just left-of-centre in the photograph. The
door, which one can expect to be slightly taller than the people who pass
through it, amounts to perhaps one-sixteenth of the height of the building.
It’s also a wide building. Its overall size, certainly compared to Dales Toffee
Shop and even compared to many office buildings in London, is colossal. It
is a building which has modernist elements, by which I mean that it is angu-
lar, composed of straight lines. It also has postmodernist elements, mainly
consisting in its shiny surfaces, which I will come to in a moment. It is with-
out any doubt a dramatic structure and one which did not arise out of
accident or convenience. It is not a single-family, residential home which was
later converted into a shop and it wasn’t carved out of the land on which it
sits. It was built for purpose; in this case, a corporate purpose.
As an example of corporate architecture, it has things in common with
other buildings such as the Sydney Opera House, the BMW-Vierzylinder
building in Munich or the MahaNakhon skyscraper in Bangkok – the tallest
building in Thailand and the site of the Ritz Carlton hotel. These dramatic
buildings do not exist for merely functional reasons, that is, to provide shel-
tered interior spaces for humans to work or consume services; their
architecture serves additional purposes, one of which is marketing.
To put it simply, buildings like these are designed to impress. The size and
scale of the PwC building, its stark, modernist lines and glittering surfaces
help to assert and reinforce the dominance and authority of PwC as a busi-
ness. This building gives PwC visibility and recognizability. It is a display of
PwC’s success. It creates a halo of prosperity which spreads beyond the build-
ing itself to the entire business park, supported by the other buildings in this
purpose-built space – if you think about it, the concept of ‘a business park’ is
itself rather contrived. It doesn’t occur in nature and is designed to create a
self-contained space which celebrates corporate values and capitalism.
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 147

If you delve deeper into trends in corporate architecture, you will find
that the PwC building is simultaneously contemporary, very much of our
times, and, some may feel, is becoming rather dated. One way in which it
expresses ‘contemporary’ is in those reflective surfaces. If this building had
been erected in the first half of the 20th century or even earlier, it could have
retained the same size but the surfaces would have been matte – for compar-
ison, consider the historic buildings of Chicago. Chicago was substantially
rebuilt in the 19th century after a series of fires, resulting in some impressive
and ambitious architecture for which the city is now famous. The large
corporate buildings of that time and place are certainly able to assert the
dominance and authority of the companies for which they were made but
they are solid blocks of concrete, stone and brick which block the viewer’s
gaze – they don’t make much effort to accommodate the natural landscape
in which they are placed. The shiny surfaces which cover almost all of the
PwC building are typical of architecture which is not just modernist but
post-modern. Specifically, this architectural gesture was developed to make
gigantic, imposing buildings sit more comfortably in their surrounding land-
scapes. The shiny surfaces of this building are doing what they are intended
to do, which is to reflect the blue California sky and also the tall palm trees
which sustain the ‘park’ aspect of this business park.
It’s notable that this has been only partly successful as the PwC building
reflects not only features of nature such as sky and trees but also an equally
assertive and angular corporate monolith which sits directly opposite. This
is ultimately the meaning of the Irvine business park which is conveyed to
the casual observer, the worker or the tourist who happens to be passing
through. You can escape from the hard realities of capitalism into blue sky
and green trees – but you will not get very far.
If you are wondering how some people might feel that the glittering
palace of PwC is rather dated, the answer is found in the idea of exclusivity
versus diversity and inclusivity. This huge, angular, blocky edifice is an archi-
tectural style inherited from the heyday of modernism, a period in the
mid-20th century when 70 per cent of the workforce of Western countries
was male, a time when companies uncompromisingly expected employees
to comply with and fit in with them and did not see the need to shape them-
selves around the diverse populations that make up the whole pool of talent
on which they could draw.
Of course, we may expect that PwC is doing everything it can to be
inclusive and accommodate women and differently abled people and
commentary on the external architecture of this particular building is in
148 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

no way a commentary on the policies of the company itself. However, it’s

interesting to note the contrasting design decisions which are often made
by newer, start-up companies. These companies are often very keen to
make a public display of accommodating people with disabilities (a factor
which has a direct impact on architecture – it’s easier to employ differ-
ently abled staff when the architecture of the building has been designed
with them in mind). Such companies, in a display of diversity, are also
characteristically keen to get away from the grey cubicles which once
dominated the US office. They install casual and comfortable seating for
informal meetings, they have rooms designed for creative work which
look like kindergarten classrooms with primary colours and ‘play’ materi-
als such as crayons. They supply open-plan kitchen areas with free coffee
and fruit, on-site gyms and even sensory features such as sand and
synthetic grass. Over time, we may come to see these new, more playful,
youthful, gender-fluid and diverse ideas reflected in office exteriors as well
as interiors, as new buildings are erected.

Implications for business

In this chapter, I have talked in some detail about the ability of features of
human-made environments such as office buildings and stores to convey
meaning. These environments and structures represent reality. That is, it’s
not simply that they are reality – recall our maxim from earlier, ‘where there
is choice, there is meaning’. They are not inevitable features of the natural
world such as mountains or clouds. They are the products of human inter-
vention and they are the result of a host of human decisions, from the giant,
shiny cube of PwC to the small details of a poster printed by a local news-
paper in a village in Yorkshire. Each of the examples we have looked at here
invites an analysis that is distinctively semiotic, with a focus on representa-
tion. The PwC building and Dales Toffee Shop each construct and offer to
local residents and visitors a very particular version of reality, which they
ask viewers to accept as reality itself. Dales wants you to accept its historical
authenticity and to experience the whole village as a preserved relic of
romantic English history. PwC wants you to accept and acknowledge its
mighty authority and simultaneously to forget that it could be, but in this
case is not, expressing its brand values using natural materials, feminine
shapes and a structure which clears the view of the sky, grass and trees by
sitting within the earth rather than squatting on top of it.
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 149

In real-life commercial projects, away from the confines of this book, I

have worked for companies which exist to develop tourism in the north of
England. Yorkshire happens to be very successful in selling its particular
version of romance but there are other northern counties which still have a
way to go in making themselves appealing. In the example discussed here,
we have begun to reveal some of Yorkshire’s tricks of the trade. On the day
I took the photo of the PwC building, I was in California for reasons unre-
lated to corporate finance. I was actually there on behalf of a British company
that wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how American consumers
take care of their pets. In comparison to British consumers, American pet
owners are preoccupied with a tension between nature and culture. On the
one hand, nature is rather close – pets are seen as being much closer to their
wild ancestors compared to the way that British pet owners view their famil-
iar, cosy cats and dogs. On the other hand, nature is somewhat out of reach,
particularly in food. It’s no secret that American food landscapes feature a
vast amount of heavily processed food items. One effect of that can be that
getting one’s hands on unprocessed food, for humans or animals, can be
somewhat of an effortful challenge.
The tension between nature and culture is mirrored in the physical land-
scape of California. On the one hand, Orange County has 42 miles of
coastline, making the untameable ocean a feature of life there which is on
the doorstep and hard to ignore. On the other hand, many of OC’s residents
will find that all that dramatic nature is frustratingly out of reach – American
citizens work long hours and don’t get many days off. Many of them will
spend most of their time confined in gilded palaces like the one in the photo.
What the pet care brand needs is a marketing strategy that helps to reconcile
this tension, that renders nature safe and controllable while at the same time
bringing it within easy reach.
Probably I could have eventually reached this insight about the tension
between nature and culture purely by interviewing consumers about pet
care or running focus groups. However, my observational trips around
Irvine, which features both nature and culture in their most impressive
forms, drew this aspect of life in that region to my attention quickly and
graphically.
If you are in a location to do research, whether it is pure semiotics or
because you are primarily there to run some focus groups or for any other
reason, go outside with your camera. Walk around. Assume that you know
nothing – cultivate your ethnographic strangeness and let the unusual
150 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

features of seemingly familiar objects reveal themselves. Free yourself from

expectations and checklists. The location you are in will show you its face
and its values if you stop and look.

When to use semiotic field trips

In my view, every semiotic project benefits from some first-hand observation
that involves leaving one’s desk and going outdoors. However, it’s also a
reality of commercial semiotics that quite often you are pushed for time and
so is your client, who wants to send you a few pack shots or ads in return
for prompt commentary on their internal structures and semiotic signs. You
should write a proposal that argues for allocating some resources to a semi-
otic field trip in the following circumstances:

●● The client has questions about a culture that they know they do not fully
understand. For example, your client is based in Europe but wants to sell
products in China. They know that Chinese consumers and Chinese
culture are different in ways that are likely to impact beauty, giftware or
public transport, but they do not know the details. Here, you have a
strong case for visiting China if the budget will allow for it. Visit some
beauty parlours, experience a gift-giving occasion, travel around on the
train.
●● The project concerns regional or national taste. Your client sells processed,
ready-to-eat meals or fashionable homewares. They know that consumers
in the north and south of the country have different ideas about food and
home décor and they are also ready to accept that these different ideas
would be better captured by observation than by running a survey.
Encourage them not to limit their ambitions to the kind of commercial
ethnography which is a glorified in-home interview. By all means, visit
consumers in their homes where taste is expressed, but, at the same time,
go to the places where taste is formed. Go to local restaurants and cafés.
Visit hotels, nightclubs and home furnishings stores.
●● The project involves questions of reality. The client is trying to sell the
truth and authenticity of something or is concerned with keeping up a
certain type of appearance. Tourism is an obvious example: all forms of
tourism involve manufacturing a version of reality for visitors which
satisfies their expectations and is more pleasing than the facts of everyday
life. Another example could be alcohol. The client owns a whisky which
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 151

is trying its hardest to look authentically Scottish for sales overseas. Or,
more challengingly, the client is entering Scotland with a bank or
department store and is trying its hardest to appeal to Scottish consumers
in a way that gets past unfortunate tourist misconceptions and stereotypes,
convincing local residents that the brand understands the real Scotland
that lies below the surface of holiday brochures and picture postcards.

Whenever you or your client have questions that concern the psychology,
tastes or behaviours of entire nations, large geographical regions or unusual
demographics or subcultures, you have good reasons to physically go there
and take a look around.

Who is involved in semiotic field trips?

When doing semiotic field trips, there’s a great deal to be said for factoring
in some time alone. You need time to explore and make spontaneous discov-
eries. You need the freedom to pause in a particular spot and take time to
think, without having to refer to the needs of another person such as an
accompanying client or researcher who will distract you with questions or
become bored, hungry or anxious about sticking to an agenda. Try to build
a little ‘alone time’ into your trip which allows this to happen. Having got
that disclaimer out of the way, including other people in your trips can be a
tremendous boon to you and also to them. Here are some of the people who
you might choose to work with.

Work with local interpreters

Local interpreters are a lifeline if you are in a country where you don’t
speak the language. I spent several days in Chile. I had, or thought I had, no
prior knowledge of Spanish, certainly no formal education, and I was
astonished by the amount of Spanish I managed to acquire after time on my
own in a place where many people are not bilingual and there’s no expecta-
tion of English being dominant or even available. That said, on some of the
days I was there, I was accompanied by Spanish-speaking guides and these
people were invaluable, not only in simply translating from Spanish to
English but, more importantly, interpreting in the sense of being able to
explain the significance of words and phrases as well as their dictionary
definitions.
152 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Partner with local research agencies

Don’t hesitate to partner with local research agencies when you are in an
unfamiliar culture. I had amazing benefits from working with an agency in
South Africa which provides ‘immersion experiences’. That is, I gave them
some indications of the things that I wanted to do in three South African
cities, such as experiencing nightlife and making connections with local
artists, but they used their unique knowledge of the country to take me on
an extremely well-organized tour to visit consumers at home. These consum-
ers were sampled from all the economic strata of South African society,
ranging from some very wealthy people who live in gated communities to
people who experience the grinding poverty of informal settlements. I could
not have penetrated these places without the help of the local agency and
they were invaluable in getting me through doors, introducing me to people
and showing me how South African society is segmented.

Bring a client
Clients love coming along on semiotic field trips because it is a chance for
you to pass on some of your skills in taking a semiotic view of the world
around you. Include them on days when you have specific activities
planned such as visiting stores, malls or places of local interest. As you
walk around with them, think out loud. A semiotic perspective is conta-
gious and they will pick up your particular method of looking at things as
you detect ideological structures, simulations, representations of reality
and semiotic signs.

Where should I go? What to do when on the ground

If you are in a place where either your category or your target customers are
present, almost nothing you can do with a semiotic field trip will be wasted
time. That said, here is a short checklist of destinations to inspire you. I’ve
visited all of these myself and benefited greatly:

●● Consumers’ homes; this one almost goes without saying. Talk to

consumers. There’s no need to formally interview them, semiotics is an
observational method and you will get more value from natural
conversation than you will from pelting people with interview questions.
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 153

Look around their homes. Take photographs. Go outside and look at the
back yard or garden.
●● Accompany consumers as they go about their normal day. Don’t direct their
activities. Ask them what they would have done if you were not with them
that day, and do that. Go for an ice-cream or help their brother-in-law move
a piece of furniture or go with them to pick the kids up from school.
●● Stores and shopping malls are obvious destinations. Take your time; I’ve
spent entire days hanging around malls for research purposes. Eat lunch
and dinner. Visit stores that are out-of-category as well as ones that are
obviously within the category you are studying.
●● Go to museums of art and local history. Don’t stick to the national
galleries, find the small, independent places. Make contact with local
artists, visit their studios, ask them to talk about their work. I met the
artist George Demir in a tiny studio in Bangalore; he was at the end of an
extended visit there from his home in Germany. He was very generous
with his time and shared a great deal of what he’d learned while in India
doing his own research. He’d been in Bangalore for much longer than I
was able to be there and had the added benefit of being able to look at
the local culture both as an outsider and as someone who had interviewed
many local residents, in great detail, about their lives.
●● Experience nightlife. Go to a comedy club in Johannesburg or go to the
opera in Hong Kong.
●● Go to places where you can read. I had an educational Sunday morning
in a small town in the Netherlands where I sat down in a café with a local
researcher and we read all of the day’s newspapers over coffee, which he
helpfully translated from Dutch while explaining local politics. While I’m
on the subject of reading, don’t waste any evenings that find you alone in
your hotel room. Find out what are the latest, locally written, blockbuster
novels. Get English translations if necessary. Consume them avidly while
waiting around at hotels and airports.
●● Take yourself on a walking tour. I spent a whole day doing this in Santiago
de Chile, with the help of a guide which I obtained on the internet. It
lasted six hours, I took countless photographs and visited places which
ranged from Santiago’s most important historical buildings to the fruit
and fish markets.
●● Use local services. Get a haircut or a manicure. Talk to the service
providers and observe how the facilities are arranged and how customers
use the space.
154 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● If you can gain access, perhaps with the help of a local research agency,
go to offices and other places of work. Observe the internal and external
architecture and how the working day is organized. Eat an office lunch
with the French, which may be a very social occasion. Observe the way
that the ritual of office lunchtime varies from other countries, in which
people may go out to eat alone or sit at their desks with a pre-packed
sandwich.

Some final notes about planning

Here’s a list of things that I like to put in place when planning a semiotic
field trip.

Use each day to do something different

If you are going to visit multiple cities in a single country, I like the two-
days-on, one-day-off model. That is, on the first day in a city I’ll go and
visit consumers, often accompanied by a client or local researcher. You can
fit in two consumers in one day, with enough time to have a chat with
them at home and visit a local store. The second day is consumer-free. I’ll
typically go with a client-side or agency-side companion to visit at least
two of the locations in the previous section. Do some advance research to
pick out key destinations or neighbourhoods that you want to visit. These
are your two days ‘on’. On the third day, go out alone. Take a walking tour
or visit a museum or choose some other activity or destination that needs
lots of thinking time. In the evening, travel to the next city. Repeat until
you are done.

Choose between methods of capturing data

Decide how you are going to capture observations and data to bring home
with you. Commercial ethnography often leans heavily on video recordings
and researchers will often let the camera run for 100 per cent of the time
that they are with a consumer. Freed from this expectation that is attached
to ethnography, I don’t usually shoot video. I find photography far less
intrusive for consumers and other local residents, especially using a discreet
smartphone, and I might take several hundred photos over a trip that lasts
nine or ten days. Don’t second-guess yourself or try to do the analysis before
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 155

collecting the data. If something seems even potentially or slightly interest-

ing, get a snapshot. When you get back to your desk at the end of the trip
and browse through your hundreds of photos, there will be unexpected
gems in there that perfectly capture the essence of the culture or location
even though you couldn’t have known that at the moment when you took
the photo.

Study your location before travelling

Research as much as you can about the location before you get there. Read
about the political climate and the economy. Learn about the social geogra-
phy of the country. It will help you to understand what you are experiencing
when you arrive. Sometimes your client organization will have ready-made
induction materials which are used to educate incoming staff from other
countries. Absorb these too; they are full of valuable shortcuts to under-
standing the local culture.

Analysing field trip data and finding insights

Perhaps as a result of 20 years of experience and the confidence that grows
with it, I don’t write extensive field notes or attempt to sort through my
photographs in the search for insights while I am on the ground in a new
country. Essentially, all I do is keep a precise but strictly factual diary of
where I went, what I did and who I met on each day, because later on I can
match this information to the time stamps on my digital photos. My reason-
ing is that my time in that place is limited – at most I might have nine or ten
days. As I see it, my purpose while I am there is not to waste a single minute
on administrative or project management tasks that I could have used to
immerse myself in the place and its people. I want to extract value from
every little bit of time, even if that is just reading a book by a South African
politician or a Dutch novelist in my hotel room at the end of an exhausting
day of travelling around.
I appreciate that to a new researcher this can feel a bit like leaving the
analysis to chance and also you want to know what you are supposed to do
with all this photographic data you have collected, along with the local
products you’ve no doubt bought and the local books, newspapers, maga-
zines, restaurant menus, advertising flyers and information leaflets that
you’ve brought home with you. If you now go back and look at Chapter 4
156 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

(bottom-up analysis of signs and symbols) and Chapter 5 (top-down analy-

sis of ideology and culture), you have a ready-made list of items to search
for in your data and analytic questions to ask. When you get home and are
back at your usual desk, pull all of your photographs, products and printed
material into one place so that you can see it all at the same time. Make
some coffee and take a deep breath. Systematically apply all the prompts
and questions that Chapters 4 and 5 are offering you. If you have a lot of
data, as you probably do by this stage, start with the data that are obviously
crucial to your project, such as the interiors of stores where your client’s
brand is displayed and gradually work outwards to data that seem to be of
more peripheral interest. End your analysis when your data set is no longer
revealing new answers or when you have exhausted your good-quality
materials, whichever comes first.

Activity: Your own semiotic field trip

This has been a long chapter and it is time to put down your book and go
outside. Pick a destination that is relevant to the project you are pursuing as
you work through this course in semiotics. There’s no need to be away for
two weeks; if you are researching baked beans, go to a supermarket or a
working men’s café. If you are researching mature women and their well­
being, go to a place where mature women congregate. Ask permission to
join a meeting of the local book club, women’s group or feminist organiza-
tion. See if you can obtain a day pass for the local gym and use the whole
day if you can. Eat in the café, sit in the jacuzzi. Find where those women
gather, go there and be approachable and chatty. If you are on private prop-
erty or you are likely to get people’s faces in shot in your photos, ask their
permission. Be considerate of others, keep your eyes open, listen and learn.
Do your analysis as soon as you get home. Record all your findings.
This chapter has concerned observational field trips using semiotics.
These trips have some overlap with ethnography but they differ in two
ways:

●● Semiotics is concerned with representations of reality. It does not imagine

or take the view that it is encountering reality itself.
●● Semiotics is not constrained by the conventional expectations that are
tied to commercial ethnography. A semiotic field trip is not defined or
qualified by video shooting schedules, interviews, accompanied shopping
 HOW TO DO SEMIOTIC FIELD TRIPS 157

trips or any of the other mechanisms of observational market research. If

you went on a trip which gave you first-hand experience of a location or
culture and if you then examined that experience using the tools and
questions in Chapters 4 and 5, then you are doing semiotics correctly.
Enjoy your freedom.

These distinctions notwithstanding, it is clear that semiotics is very closely

related to ethnography and also to discourse analysis, which is the study of
naturally occurring language, especially conversation. Chapter 8 offers
advice in combining these methods in a single project, to their mutual
benefit.
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 159

08

Combining semiotics with

ethnography and discourse analysis

WHAT’S COMING UP

Semiotics is a research method that studies aspects of consumer culture. In

this respect, it is different from the surveys and focus groups which are the
standard tools of market research. Those traditional methods arise from the
psychology of the individual: they seek to elicit internal, psychological
states such as attitudes and needs. As such, they have become known as
the inside-out approach to research. They start from the position that
interesting things are going on inside consumers’ heads and they seek to
make those things external through the research process and make them
visible to researchers and their clients.
Semiotics belongs to an alternative family of methods which collectively
take an outside-in approach to research. Rather than trying to get things
out of people’s heads, these methods ask how they get in there in the first
place. The answer is usually framed in terms of the culture in which every
consumer has no choice but to participate. There is no escape from the
supermarket, as the saying goes. While semiotics has its own, very
particular, strengths, conceptual tools and applications, a researcher’s
ability with semiotics can only be improved by competence with the other
research methods in the same family, of which the most prominent are
ethnography and discourse analysis. This chapter shows you how to
combine them on a single project and apply them all to a single data set,
with different outcomes. By the end of this chapter, you will have:

●● a clear understanding of how semiotics, ethnography and discourse

analysis are different as well as how they are similar;
160 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● practical experience in applying the techniques of semiotics,

ethnography and discourse analysis, yielding different findings;
●● the ability to decide when and how to use these three methods either
separately or together – a decision which affects data collection as well
as data analysis;
●● pointers to further reading for self-education in ethnography and
discourse analysis; and
●● confidence in discussing these methods, writing them into your
proposals and recommending them to others.

How to distinguish ethnography, semiotics and discourse

analysis and stop making curry
Why is it important to understand how semiotics, ethnography and discourse
analysis are different? Isn’t it more important to understand what they have
in common?
A Google search for the phrase ‘difference between semiotics and ethnog-
raphy’ will quickly present the reader with articles by commercial suppliers
which seem intent on mashing the two methods together with barely any
appreciation of how they are different. In the typical view adopted by these
organizations, ethnography is about looking at people (actually, consumers,
‘people’ never means the researcher themselves or their client), while semiot-
ics is something to do with signs and symbols. The supplier thinks there is
no reason not to include a bit of sign- and symbol-spotting while they are in
consumers’ homes shooting video of them making breakfast or cleaning the
bathroom and this can be sold to the client as offering extra value for money
in the style of two research methods for the price of one.
The situation pertaining to discourse analysis is different but not better.
Discourse analysis has yet to make real inroads in market research, perhaps
because it is at least 30 years younger than semiotics, 100 or more years
younger than ethnography and has proportionally fewer practitioners
outside of academia. This shields discourse analysis from some of the most
unfortunate consequences of commercialization, such as ethnography that
is reduced to an extra-long in-home interview and semiotics that makes lists
of the visible characteristics of packages and products without understand-
ing why. Unfortunately, discourse analysis within academia is not immune
 COMBINING SEMIOTICS WITH ETHNOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 161

to vagueness and imprecision, with the result that this author has reviewed
submissions to academic journals which claimed to use discourse analysis
but which were limited to picking out ‘themes’ in interview transcripts with-
out ever specifying what a theme is – a practice that can be found in any
qualitative market research agency and which does not require an academic
background to produce.
If I am being critical, it is because mashing together methods on the basis
of their similarity and without an appreciation of how they are different
causes all the methods involved to lose their abilities to arrive at unique
insights. If we take the time to understand what makes these approaches
independent of one another, then we get much better results when we join
them together. An analogous situation is cooking. If you want to make a
curry, which is a Western concept and not a dish which originates from the
Indian subcontinent (for example, see Chopra, nd; Kanjilal, 2016; Little
Global Chefs, 2017; Thomson, 2017; Twilley, Graber and Gastropod, 2019;
Snyder, 2018), then an easy and quick option is to use curry powder, a prod-
uct which does not require users to recognize any of the ingredients and
which results in dishes which may be palatable but which all taste the same.
If, on the other hand, you are serious enough about Indian cooking that you
want to know and understand the different properties and flavours of cori-
ander, turmeric, cumin and various other spices, then you will be able to
prepare a wide range of dishes which are distinctively different and which
use and incorporate those spices to their best advantage. The aim of this
chapter, then, is to rescue you from curry and curry powder and make you
into a competent Indian chef.
Let’s consider our three spices independently and grasp how they tackle
qualitative research of humans and human cultures in different ways.

Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis, henceforth DA, itself comes in different flavours, which
helps to contribute to the uncertainty that persists within academia as well
as outside it. The variety which I’ve found the most precise and helpful and
which is favoured in this book is a method used by social psychologists as
part of a larger project called discursive psychology. It is a close relative of
conversation analysis (henceforth CA), which is a form of micro-sociology.
There is considerable overlap between CA and DA when it comes to analys-
ing the fine details of conversational mechanics and the interested reader is
encouraged to learn about both, as they go hand in hand. Discourse analysis
162 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

is differentiated from CA by its attention to how the traditional intellectual

products of psychology, such as ‘personality’, ‘emotions’, ‘memory’ and so
on are manufactured in verbal exchanges such as conversation with specific
persuasive effects. Qualitative research as it is found in commercial market
research is extremely interested in, and occupied by, psychological matters
such as ‘emotions’, ‘attitudes’, ‘motivations’ and so on, and so a discursive
psychological approach to DA has much to offer the qualitative market
researcher. It also has a lot to offer commercial suppliers of methods such as
sentiment analysis, which claim to discover positive or negative sentiments,
that is, emotions, in communicative products such as tweets, Facebook
messages and other contributions to social media.
In a subsequent section of this chapter we will take a look at some conver-
sational data which arose in the context of a market research project. You
will see that the consumer in this project appears to express needs which
specifically concern safety. Qualitative market researchers are very familiar
with the human need for safety and this is reflected in countless market
research models which describe it as a need state or sometimes as a universal
human need which can be relied on to apply to consumers everywhere in the
world, varying only in degree. In contrast, an approach which is informed
by discursive psychology invites us to appreciate that needs, including the
need for safety, are items which people actively produce and construct, in
live situations, in conversation. In the extract of conversation that we are
going to consider, you will see that, irrespective of whether or not the
consumer actually needs to feel safe, it is very much in the interests of this
particular speaker to say that he needs to feel safe. It is in his interests to say
this because it serves his purposes in a conversation which dances around
some difficult topics.
Discursive psychology is a branch of psychology which pays attention to
exactly this property of needs and emotions. From the perspective of DA,
they do not simply exist inside market research respondents, waiting to be
pulled out. Rather, they are actively produced in live conversational settings
such as market research interviews, where they work to achieve some useful
result for the speaker. Discourse analysis is a method of unpacking the fine
details of conversation, frequently borrowing techniques and empirical
evidence from conversation analysis, in the service of finding out how speak-
ers and writers use language to solve problems and manage relationships
and live situations.
 COMBINING SEMIOTICS WITH ETHNOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 163

Semiotics
Semiotics, as you are now well aware, is most easily and simply defined as
the study of signs and symbols. If the advantage of this definition is simplic-
ity, the disadvantage is that it overlooks the larger purpose of semiotics,
which is to decode consumer culture. Studying semiotic signs, whether they
are visual images, colours, shapes, single words, brand names, sounds such
as advertising jingles or even smells and textures, is not something that the
researcher collects just because they are inherently interesting. The point is
to use them as a conduit to discovering something about the culture which
makes them important and necessary. That is, cultures around the world
have varying ideologies and collectively held beliefs, memories and customs.
They effectively operate with different versions of reality, which is why
foreign cultures can sometimes be hard for researchers to understand.
Semiotics enjoys a massive scope, in the sense that it brings all the different
kinds of signs listed above within its remit. Like discourse analysis, which it
helped to engender, it is very concerned with representations of reality. It
concentrates on the ways that people depict and represent reality to each
other and the ways that unique versions of reality are offered to consumers
through specific habits and gestures using visual images and other sensory
signs alongside language.

Ethnography
Ethnography is an observational research method which arrives in market
research from anthropology, one of the parents of semiotics, the other parent
being linguistics. Like the other methods in this chapter, it studies culture
but it is less concerned with representations of reality than it is with reality
itself. It acknowledges that cultures vary dramatically, over time and around
the world and makes a point of trying to find out how members or local
participants arrange their lives according to local customs. Academic
ethnographers have lots of useful things to say about culturally specific
phenomena such as family groups and households, rites of passage such as
getting married or becoming a parent and many other principles and
routines, large and small, around which the rhythms of daily life are
arranged. Ethnography has useful things to say about why work cultures
differ between India, Europe and the USA, why China has ‘tiger moms’
while other countries don’t, why British consumers use less stain remover
164 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

when doing their laundry than their American counterparts and why tubal
ligation, commonly known as sterilization, is a prominent method of contra-
ception in Brazil.
Good ethnography depends on two major skills. The first is the ability of
the researcher to temporarily become a participant in the culture they are
studying, putting people at ease and inserting themselves as seamlessly as
possible into local behaviours and customs. The second skill is storytelling.
The adept ethnographer needs to be able to report their findings in such a way
that the reader is drawn into the culture under discussion, eventually coming
to feel that they have an insider’s view of what is going on. Ethnography, at
least in commercial market research, is not over-concerned with the difference
between representation and reality as its main purpose is to uncover the real-
ity that exists for the people being studied and make it available for readers,
as graphically as possible. For this reason, it often makes use of video record-
ings, the advantages and limitations of which we will consider in this chapter.

How to analyse conversation using ethnography,

semiotics and discourse analysis
Let’s move on from theory and get stuck into some real data. Here’s an
extract of conversation. It is a segment of a conversation that I had with a
consumer at his home, which happens to be a small apartment in a large city.
In the below extract, R stands for ‘Rachel’ and ‘C’ stands for ‘Consumer’, a
code used to preserve his anonymity.

FIGURE 8.1 Extract of conversation with a consumer

1 C It’s a real nice neighborhood.

2 R It is.

3 C I feel safe going out at night. In my car, I feel safe. I know that my children are safe.

4 R Mmm.

5 C Going around.

6 R I hear you.

7 C So lots of, lots of benefits. Obviously we’re, the living conditions are not

8 ideal for a family of four, it’s er quite small but er I think it’s a compromise

9 that we have to make.

10 R Definitely.

11 C You know we could live in a bigger house in a worse neighborhood.

 COMBINING SEMIOTICS WITH ETHNOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 165

Ethnography, semiotics and discourse analysis are able to draw different

insights from this short sample of conversation. Here they are.
Ethnography, as well as some other approaches such as the type of quali-
tative research which is based on the interior psychology of the individual,
encourages us to appreciate that the consumer is expressing feelings about
the place where he lives. In his view, his neighbourhood is ‘real nice’ (line 1)
and he feels ‘safe’ (line 2). This is potentially useful information, especially
in the context of a larger project where the researcher meets many consum-
ers who live in different towns and cities. The consumer is telling us that his
city has a mix of neighbourhoods, some better than others, and he is glad
that he lives in one of the good ones. Had we met this consumer in a small
village where everyone knows each other, he might have been less concerned
about maintaining a residence in the right area.
A semiotic approach will immediately detect numerous binary opposi-
tions in this consumer’s talk. Binary oppositions, which we encountered in
Chapter 4, are one way in which people use language to simplify a complex
world by reducing it to opposing pairs of things. In this short extract, the
binary oppositions include:

●● nice neighbourhoods versus worse neighbourhoods;

●● safety versus danger;
●● day versus night;
●● adults versus children and also perhaps parents versus adults who are
child-free;
●● small versus large apartments; and
●● apartments versus houses.

Taking this approach uncovers some extra layers of meaning in the tran-
scribed conversation. This consumer is not simply communicating his
feelings or saying things which are symptomatic of his local culture. He is
actively constructing a version of reality for the benefit of the stranger who
has come to talk to him about his life. He is not simply describing or report-
ing reality, but offering a representation of reality in which he asks his fellow
conversationalist to appreciate his location in the way that he wants it to be
appreciated. There are, of course, dozens of other things that he could have
said about his neighbourhood, but did not say (recall our motto from
Chapter 7: ‘where there is choice, there is meaning’). He could have said ‘this
is the neighbourhood where I grew up’ or ‘there’s a lot of economic growth
166 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

in my neighbourhood’ or even ‘there goes the neighbourhood’ (an idiomatic

phrase commonly used when people want to express disapproval of new or
incoming neighbours). In fact, he says none of these things. Rather, he asks
the visitor to appreciate that his city, and perhaps all cities, are divided into
areas of safety and danger (not, for example, residential districts and shop-
ping districts), areas which are good for parents and children versus areas
which are not so good, hours of the day in which a neighbourhood may be
transformed from one personality or character to another. In this short
sample of talk, he builds a version of reality which he asks the visitor to
accept as true.
Importantly, we can achieve this level of analysis without reference to
whether or not the description he is giving is literally true. For semiotic
purposes, it actually does not matter whether the neighbourhood is safe or
dangerous, objectively speaking (and indeed, we might wonder what objec-
tive measures would be, since all seemingly objective reports, including
things like crime statistics, exist as texts and are themselves constructed and
vulnerable to manipulation). What matters is that this is what he wants the
visitor to understand. Perhaps this seems like a small distinction but it might
become very important if we are researching the habitability of different
towns and cities. We are not limited to acknowledging that this consumer
feels safe or even endorsing his claim that he feels safe. We have identified
six, maybe seven, dimensions according to which residents of this man’s
town, city or neighbourhood ask for their locale to be evaluated.
An approach that uses discourse analysis is able to uncover even more
levels of detail in the conversation that are distinctive to DA. From a DA
point of view, there are three aspects of the conversation that I particularly
want to highlight.
Firstly, consider line 3. The consumer does not simply announce that he
feels safe, leaving it at that. He repeats himself, seemingly for emphasis. ‘I
feel safe going out at night. In my car, I feel safe. I know that my children are
safe.’ A discourse analyst will immediately recognize this as a three-part list,
a linguistic or conversational device documented by Gail Jefferson in 1990.
The meaning of three-part lists is not something that the discourse analyst
has to guess because evidence is found by examining how they are used
across multiple situations and how people respond to them. In general,
people respond to three-part lists as representing a complete set of things.
‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ is accepted by recipients as meaning ‘all of
the assembled audience’. If you want to impress people with your knowl-
edge of research methods which explore culture, you could say ‘ethnography,
 COMBINING SEMIOTICS WITH ETHNOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 167

semiotics and discourse analysis’ and your listener will likely take this to
mean that you have a complete set of methods at your disposal, even though
there are other disciplines (such as ethnomethodology, feminist research or
critical theory) which you could have mentioned by name but omitted.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair famously made a speech in 1997
in which he said ‘Ask me my three main priorities for government and I tell
you: education, education and education’, which elicited a large round of
applause. In this particularly clever gesture on the part of Blair’s speech-
writer, the mechanism of the three-part list is deployed even though all the
items on the list are the same. The audience is encouraged to appreciate that
education is all that matters.
In this case, using discourse analysis to identify the three-part list in this
short conversation gives us a new appreciation of what the consumer is
doing. He is keen to emphasize that the neighbourhood enjoys all kinds of
safety. It is comprehensively safe. There aren’t any kinds of safety that are
missing. This serves to support and reinforce his later remark on line 7, ‘lots
of benefits’, even though he has, in fact, highlighted only one way in which
the area is ‘real nice’. A sceptical or critical reader might wonder whether he
is rather struggling to make his case for living there.
Secondly, consider line 7. I want to draw your attention to the word
‘benefits’ and the phrase ‘living conditions’. This is peculiarly detached and
objective language; that is, it is not the sort of vocabulary that people
normally use when they are having relaxed and intimate conversations with
friends. It is more the language that one would expect of an estate agent.
This speaker has made a decision to deploy a rather official discourse (a style
of language, similar to a semiotic code) in talking about the advantages and
disadvantages of his choice to live in this particular dwelling and location.
Why would he do this? One might surmise that he has good reasons for
switching away from the more intimate and relaxed discourse or vocabulary
that an informal conversation seems to anticipate. ‘Benefits’ flags him as able
to objectively evaluate his living circumstances; it positions him as someone
who is not at the mercy of his emotions or unable to see what is going on in
his life but rather as someone rational who is able to weigh up pros and
cons. ‘Living conditions’ is even more interesting and here it comes off as a
kind of euphemism. This is the language of an economist or even a social
worker. It speaks of a problem, not directly but by turning it into official-ese,
a kind of jargon used by professionals in matters such as housing when they
want to describe a general category rather than a specific instance. Here,
the general category being invoked is one of problems in the way that
168 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

i­ndividuals and families experience their housing. There is a difficulty. The

place is not just small but too small for a family of four people. Their needs
for things like personal space and privacy are being compromised.
Finally, and in connection with the above two points, discourse analysis,
as a result of its large overlap with conversation analysis, particularly excels
at noticing when language is defensively designed. It has a long track record
of being able to detect when speakers are treating a topic or description as an
accountable matter. By this, I mean that DA and CA have accumulated lots of
evidence to show that people rarely tell stories or give descriptions of things
which show no awareness of the likely interpretation of the listener or reader.
In everyday conversation and also in market research situations, people
commonly design their talk so as to anticipate and pre-emptively ward off
potential criticisms. We can see quite a bit of this happening in Figure 8.1:

●● The speaker’s three-part list, signifying a complete panoply of safety, is

clearly there to convince the listener that there is no advantage to the
neighbourhood that he has not thought of. It discourages further
questions, and the listener can be seen complying with this guidance in
utterances such as ‘I hear you’, which confirm acceptance of the speaker’s
point of view and do not challenge it.
●● ‘Benefits’ resists the interpretation that the speaker does not fully
understand his situation, or that he is unable to apprehend it from the
point of view of an outsider. ‘Living conditions’ is a euphemism that
refers the conversation to a general category of housing problems and
away from any problems pertaining to this particular dwelling.
●● Notice the two instances of ‘er’ on line 8. ‘It’s er quite small but er’. They
bracket the phrase ‘quite small’ and as analysts we may take the view that
‘quite small’ may be putting it rather mildly. The speaker seems a little
awkward, slightly stuck for words with regards to how to express what’s
wrong with this specific home. We don’t need to speculate about the
speaker’s internal psychological states to reach this conclusion; the key to
drawing reliable and empirical conclusions using discourse analysis is to
find other examples of the word, phrase or fragment and observe the way
that other speakers, across a range of occasions, use them with certain
persuasive effects. If you were to go to a social media platform such as
Twitter or Facebook right now and observe live conversations unfolding,
you will see that contributors to those conversations regularly use ‘er’ and
especially ‘erm’ quite deliberately to convey the impression of hesitation
or a moment of reflection, usually right before saying something critical
 COMBINING SEMIOTICS WITH ETHNOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 169

to another speaker. That is, people use ‘er’ and ‘erm’ on purpose to soften
the blow of critical remarks and make them seem less like an attack. They
also use ‘er’ and ‘erm’ spontaneously in live conversation when they are,
in fact, hesitating or unsure of how to express themselves, which the more
deliberate kind of ers and erms on social media imitate.

At this point, we have analysed a short segment of conversation fairly

comprehensively, so you can perhaps imagine how much meaning it is possi-
ble to extract from a full-length interview, home visit or a market research
project that involves many consumers. In this example, we have considered
text only (that is, we didn’t work with video or with supplementary photo-
graphic evidence) and we have managed to pull out layers of meaning which
are different, according to the particular qualities of each research approach,
and yet which build upon each other. To summarize:

●● Ethnography will alert you to people’s feelings and also to their physical
behaviours. It’s worth remembering that in this case we’ve used a short
segment of transcript as our data but had we conducted an ethnographic
project, we would probably have video footage that allowed us to add
other information into the mix. For example, we would be able to detect
the consumer’s non-verbal behaviour such as his body language and we
would be able to see how he moves around the space (or stays fixed on
one spot) as the conversation unfolds. We’d also be able to see how the
camera moves so as to take in different parts of the dwelling and how the
person who lives there reacts to that as he is talking.
●● Semiotics will alert you to representations of reality as representations
and not as reality itself. It will cause you to pay attention when people are
offering you versions of reality, when they are presenting things in a
certain light. It will train your attention not only on individual semiotic
signs such as words but also on structural, linguistic features of talk such
as binary oppositions. In this case, we were able to build on ethnographic
observation of the man’s feelings by picking out six or seven dimensions
according to which he and perhaps others in his community evaluate
homes and neighbourhoods. This certainly would be useful if we were to
proceed with a project that involved meeting further consumers or if (as
is usually the case in market research) we are required to say something
about an entire demographic or community and not just one individual
householder. We now have the beginnings of a framework for analysis
that is capable of informing the whole project and that you can expand
on as you move forwards.
170 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● If you do semiotic field trips in the style described in Chapter 7, you’ve

also brought away with you numerous photographs of the domestic
interior. Photography causes you to attend to different things when you
are on location compared to video. Video ethnography gravitates towards
recording things that move – people preparing meals, shopping, doing
their housework. Still photography, as well as being less intrusive for the
market research respondent, encourages the researcher to pay equal
attention to things that don’t move – details such as a poster on the wall,
a new leather sofa, a frayed cushion, a sink full of dishes. These are
details which are easily overlooked by a videographer who is there to
record action.
●● Discourse analysis is made for transcripts of conversation, as well as
conversations which begin and end in text form such as many of the
interactions which take place on social media. It will alert you to the
occasions when speakers switch from one kind of discourse or vocabulary
to another and the persuasive effects that they achieve when they make
that change. It has identified a host of linguistic mechanisms which
speakers use, such as three-part lists, hesitations and euphemisms. It will
cause you to pay attention to defensively designed accounts in which
speakers make clear the kinds of issues on which they do not wish to be
challenged, and you are then able to draw your own conclusions about
why that might be. Because DA is designed to inspect the details of
conversation, it tends not to concern itself with physical human behaviours
such as the ways that people move around in a space or perform routine
tasks and, unlike semiotics, it does not find its strengths in its ability to
decode visual and other sensory signs along with speech and writing. It is
a very powerful tool for unravelling the mysteries of conversation, that is
what it is for and it does not replace ethnography or semiotics but gives
the ethnographer or semiologist extra powers to detect what is going on
in people’s everyday lives.

In spelling out the differences among these approaches, my aim has not been
to set up the three methods in competition with each other – if one is better
than another, that is a matter for academic debate and not for the brand owner,
advertising planner or market researcher. Rather, my ambition has been to
show how the three approaches build upon each other and how you can apply
all of them to a single data set, yielding insights that increase in their range and
depth. If you want to improve your abilities with ethnography, semiotics and
 COMBINING SEMIOTICS WITH ETHNOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 171

discourse analysis, alongside the self-contained course in semiotics set out in

this book, there are lots of books worth reading which will take you on that
journey. Here are a few which I particularly recommend.

Ethnography
Hammersley, M and Atkinson, P (Eds) (2019) Ethnography: Principles in
Practice (4th edn) London: Routledge. The 2019 version is a fourth edition
of Hammersley and Atkinson’s book, which is a leader in its field. It system-
atically takes the reader through the practical business of doing research
such as sampling, interview technique and writing research reports, as well
as the expected details of how to do ethnographic observation.

Semiotics
Chandler, D (2022) Semiotics: The Basics (4th edn) London: Routledge.
Now in its fourth edition, this book provides considerable technical instruc-
tion and a grounding in semiotic theory, for researchers who would like to
develop a more academic grasp of the discipline. Despite its academic
credentials, it remains readable, which accounts for its popularity with
students. It does not specifically concern marketing or market research and
that is how the book you are reading now fills a gap.

Discourse analysis
Potter, J, and Wetherell, M (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond
attitudes and behaviour, London: Sage; and Potter, J (1996) Representing
Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction, London: Sage. As
noted above, discourse analysis comes in lots of flavours and books are
regularly published which tackle it from different points of view. To the
reader who wishes to develop the skills in discourse analysis and discursive
psychology outlined in this chapter, I have no hesitation in recommending
these two classic titles, both still in print. They are authored by two of the
founders of British discourse analysis, they are how I learned DA and they
will not let you down. Some knowledge of how psychology normally
proceeds will help you in tackling these foundational texts but is not strictly
essential.
172 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Activity: Multi-method research

Take up the project on which you have been working throughout this book
and identify a relevant opportunity to go out and meet someone who will
talk to you, in an interesting location. It could be a case of going to visit a
consumer in their home or you could talk to the manager of a store, a
professional service provider or some other expert. Go and visit them in the
place where they are normally found. That is, don’t make your consumer
visit you at your office or in a viewing facility. Don’t talk to the store manager
on the phone but go and visit them at their place of work. Combine the
methods described in this chapter by doing the following.

Video
Video part of the encounter. Video is good at capturing action sequences,
so get your respondent to do something which is relevant to your project.
If you are pursuing the baked beans project, get them to cook a dish that
uses baked beans. If you are pursuing the project that concerns mature
women and mental health, ask permission to record a target customer
doing something which she feels improves her mental health and well­
being. Maybe she knits, does yoga or takes walks in settings of natural
beauty, pausing to sit down in favourite spots that have a nice view or an
opportunity for refreshment.

Photos
At least some of the time, switch off your video recording and take still
photographs. Recall that still photos are good at helping you identify things
which are important but which don’t move and which are easily overlooked
when we are making video. The interiors of buildings are especially well
suited to photography. How has your target customer arranged his or her
home? How is it decorated? Are there cushions printed with slogans such as
‘Live, Laugh, Love’? Are there signs on the kitchen walls that say things like
‘Meals and memories are made here’? Ask your consumer to find their
favourite kitchen gadget or recipe book and pose with it. Ask them to show
you the possession that makes them feel most connected and cared-for,
photograph it in the spot where you find it. Don’t make the photograph too
close-up, you are not collecting data for the police or a forensic scientist. Try
to get surrounding information in shot which will help you later when you
are picking out semiotic signs.
 COMBINING SEMIOTICS WITH ETHNOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 173

Audio
Hold a conversation with your research participant which you audio-record.
When you get back to your desk, transcribe it. As you may have noted from
the extract discussed in this chapter, discourse analysis requires much closer,
more detailed transcription than is the standard in traditional qualitative
research. I encourage you to transcribe the material yourself, because you
want to capture as much detail as possible and also you want to be the
person making the decisions about what to capture and what it is OK to
leave out. Some of the features which you may choose to include in your
transcript are:

●● Pauses. Serious discourse and conversation analysts time the duration of

pauses.
●● Overlapping speech. If speakers interrupt each other, capture the exact
moment when that happened and transcribe both parts of the overlap if
you can hear them.
●● Laughter.
●● Particles such as ‘er’ and ‘mmm’.
●● Repairs – times when a speaker corrects themselves, when they begin to
say one thing, then abruptly stop and say something else. You may be
able to detect from the context what they were likely going to say before
changing their minds.
●● Volume – if a speaker suddenly shouts or raises their voice, you can
record that in capital letters. You could also use a smaller font to mark
when people drop their voices and speak in a whisper.
●● Line numbers, which you can see in the example we’ve used in this
chapter. I find line numbers helpful when I am working with multiple
transcripts because I can use them to identify the parts of a transcript that
I’m particularly interested in (Interview 2, page 12, line 25) and they are
standard practice in academic DA and CA.

When you come to analyse your data, make a point of noticing how the
three approaches to research prompt you to detect different things. Make a
point of recognizing their different strengths and their ability to penetrate
different aspects of human life and communications. When you are finished,
evaluate the differing contributions of ethnography and discourse analysis
to your semiotic project. What did you gain? What insights did you gather
that you might otherwise have missed? This evaluation process isn’t just an
174 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

exercise for its own sake, it will improve your decision-making abilities as
you plan and execute future projects and keep you from endlessly cooking
the same curry.
If you are developing your own semiotic project as you work through this
book, you will no doubt be happy to learn that you have now completed all
of your data collection and all of the close-up aspects of data analysis. It’s
finally time to take a step back from all of the many observations you’ve
made, large and small, pick out the most significant and start converting
them into business strategy. This is the subject matter of Chapter 9.
 175

09

Data – insight – strategy

WHAT’S COMING UP

This chapter is designed to answer the question, ‘What do I do next?’ You’ve

finished with the meaty middle of a semiotics sandwich. You’ve collected
data from many different sources and you’ve analysed it using all the
techniques in this book (if you’re not sure about those aspects of semiotics,
flip back to Chapters 4–8 which offer you a guided course in collecting and
analysing data and using conceptual tools). You’re now at the stage where
you have a lot of observations of features of your data set and you have lots
of ideas about your target consumer and the category and wider society in
which your product or service sits. Now it’s time to assemble all of those
observations and ideas into something that your company or your client
can use. By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

●● plan ahead to avoid running into difficulties at the tail end of a project;
●● identify insights – the things in your various observations and ideas that
make you sit up and take notice;
●● respond to specific marketing challenges such as creating new brands,
repositioning brands and communicating ‘premium’ and ‘value for
money’; and
●● respond to larger business challenges, such as the need to grow, to deal
with competition and to adapt to change.
176 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Common problems and how to avoid them

When people have difficulty converting semiotics into useful business advice,
that problem usually arises from one or more sources:

●● Failing to understand the business context and purpose of the research.

They didn’t clearly understand what the client was trying to achieve with
the project and why that client thought semiotics would be a good idea.
This is a discussion that you want to have right at the beginning of the
project with the people who will ultimately be the users of your research
findings. It will help you to plan your research so that everything you do
leads you towards the needed answers and solutions. It will also ensure
that you and your end users are on the same page regarding expectations
of semiotics and what it can deliver.
●● Failing to do top-down analysis. They dived straight into the detail of
bottom-up analysis and stayed there. They did not make any connections
linking the small details of semiotic signs to the category, adjacent
categories, consumers, social trends or large aspects of culture such as
ideology, politics and economics.
●● Failing to understand the reason for doing bottom-up analysis. They
occupied themselves with the detail of bottom-up analysis without
understanding why they were picking out and listing the visible features
of advertising and packaging (while simultaneously ignoring non-visual
semiotic signs and other types of data beyond ads and packs). ‘Semiotic
signs’ were interpreted as being visual characteristics such as colours and
shapes without any reference to their meaning. ‘Codes’ were interpreted
as being groups of superficially similar signs without any reference to
their function.

Before we move on, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of what is

meant by signs and codes, because it’s easy to lose sight of these things when
we are caught up in the excitement of documenting the visible characteris-
tics of easily accessible data such as ads and packs.

Sign
A semiotic sign is a small unit of communication that carries meaning. It
could be a single word, a sound effect, a simple visual icon such as a heart
or a smiley face. Signs are invested with meaning by the cultures that produce
them. They are the building blocks of packaging, advertising and other
brand touchpoints.
 DATA – INSIGHT – STRATEGY 177

Code
A code is a sum of semiotic signs which often occur together and which help
to uphold versions of reality and prescribe behaviour. For example, Australia
has a code of kangaroos, hats with dangling corks, beaches and so on which
is mainly for exported beer brands and tourists. It upholds certain myths
and beliefs about Australia, while glossing over details of reality that don’t
fit. It tells tourists how to be tourists and it tells beer drinkers how to enjoy
beer, even and especially if they are far from the place where it was created.
Aside from understanding your client’s business needs, the biggest thing
you can do to avoid problems in your semiotic projects is to remain clear
about what signs and codes are for. They are not merely decorative; they
serve a real-world purpose or function. Signs convey meaning. Codes
promote certain versions of reality and tell people how to behave. Because
codes are larger than signs, they help you to connect the small details of
brand communications (as seen in the bottom-up analysis of Chapter 4) to
the various different cultures of the world and to changing social trends (the
top-down analysis of Chapter 5). Staying focused on the functional and top-
down aspects of semiotics means you will never be in a situation where you
are unsure why you are telling your client about details of the appearance of
things that they could have figured out for themselves, for example that
Coke is red while Pepsi is blue.

What is an insight?

WHAT IS AN INSIGHT?
●● An insight is not simply an observation, even one that is interesting or
pleasing.
●● Insights are distinguished by their ability to cause some kind of change.
●● This is how they turn into strategy for brands, products and marketing
communications.

Insights do more than look pretty. They do at least some of the following
things:

●● challenge the recipient, audience or viewer;

●● make you look differently at a topical issue;
178 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● uncover an important, underlying truth about the society we live in and

the human condition;
●● break rules and upset convention;
●● convey a message or ask questions;
●● make people think;
●● make them act; and
●● cause a problem for competitors who think they know brands and
consumers.

Most importantly, insights lead to a change in the way you market your
brand or perhaps in your business model. As you consider all the data you’ve
collected and the various observations that you’ve made of its interesting
features, insights may make themselves visible. Here are a couple of exam-
ples from my own commercial experience.

Challenging the taken-for-granted

What do the stakeholders in your research project take for granted? What
do you have to say on the strength of your semiotic analysis that upsets
those assumptions? I once worked on a project which concerned pensions.
The client wanted to bring on board new British customers. They were
particularly interested in courting people who were in middle age. Marketing
tools included print advertising, the sort of thing you find in newspapers,
and also printed brochures, featuring full-colour photographs of people
enjoying their retirement. The photographs were intended to depict the
pleasant aspects of retirement, such as sitting in a sunny garden instead of
having to go to work. It was taken-for-granted within the organization that
sitting in the garden must be a pleasant activity. The models featured in the
photos represented taken-for-granted aspects of the appearance of retired
people, for example, they have grey hair.
When I looked at these images, I had a feeling that the taken-for-granteds
might be slightly out of sync with the way that mature adults perceive them-
selves. It occurred to me that someone who was 50 at that time, about 10
years ago, would have been born in 1960 and therefore would have been 20
in 1980, just as a second wave of newly refreshed, very aggressive and anar-
chic punk rock was sweeping the nation. Punk was a landmark in the history
of British youth culture and if you search for images you will see that the
young people of that time adopted some very radical fashions which would
 DATA – INSIGHT – STRATEGY 179

be considered extreme by the young consumers of modern Britain. They

shaved off most of their hair, dyed what was left using eye-wateringly bril-
liant colours, combed and glued it into fierce spikes that stood up from the
scalp at a 90-degree angle and could exceed 12 inches in height. They ripped
up their clothes and held together the remaining scraps with safety pins.
They wore razor blades for earrings, dog collars for necklaces and delighted
in frightening older generations with their appearance.
The British punks of 1980 have not forgotten their youth and they have
this in common with all generations who tend to look back fondly on their
heyday and imagine themselves as they were, not as they are.
I was motivated to find out how these people looked and behaved today,
so I began to search for and follow their social media accounts and to look
for self-reports of their behaviour. Sure enough, they were substantially
unchanged. They are the oldest and therefore the original members of a
cohort now referred to as ‘Generation X’. They never fully embraced the
need to conform to respectability and they smoke and drink in proportions
that today’s young Brits regard as irresponsible. I found self-portraits on
social media where they had dyed their hair shades of pillar-box red that
would have been perfectly on-trend in 1980. I encountered a survey that had
been done by one of the popular online dating platforms which appeared to
show that over-50s were more likely to have sex on the first date than people
aged under 24.
I shared all this with the pensions provider and their view of their target
customer changed. They began to see that you cannot seduce old British
punks with images of elderly people who appear to be their own parents,
enjoying the rewards of conformity. We continued our semiotic research
into the culture of this interesting, target demographic and eventually
learned some things about how they imagine their retirement, if it ever
arrives. They did not want to sit in the garden with a cup of tea. They
wanted to keep on feeling like the rebels they have always been, if only in
their memories and imaginations. This eventually converted into more rele-
vant visual communications.

Activity: Challenge the taken-for-granted

Consider the project that you are working on as you progress through this
book, or consider a category that you regularly help to market. What are the
taken-for-granteds? What are the everyday assumptions in that c­ ategory?
180 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Do old people have grey hair? Do baked beans arrive in tin cans? Are banks
closed at weekends? Do video games tell a story from the point of view of a
hero who is out to rescue a princess or save the world? On this last point, a
British video game called Plague Inc. won an award from the Queen for
innovation (Ndemic Creations, 2018). The late Queen’s Award for Enterprise
is not specific to video games but applies to all categories of business, mean-
ing that Plague Inc. beat competitors in countless other categories in winning
the prize. In this game, the player does not take on the role of a hero or even
a human but a disease! They may play as a virus, bacteria or fungus and the
objective is to wipe out the entire population of the world. It’s a very unex-
pected and original premise, sold 100 million copies and even has an
educational function, allowing the player to model the emergence and spread
of an epidemic (all the details of the game can be found at ndemiccreations.
com). All this happened before the Covid-19 pandemic, showing great fore-
sight on the part of Ndemic. When Covid happened, Ndemic was ready. It
has since worked with The Coalition for Epidemic Awareness, developing
new software called Plague Inc. The Cure, which demonstrates how invest-
ment in vaccines softens the impact of future pandemics.
Identify the taken-for-granteds in your category. List as many as you can.
Test them. Are they incomplete or untrue? Is there something to be gained
by looking at examples of things in real life that don’t fit the taken-for-
granted assumptions? What happens if you deliberately build a product,
service or set of marketing communications that does things differently?

Break rules and upset convention

One simple way to get consumers to develop a revived interest in brands and
categories that are low-engagement or that they think they know well is to
dramatically alter the size and scale of products. I’ve seen numerous clients do
this with good results. Remember that consumers are surrounded by products,
especially fast-moving consumer goods, all the time – at home, in supermarkets,
in places where services are provided, from restaurants to hair salons. Consumers
have been well-trained by brands to have a clear idea of what size things should
be. We all know roughly what to expect of a can of beans, a bottle of shampoo,
a pot of shoe polish, a box of laundry detergent, a bar of chocolate. When we
encounter one of these familiar items, which is either much larger or much
smaller than we thought it was going to be, it makes us pay attention.
If you need some convincing, go online and look at the sculptures of pop
artist Claes Oldenburg. Throughout his long career he has specialized in
making life-like sculptures of completely everyday objects such as badminton
 DATA – INSIGHT – STRATEGY 181

shuttlecocks, sandwiches, ice cream cones, safety pins, clothes pegs and ciga-
rette butts. His work, which is both entertaining and shocking, leverages his
ability to make people look at objects which they thought they knew in a
completely new way, usually by blowing them up to 40 times their normal
size. It can be quite an experience to turn a corner, inside or outside of an art
museum, and encounter a ham sandwich, made of vinyl, that is three or four
times larger than you are, or a gigantic book of matches that are the height of
a house. You may remember from Chapter 5 that I recommended contempo-
rary art as a source of inspiration for top-down analysis, and this is why. If
the challenge you are facing is something like how to make totally everyday
objects exciting, you can be sure that a modern or contemporary artist has
got there before you. In this situation, if you are selling something like soap
or cake, as well as Claes Oldenburg, you could make a point of investigating
the work of other American artists who were working after the end of World
War II, such as Andy Warhol and Wayne Thiebaud. All these artists were part
of the pop art movement which was particularly strong in the post-war
United States and they absolutely delighted in rejecting the idea that art and
art museums are supposed to concern themselves with objects and ideas that
transcend trivial and commercial matters such as brands, shopping and the
detritus of everyday life. Their fun and eyebrow-raising experiments with
turning sandwiches and boxes of detergent into art are still entertaining audi-
ences to this day and their techniques are available to be borrowed by
marketers. Remember, too, that if you can get attention by blowing things up
to immense proportions, you can achieve much the same result by making
things very tiny compared to their usual size.
Examples where I’ve seen brands and marketers use these techniques
with success:

●● An enormous lollipop tree in a sweet shop attracted as much attention

from adults as from kids.
●● A huge bottle of L’Oréal hair conditioner, as wide as a consumer and
nearly as tall, drew attention to the brand in hair salons.
●● A hotel delighted guests by placing hugely over-sized, throne-like chairs
in its lobby. The chairs were so large that any adult who sat in them
appeared to be tiny, a bit like Alice in Wonderland after drinking a potion
that reduced her to a minute version of herself. These chairs were not
only fun to sit in, they created a perfect photo opportunity for the
consumer who likes to share their holiday on Instagram. In this way, the
hotel effectively generated free advertising for itself.
●● At the small end of the scale, a company that makes a range of ordinary
household goods experimented with making tiny plastic models of the
182 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

products, no more than two inches high and gave them away as a gift-
with-purchase. Consumers enthusiastically treated them as collectibles
and wanted the whole set.
●● Owners of confectionery and alcohol brands have long known that
miniatures turn everyday products into gift sets, perfect for seasonal
celebrations. Owners of personal care brands know that miniature
versions of shampoo and body lotion, which can be marketed as ‘travel
size’ are not just easy to pack in a suitcase, they are also enormous fun to
shop for. This is why they are often displayed in stores in rows of plastic
buckets, like pick’n’mix sweets. Each individual miniature costs something
in the range of 50p to £2 (in US dollars, that’s 62 cents to $2.46), helping
the consumer to feel free from worries that they are spending a lot of
money and thoroughly enhancing the fun of picking and choosing.

Activity: Grow it or shrink it

Return to your project or the business category that you regularly work
with and find something that can be blown up to immense proportions or
reduced to a tiny fraction of its usual size. It could simply be a product – a
desk toy in the form of a miniature can of beans. It could be something at
your point of sale that creates a photo opportunity for consumers and hence
free advertising. It could be a metaphorical change of size. If you are trying
to sell mental health and wellbeing, you could go large – instead of talking
about everyday-sized problems such as anxiety and depression, start talking
about life purpose or the very reason for being alive. Alternatively, go small.
Develop a marketing campaign that focuses on ‘one tiny thing you can do
right now that will make you feel happier’. Probably, when you come to
think of it, there are dozens of tiny actions that make people feel better and
that even very depressed and apathetic people can manage. Now we have
something that gets attention and that you can use as a conversation starter
with consumers.

From insight to strategy

The rest of this chapter is divided into sections which describe the applica-
tions of insights. There are a number of common business and marketing
problems which need strategic responses, from the very large (I need to
 DATA – INSIGHT – STRATEGY 183

grow my business) to the very specific (I need to engage shoppers). Let’s start
right away at the large end. In each case I’ll show how semiotics can contrib-
ute and where relevant, I’ll refer to the baked bean and mental health
projects that we’ve been using as examples. At each step, I encourage you to
take a look at the project that you have been working on throughout this
book and see how it helps to answer the challenges at hand.

I need to… tell a story

If you read business features or books, you’ll have noticed that writers are
making a connection between growth and storytelling. According to this
now widely accepted wisdom, growth is not just about selling more product
by diversifying your product range, partnering with other brands or moving
into new markets. It is also about developing a clear idea of the company’s
purpose (the reason why it exists), its vision (what will change as a result of
fulfilling that purpose) and a set of values that the company embodies. The
purpose, vision and values of the company then need to be crafted into a
short and compelling story which everyone in the company can buy into.
This is not miles away from marketing to consumers and sometimes these
stories end up as part of consumer-facing marketing communications.
There are two ways that semiotics will help you in this situation:

●● it constantly refers back to tangible examples that you can see and point
to; and
●● it has a special facility with language; it is precise about what words
mean and it can recognize good word choices.

How can we apply this to our baked beans project? An ambitious baked
beans brand which existed in the UK until May 2016 was Masons Beans. It
ultimately ceased trading because, although it was enthusiastically stocked
by Fortnum & Mason, possibly the world’s oldest (est. 1707) and most
prestigious department store, it was unable to secure a deal with the major
high-street supermarkets which account for most British grocery spending.
The reasons for that are known only to the young entrepreneur behind the
business, Ben Mason. Possibly he was not able to make his product on a
large enough scale, there were issues with pricing or some other obstacle.
What we do know is that there was nothing wrong with his brand story. It
convinced Fortnum & Mason and was so compelling that it inspired inves-
tors to compete for a share of the business when Ben appeared on popular
184 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

FIGURE 9.1 Masons Beans story

Masons Beans are a healthy, tasty and filling one-pot meal.

Cooked by hand with onion, garlic, chunks of tomato and
bacon and all sorts of tasty things.

In most other countries baked beans are a nice, home-

cooked stew. Why do we have only the factory-produced,
cheap tinned stuff?

World War II – that’s why. We’re still eating ration food.

I’m Ben Mason and I’m taking beans back to fresh – not a tin
in sight.

Masons Beans are cooked fresh, to be kept in your fridge or

freezer. They’re great on toast, a jacket potato, or as a high-
protein lunch straight from the pot.

Available from £2.20.

SOURCE Reproduced with kind permission of Ben Mason

TV show Dragons’ Den (known as Shark Tank in the United States). Ben
eventually accepted £50,000 (about US$65,000) from one investor, in
exchange for a 20 per cent share in the business, while the other investors
wanted to offer even more money for a larger share (Foster, 2016). The
brand website still exists and we can see the short story that expresses the
brand’s purpose, vision and values on its website (see Figure 9.1). It is,
perhaps, not a surprise that it is a good story because Ben had a career in
advertising before turning to food (as you can see from his LinkedIn page:
linkedin.com/in/masonben).
Viewed from a semiotic perspective, this story has several noticeable
features that explain why it made investors want to hand over money.

●● It challenges the taken-for-granted. British people expect beans to arrive

in tin cans, but there is no reason why this practice should be allowed to
dictate their meals if they would prefer an alternative.
●● It uses an incredibly evocative semiotic sign, which is ‘World War II’,
immediately followed by another, which is ‘ration food’. These two small
phrases are capable of conjuring up a whole collection of powerful ideas
in the minds of consumers. Hardship. Bombs. Homes and cities destroyed.
Children evacuated. Food shortages. This gives the reader a very powerful
reason to suddenly feel mistreated by canned beans and therefore a
reason to want this newer, fresher product.
 DATA – INSIGHT – STRATEGY 185

●● There’s a binary opposition in the story – ‘other countries’ versus ‘our

country’. The consumer is suddenly made to feel that they are entitled to
something which other countries already have but that they aren’t getting.
●● Note that three-part list which is used to finish off the story (we talked
about three-part lists in Chapter 8). There are three serving suggestions,
implying a complete set, a whole range of ways to use the product.

Consider your own project that you are working on throughout this book
and write a short story that captures why the company or brand exists and
what its values are. Build in each of the items you see here. Find a taken-for-
granted and challenge it. Use at least one semiotic sign which is capable of
triggering emotions, memories or imagination. Factor in a binary opposition
where it is clear which half of the binary is the desirable one – that’s the half
that your business is offering. Include a three-part list near the end to show
that you’ve thought of everything. Please note that there’s much more discus-
sion of brand purpose in the last three chapters of this book.

I need to… adapt to change

If you stay in business long enough, change is a certainty. Lean into it. Most
of your competitors, or your client’s competitors, have designed their busi-
ness to:

1 be steady; and
2 to consistently sell their product or service at a profit by buying low and
selling high.

There is a tension between being steady and consistent and being agile and
future-facing, but as change comes to every category of business, whether we
like it or not, we might as well give ourselves a competitive advantage by being
ready to meet change as it happens. Some of the changes you may encounter
are perhaps beyond the scope of this book. Perhaps products that you used to
charge for are now being given away for free, or perhaps your industry has
become a hotbed of unethical business practices. These may not be challenges
that you can fix with semiotics. However, many others of the changes that busi-
nesses commonly encounter are well within your power to use to your
advantage if you have good skills in semiotics. These particularly include:

●● Changing and emerging trends in product and service categories, such as

the arrival of prebiotics and other new types of dietary supplements or
186 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

changes in the video games industry from games as products to games as

services. These types of market-driven changes cause shifts in the
landscape of competitor organizations and in the types of products which
consumers may regard as a substitute. They are changes which have a
knock-on effect on consumer behaviour.
●● Changes in consumer attitudes and behaviour which are driven by
consumers themselves. Brand owners and marketers are understandably
interested in specific cohorts such as Millennials and Generation Z. They
are also frequently interested in segments which emerge based on
changing needs or new behaviours. Examples could be vegans (a rapidly-
growing segment in many countries) or micropreneurs (entrepreneurs
who intentionally keep their businesses small-scale, usually because this
allows them to do the kind of work that they want to do).

You may feel that you already have information about trends in the form of
facts about the market share of competitors, sales figures and quantifiable
changes in consumer or shopper behaviour. What you may not have, and
what you need, is an understanding of why change is happening or what it
means. Semiotics can help you find out and therefore identify strategies for
responding. Recall the top-down analysis of Chapter 5. In that chapter, if
you were following all the exercises, you completed two stages of analysis.
The first stage involved mapping historical and regional variations in the
ways that different cultures treat items such as mental health and baked
beans. The second stage was ideological analysis, which entailed asking
some questions about the status of baked beans and mental health as ideas.
How do issues of class and taste play into the baked beans category? Is
canned food a simulation of fresh food? In exchanges between the users and
providers of mental health services, who has the power?
Using semiotics to understand change weans you off a reliance on things
like sales figures and frees your imagination so that you can offer new prod-
ucts and services that are adapted to the consumer of the present day,
whether that’s gourmet comfort food or empowering mental health services.

I need to… get ahead of competitors

Almost all businesses take a strong interest in what their competitors are
doing. Even non-profit organizations and NGOs want to keep an eye on the
entities that their clients and supporters might regard as alternatives. While
 DATA – INSIGHT – STRATEGY 187

there are lots of ways to map competitors, this activity conventionally relies
on aspects of their businesses such as identifying their value propositions,
advertising spend, promotional activities, use of SEO and other factual
matters. There’s nothing wrong with considering all of these factors, of
course, but semiotics adds something new. Because it has the unique capac-
ity to identify semiotic codes, you are now able to map competitors not just
in terms such as the key words they use for search engine optimization but
in terms of the codes they deploy to build certain versions of reality for
consumers and tell them how to behave.
Perhaps you are working on behalf of an alcohol brand; let’s take gin for
the sake of example. You can use gin brands’ websites, advertising and other
marketing communications as a data set for bottom-up analysis. As you
proceed with your analysis, you are able to detect that several codes are in
use within the category:

●● Some brands rely on a French code which invokes ideas in the minds of
consumers outside France which are connected to that country. These
ideas include things like ‘refinement’ and ‘elegance’. For example, consider
the fluted, rather classical packaging of Citadelle gin.
●● Some brands use a Nordic code which invokes images in the consumer’s
imagination such as ‘unspoiled nature’ and ‘snow’ and ideas such as
‘clean’ and ‘fresh’. For example, consider the Swedish and Finnish gins
discussed by Miller (2019).
●● Some brands trade on the idea of ‘Britain’ and specifically ‘London’. This
is less about refined manners and unspoiled nature than it is about a
collective memory of 18th- and 19th-century London. The city in the
18th century was full of gin shops. Gin was so wildly and destructively
popular that no fewer than eight Acts of Parliament were passed to try to
constrain its use (Difford, 2019). In the 19th century, small gin shops in
London were replaced by vast gin palaces (Warner, 2011), architecturally
splendid and serving half a million customers each week. These are the
memories which contemporary brands of ‘London Gin’ evoke.

These are just three examples which leverage provenance but if you are inter-
ested enough in gin to deeply explore the category, you will see that there are
various other codes in play as well. Some brands will rely on a ‘party’ code
that shows aspirational models and celebrities in exciting locations. Some
brands will leverage a code of individuality and individualism – this is gin for
rebels. As you keep digging you will no doubt uncover more – the more
188 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

crowded a category, the more codes there will be. Eventually you will be able
to produce a map. In that map, there will be some codes that have large clus-
ters of competitors (because there are many brands which are all saying the
same thing) and there will be some codes that are occupied by hardly any
brands. It’s then up to you to decide whether those codes are under-exploited
because there’s something wrong with them or because they are new and in
line with the emerging ideas and trends that you spotted as part of your top-
down analysis.

I need to… innovate

In Chapter 6 we looked at several techniques for creative thinking and inno-
vation; you may particularly remember the semiotic square (Figure 6.1)
which has a special capacity to spot consumers’ unmet needs and problems
which require a solution. These needs and problems are where brands can
step in and offer something new. In fact, it is widely accepted in business
culture that the best innovations are those which respond to genuine needs.
This is what makes the difference between innovations, usually small and
incremental, that nobody needs, versus truly disruptive, game-changing
innovations. This is what makes the difference between innovations that
nobody asked for, such as the yogurt launched by Cosmopolitan magazine
in the 1990s (Brook, 2004), and innovations that make a real difference to
people’s lives. Researchers at Ohio State University are working on innova-
tive new medical tools which use nature as inspiration. It’s no secret that
many patients are frightened of injections and find them painful. Scientists
and engineers at OSU noticed that insects such as mosquitoes manage to
pierce our skin and suck out our blood without our even noticing until after
it is all over. If you are interested in how mosquitoes achieve this, it is due to
a combination of mechanical aspects of the insect’s proboscis, which you
can read about in a feature on OSU’s innovation in Science Daily (Grabmeier,
2018; sciencedaily.com).
There are, then, two parts to innovation: identifying a need or problem
and then identifying a solution. Most innovations that disappoint fail at the
first stage by offering a solution to a problem that never existed. That is, it
was never clear why consumers needed a yogurt that was made by a maga-
zine publisher. The need for painless injections is much more clear. Use the
semiotic square to identify those needs. Here’s a semiotic square for the OSU
medical innovation (Figure 9.2).
 DATA – INSIGHT – STRATEGY 189

FIGURE 9.2 Painless needles

Sharp

Expectation How can this be?

Uncomfortable Comfortable

How can this be? Expectation

Smooth

In sectors such as medicine, military defence and space exploration, problems

often make themselves apparent from the outset. It’s known from the begin-
ning that patients hate having blood drawn, soldiers become fatigued and
astronauts have problems using the bathroom or doing their laundry in zero-
gravity situations. In other areas of business activity, such as the sectors where
most consumer-facing brands are found, there’s a constant drive to innovate
for its own sake, for internal, political reasons or because business owners
believe it is the only way to drive growth. This is what leads to unnecessary
innovations such as magazine yogurt, for which no semiotic square can exist.
Use the semiotic square when you know that you must innovate, to drive
value in your category or to keep up with competitors, but you do not know
what type of need or problem you should try to solve. Once you have iden-
tified that consumers need to feel good about themselves despite their
insecurities over their appearance (the Dove ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’) or
once you have identified that consumers need to be released from the pres-
sure to keep their children looking pristine all the time (Persil’s ‘Dirt is Good’
campaign), you are on the way to a worthwhile innovation which can exist
at the level of marketing or branding as well as product design and probably
will not require you to bring in a team of leading scientists and engineers.

I need to… change the appearance of my brand

Changing the appearance of a brand by tweaking its packaging or other
visual communications is never an end in its own right, it is always for some
190 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

reason or objective. I cluster those objectives here because they can all be
met through making changes to appearance and do not necessarily entail
wholesale changes to a business or the type of products it sells. Because the
ability of semiotics to decode signs and symbols is well known, making
small changes to the appearance of things is a very common type of brief
that the commercially practising semiologist will receive. Here are a few of
the things you can achieve by changing the way a brand looks:

●● make it stand out as being for children, men or some other segment of
consumers that recognizes certain visual cues in a crowded market;
●● make it stand out as vegetarian, vegan or organic;
●● make it look more premium or, alternatively, signal ‘value for money’;
●● make it look either more local or more global;
●● make it look more intimate, spontaneous and friendly or, alternatively,
make it look more established, official and trustworthy.

In this situation, use the techniques for bottom-up analysis in Chapter 4.

Make a collection of brands, including their packaging, display advertising,
photos on their Instagram accounts and any other relevant visual stimulus
which is available to you. Try to include all the major brands in your cate-
gory as well as a few new entrants, outliers and lapsed brands that are
falling out of date. According to the question you are investigating, begin to
list semiotic signs which a consumer in the target market could recognize as
conveying a particular meaning. As a result of this activity, you will soon see
how signs are grouped into codes. Don’t be surprised if there is more than
one code to communicate the same message – it’s perfectly usual for there to
be a couple of different ways to communicate ‘premium’, for example, even
within a single business category.
Here are some signs to look out for as you proceed with your task:

●● Products for children often feature: cute cartoon animals; crude drawings
that could have been (but usually were not) made by a child; licensed
characters such as Peppa Pig or Princess Elsa from the Disney movie
Frozen; rounded, lower-case letters which are at odd angles and do not sit
tidily on a straight line.
●● Products for men often feature: lots of black, charcoal grey and dark
blue; semiotic signs for sport such as the word ‘energy’ and easy-grip,
ribbed edges, even when the product has nothing to do with sport; the
word ‘men’ prominently placed on pack; words and phrases with a
masculine connotation such as ‘Bull Dog’ or ‘Man Cave’.
 DATA – INSIGHT – STRATEGY 191

●● Organic products often feature: health messages that use technical

language, such as ‘Superblend Protein’; delicate, hand-drawn patterns
and illustrations, especially of plants; prominent mentions of specific
foods and ingredients such as kimchi and tofu; messages about sustainable
farming and fishing.
●● Products often cue premium using one of two major codes. You will find
that the specifics vary depending on which region of the world you are
working in, but the underlying foundations are the same. Essentially,
brands all over the world distinguish themselves from the mass market
either by adopting the design traditions of 300 years ago, recalling the
grand history of their nation (usually this involves heavy decoration,
elaborate patterns, gold details) or by becoming extremely minimalist,
like Apple or Fenty Beauty, the cosmetics brand of singer Rihanna.
●● Value for money may be communicated on pack using the word ‘value’,
‘basics’ or ‘essentials’, phrases such as ‘20 per cent extra free’ and with a
deliberately under-designed appearance that tells the shopper that they
are not paying for pretty packaging. This approach, which strips back
unnecessary illustration and decoration can result in an almost anti-
design aesthetic where packs are unapologetically unattractive (see the
‘Basics’ range of British supermarket Sainsbury’s for examples).
●● Semiotic signs for ‘local’ obviously depend on which area of the world we
are talking about. If you compare global and local competitors in your
category and market, you will soon see the differences. As a general rule,
global brands look American to consumers who are not from Western
cultures. By this, I mean that they look bright, bold and brash. They use
loud colours, simple graphics (if any at all) and they make sure that the
brand name is the largest item on the pack. Local brands may vary by
following their own design traditions. African, Indian and South American
brands may favour dense patterns – all different, of course, depending on
the region from which they emerge. Some brands like to build the name
of a local area into their brand name or product name, such as Newcastle
Brown Ale or Belfast Tea.
●● Intimate, friendly and spontaneous brands like to make jokes; consider
the Nestlé chocolate bar Yorkie (a large, chunky product) and its cheeky
on-pack slogan ‘It’s not for girls’, which worked as an ironic joke for 10
years until Nestlé eventually adjusted its strategy in line with the changed
mood of a mass audience that no longer thought it was funny.
Contrastingly, brands that want to appear sober and reliable leverage
192 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

semiotic signs that include: serif fonts such as Times New Roman; crests
and coats of arms; dates of establishment; words such as ‘Royal’, ‘Lord’,
‘Captain’ and other badges of rank, often borrowed from military history.

Activity: Make strategic recommendations

If you have not done so earlier in this chapter, take up the project that you
are working on as you progress through this book. This could be a project
that you selected yourself, using your own business priorities and the
Marketing Challenge Hotlist in Chapter 2 or it could be one of the example
projects that I’ve discussed throughout this book, concerning a new brand
of premium baked beans or a client in the mental health sector that wants
some creative ideas concerning ways to talk to mature women. If you’ve
been doing the exercises detailed in previous chapters, you have a big data
set at hand and lots of interesting observations. Complete your project by
doing the following:

●● Revisit your business objectives or those of your client. What is the

business trying to achieve? Where is semiotics expected to make a specific
contribution? Make sure you are clear in your mind about what the
project is for.
●● Remember that any semiotic signs and codes you have detected do not
exist merely to be academically interesting; they exist because they carry
meaning, support some versions of reality while suppressing others and
they tell consumers how to behave. Remember also that you connected
your analysis of signs, texts and codes (in Chapter 4) to large social trends
and ideological changes (in Chapter 5).
●● Retaining this focus on (1) business objectives and (2) the social functions
of semiotic signs, identify 3–5 of the best insights among all your ideas
and observations. Insights make you look at familiar things in a new
light. They give you a fresh perspective on commonplace items and ideas.
There’s lots of advice earlier in this chapter about what an insight looks
like.
●● For each of your insights individually, or taking them together if they are
closely related, make some business recommendations. What do you
want to do with your brand or tell your client to do? Should it rebrand in
line with changing consumer needs or a changed marketplace? Should it
 DATA – INSIGHT – STRATEGY 193

follow a particular route to differentiate itself from competitors? Do you

now know what it needs to do to become more friendly to mature women,
vegans or kids?

Write down all of your advice. Don’t worry about making it look pretty, just
get the information down. Know what you want to say and why you are
saying it. When you’ve said everything you have to say, then we can consider
how you are going to communicate all of these strategic recommendations.
When you are ready, turn to Chapter 10.
194

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 195

10

Sharing the findings

of semiotic research

WHAT’S COMING UP

This chapter is about how to communicate the findings of your semiotic

research in a way that audiences will find engaging, easy to understand and
applicable in real-life business situations. The objective is to ensure that the
project you’ve worked so hard on and the sparkling insights you’ve dug out
from the coalface of consumer culture are appreciated and used, and
ultimately that the client returns to you and gives you repeat business. If
you are your own client, the objective is that you should feel that you have
made something of real, practical use, not the research equivalent of an
overwrought, unpublishable first novel that gets shoved in a drawer. You
want to feel that you invested your time well, that you achieved a new
vision and direction for your brand or business that couldn’t have been
reached any other way and that you know why and when you will use
semiotics in the future. With these objectives in mind, this chapter offers
my best advice on how to share the findings of semiotic research, based on
20 years of delivering semiotics to my own brand-owning clients and
delivering training in semiotics to researchers who are new to the game.
Twenty tips follow, organized into two groups.
The first group consists of tips which could apply to any kind of market
research reporting, but are presented here with a special emphasis on
semiotics. They cover topics such as responding to the needs of
stakeholders, doing your audience a favour by striking the right balance
between gravity and levity and making a product that people can’t wait
to engage with.
196 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

The second group consists of tips which are particular to semiotics. They
include being truthful (using evidence, being circumspect and staying
grounded); using and displaying genuine expertise; applying quality control
to your own work; responding confidently and robustly to challenges
concerning validity, reliability and bias. All these things together help to set
you apart from less able competitors, they boost your credibility and they
have the added bonus of pushing you to do your best work. Expanding the
limits of what you are able to achieve with semiotics is where its real joy is
located and is the reason why some researchers make it their life’s work.

Advice for all market research, especially semiotics

Respond to the needs of stakeholders
TIP 1: ACT LIKE YOU BELONG
If you are a supplier of semiotics to internal or external clients who need to
use your findings, you can win their favour and secure future research
opportunities by acting like you belong. That means adopting behaviours
which show you are on their side and you share their priorities. Are you
about to write a report, create a manual or prepare a presentation? Do you
know why you are recording the output of your research in that form? The
person who will receive it has their own needs and objectives, which could
include synchronizing your research project with other people’s and combin-
ing the findings. They might need to disseminate the headline outcomes of
your research in short form across a large company. They might need to
prepare a written marketing strategy or give live presentations to others in
which the best recommendations of your research are fully within their
command. Find out what the eventual recipients of your research need the
most and focus on making their lives easier.
Here’s a short horror story. A consumer insight professional was manag-
ing a multi-method, multi-supplier research project with a tight deadline.
One of those suppliers was a semiologist. What the consumer insight client
needed was a concise deck of practical recommendations and powerful
insights, visually expressed. What they got was a sprawling essay of 30
pages, a stream of consciousness in which the semiologist wrote all they
could on the topic until the well of imagination ran dry. The semiologist sent
this document to the client, remarking that they were worn out and unable
 SHARING THE FINDINGS OF SEMIOTIC RESEARCH 197

to come up with any more ideas. Avoid being this person and exhausting
yourself and your client by finding out how they need to use the document
you are going to write and designing it to those specifications.

TIP 2: WRITE A BUSINESS REPORT, NOT A LAB REPORT

Some market research reports are modelled on the conventions of a scien-
tific lab report, and this is especially the case when the researcher has an
academic background in the social sciences or trained with one of the more
traditional market research agencies. The structure of such a report is famil-
iar to most people who work in market research and consists of background,
objectives, method, results, discussion and conclusions. If you are lucky, you
get business objectives separately from the research objectives and you get
recommendations along with the conclusions. The time-honoured form of
the lab report has survived because it is cohesive, it follows a logical sequence
and, most of all, it serves the needs of the scientific community. That is, lab
reports look like they do because they help scientists who absolutely need
every detail of how the research was conducted, because this is a major way
of evaluating scientific findings.
I’m sure you can see immediately what the problem is when we repro-
duce these types of reports in a business context. The fact is, not many
people will care about the microscopic methodological details of your study.
What they want is to apply your research findings to a real-world problem,
in a timely manner. Help them by telling them what they need to do and by
writing a report that assists them in fulfilling that goal, otherwise you risk
losing your audience. They will become impatient and wonder ‘why are you
telling me this?’ Stay on top of your game by making sure that everything
you say ultimately leads towards and is linked to a business objective.

TIP 3: CONSIDER PRODUCING DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF YOUR REPORT

FOR DIFFERENT AUDIENCES
If you are producing output for use in a large organization or for several
different kinds of audience, consider producing modified versions that are
designed to be easy for them to consume. Maybe your client or research
users would appreciate a little set of three- to five-minute videos, each
addressing a unique topic or business objective. Maybe you can convert
your output into a usable tool such as gallery of images to inspire design-
ers, an interactive brand manual for marketers or even a game that uses a
customized deck of cards to prompt and stimulate creative thinking.
Games can be especially useful if the step that your research users want to
198 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

take following your project is some kind of brand workshop. This is a

fairly common event, especially if you are producing work for advertising
agencies or brand strategy consultancies as well as for your own brand-
owning clients.
Executive summaries are a must and it would be remiss of me not to
mention them. The more senior the people your research is able to reach, the
less easily they can make time to read an in-depth report. Satisfy their imme-
diate needs while tempting them to explore the long-form version of your
story by manufacturing a short summary containing the unmissable head-
lines and studded with juicy chunks of insight, like fruit in a cake.

Be kind to your audience

TIP 4: MAKE YOUR READER FEEL CLEVER
People like feeling smart and creative. They like experiencing their own
mastery and insight even more than they like experiencing yours. You can
deliver this experience to them and it is going to depend on setting your
priorities so that your need to feel clever takes second place. Conscientiously
avoid mysterious jargon, obscure words that make people stop reading to
look them up in the dictionary and passages of theory that make a point of
being hard to understand. This type of thing may make you feel like a Grand
Master of semiotics but it can result in making your audience feel intimi-
dated and disempowered. If someone’s paying you for this research, they
aren’t paying for you to make them feel bad. A young semiologist told me of
her experience at a conference where she excitedly attended a talk by a
person who is prominent in that field. She said: ‘I came away feeling that I
don’t know anything about semiotics.’ This is what you want to avoid. Be
sincere in your efforts to include people in semiotics and show them that
they are able to use it as part of their everyday tools for thinking.
Making a point of only writing material that can be understood by
anyone who is reasonably literate and numerate is a reliable way to make
readers feel happier.

TIP 5: BE PRECISE WITH LANGUAGE

Despite everything I’ve just said in Tip 4 about using transparent and direct
language, there will be times when semiotics requires you to use a more
specialized vocabulary. When this happens, help your reader and reduce
their cognitive burden. You may want to use techniques shown in this book
such as providing definitions of key words in boxes which are set apart from
 SHARING THE FINDINGS OF SEMIOTIC RESEARCH 199

the rest of the text or providing a glossary at the end. If you are producing
a digital document, consider hyperlinking difficult words to help readers
access the information they need.
Another way to help readers understand technical language is to be very
precise in the way you use it. Form a very clear idea in your mind of what is
meant by ‘sign’, ‘code’, ‘need’, ‘trend’, ‘culture’ and any other scientific or
para-scientific word that you need to use. Stick to that one meaning every
time you use that word. An atmosphere of confusion sometimes hangs
around semiotics and the consumer insight industry in general, as people use
psychological and scientific language to mean all kinds of different things.
You cannot stop other people from adding to the confusion by being vague
or using words that they aren’t sure about, but you can be a model of tidy,
organized thinking that readers will thank you for when difficult language
needs to come into play.

TIP 6: BRING YOUR REPORT TO LIFE WITH UNFORGETTABLE

IMAGES AND VIVID METAPHORS
When semiotic reporting fails to engage its audience, it is usually not for
want of being interesting. Semiologists usually take up their craft because
they find it intrinsically interesting and they are full of delicious anecdotes
and surprising observations, not all of which are relevant to any client’s
business objectives (those are the ones you should think about leaving out
of your report). It is rarely the case that semiotics fails to engage its audience
because it is dull.
In the rare cases where this happens, it rather ironically arises from being
over-focused on business problems, at the expense of saying anything inter-
esting about data, such as the specific communications and cultures of
brands and consumers. It results in the features sometimes found in business
magazines which make valid and worthwhile but dry and lifeless statements,
telling brands that they must acquire and express meaning. Advice offered
at this general level, while it may be self-evidently correct, may leave readers
wondering where the semiotics is or why it was needed.
A guiding principle in film-making is ‘show, don’t tell’. Show your client
some Claes Oldenburg or Andy Warhol; once seen, these artworks cannot be
unseen. Show them the most extraordinary photos you brought back from
your semiotic field trip. If you are preparing a verbal or text-only report,
don’t be afraid to use vivid metaphors. I’ve described retail stores, categories
and products using language such as ‘vomited up’ (excessive in-store
signage), ‘constipated’ (a product range that is limited and conservative,
200 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

lacking the vitality of competitors) and ‘animals escaping from the zoo’
(products which have broken out of the restraining cage of shelving fixtures
and strayed on to the floor of the supermarket aisle). For best results, match
your metaphors to the local culture of your audience – some cultures are
very graphic and physical, others are more delicate.

TIP 7: MAKE YOUR RESEARCH USERS INTO CO-CREATORS BY GIVING THEM

SOMETHING TO DO
In Tip 3 I mentioned the workshops that ad agencies and brand strategy
consultancies like to run for their clients, to get them to buy into ideas and
feel a sense of ownership. If you are in a position to organize one of these
for your research users or stakeholders, take that opportunity. The more
active the session and the more you can get people working as a team, the
better the chances that your research findings will be noticed, used and
promoted throughout the business.
Like many worthwhile activities, semiotics takes a lifetime to master but
is also quick to learn. It is a branch of philosophy, with accompanying, life-
long challenges but it is also a practical, craft skill with techniques that can
be handed to others for use straight away. Assemble a group and assign each
of them to a brand, a semiotic code or a single element of a brand plan.
Teach them how to identify semiotic signs or set them to work doing top-
down analysis, making semiotic squares or doing any of the creativity
exercises in Chapter 6.
A way to actively engage research users who you may never meet is to
turn your insights and your knowledge of semiotic method into a game such
as a board game or a deck of cards with accompanying instructions. Games
like these could be physical products, to be played face-to-face, or presented
on a digital platform for remote users. Consider reading Betty Adamou’s
book Games and Gamification in Market Research (2018) for guidance in
designing games.

Write a page-turner or make a product that people want to use

TIP 8: MAKE VISUAL IMAGES WORK HARD
In semiotic research, visual images are evidence, not decoration. Avoid
library images of a pair of hands cupping a seedling, or a woman skipping
through a meadow, if their only reason for being there is to illustrate some
theme such as ‘nurturing’ or ‘freedom’. It’s worth making a real effort to
avoid this type of thing because:
 SHARING THE FINDINGS OF SEMIOTIC RESEARCH 201

●● your time with your audience is limited, as is their attention span;

●● you want to make every element of your document work hard for you
and deliver valuable meaning to your client – nothing should be there just
to fill up space; and
●● using images as decoration or illustration makes it hard for both you and
your audience to detect when you are displaying an image as a data point
or as support for some argument.

The problem of incorporating images that don’t have any rationale other
than illustration and which consequently do only a little to aid the reader’s
understanding is surprisingly common. In my experience, it often arises
from a situation where a newcomer to semiotics has not quite understood
semiotic codes and their purpose. As we saw in Chapter 4, semiotic codes
are not sets of semiotic signs that have a superficially similar appearance.
They are also not ‘themes’. If you are thinking in terms of themes as you
write your report or prepare your debrief, you have lost sight of the function
of codes, which is that they uphold certain versions of reality and tell
consumers how to behave.
Here are a few graphics that show what to do and what to avoid.
In Figure 10.1, the images are not doing anything useful. Your reader
already knows what dancing and shopping look like. These images have
found their way into the deck because the writer is not confident about the
semiotic code they claim to have uncovered and indeed there seems to be

FIGURE 10.1 Avoid using images as illustrations

Code: Celebration
Partying Shopping
• Nightclub attendance is up • Retail therapy
• Drinking • Snacks and sweets
• Dancing • Cheap fashion

IMAGE CREDITS Juan Camilo Navia (left) and Freestocks Org (right) on Unsplash
202 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

little evidence to support its existence. Precisely what does this code consist
of? In what locations or settings is it normally found? What is its function
or purpose in consumer culture? These questions remain unanswered and
the resulting PowerPoint chart has little visible connection to semiotics and
could just as easily have resulted from traditional qualitative research, which
is very much concerned with themes, or even a quantitative survey.
Figures 10.2 and 10.3 suggest a different way to communicate findings.
In Figure 10.1 we saw mentions of ‘retail therapy’ and rates of nightclub
attendance that seem to reference forms of consumer behaviour. It seems
(although is not clear) that the author is trying to tell us something about
consumer culture rather than a specific brand or category. In situations where
we want to talk about semiotic codes which are evident in consumer culture,
Figure 10.2 might be a better way to handle it. In Figure 10.2 you can see
that the function of the code is explicitly set out. The chart names the code,
states its function and follows with examples of semiotic signs that are the
building blocks of the code and enable it to do its job. The photo of the shirt
came from a photo library, but the shirt itself was not manufactured for a
library and in fact garments bearing the ‘YOLO’ slogan are widely available
to consumers at the time of writing. Similarly, Party Cat was not manufac-
tured to serve as photo library stock. The shirt and Party Cat are real aspects
of the everyday landscape of semiotic signs, at least for some segments of

FIGURE 10.2 Visual images as evidence of codes in consumer culture

Code: Celebration
Function: Invokes meanings associated with parties and self-treating.
Excitement, happiness, a sense of occasion.
Semiotic signs include: Acts of joyful abandon; balloons, paper hats, paper whistles and
other decorations; messages that opportunities for celebration should not be missed.

SOURCES You Only Live Once shirt: Photo, Adobe. Party Cat cartoon reproduced with kind permission
of Anthony Clark
 SHARING THE FINDINGS OF SEMIOTIC RESEARCH 203

consumers. The phrase ‘YOLO’ and the Party Cat cartoon character are part
of the landscape of digital culture that certain demographics of consumers
regularly encounter. In the context of this PowerPoint chart, they are not
illustrations but data points (and if you can include a photo of a YOLO shirt
on sale in a real store, so much the better). They are two of the many items
that routinely cross the paths of digitally engaged consumers and help them
to know when they should celebrate, what to do and how to feel. Figure 10.2
is a way to communicate the findings of top-down semiotics. As we discussed
in Chapter 5, top-down analysis concerns consumer culture and the land-
scapes of meaning that consumers navigate in their everyday lives.
Now look at Figure 10.3.
Figure 10.3 shows a way to communicate the findings of bottom-up
­analysis. As you know from Chapter 4, bottom-up analysis takes apart texts
such as advertising and packaging, identifying their codes and the semiotic
signs which are the building blocks of each code. In this case, the researcher
is not commenting on all of the messages and life experiences that have
crossed the path of consumers but on a very specific data set, in fact, a prod-
uct category. The shower gels shown in Figure 10.3 represent brands which
operate in the self-care category. That’s quite a large category but the
Celebration code tells us that one end of it is indulgent and joyous, border-
ing on reckless, and encourages gifting and self-gifting.

FIGURE 10.3 Visual images as evidence of codes in product categories

Code: Celebration
Function: Invokes meanings associated with parties and self-treating.
Excitement, happiness, a sense of occasion.
Semiotic signs include: Sugary treats; confetti, balloons and other decorations;
references to seasonal occasions including summer vacations; celebratory
ceremonies including picnics and parades.

SOURCES Don’t Rain on My Parade shower gel reproduced with kind permission of Lush Retail Ltd.
Confetti Birthday Cake and Beach Party shower gels reproduced with kind permission of Coty Inc
204 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Observe that the format and layout for the chart in Figure 10.3 is the same
as in Figure 10.2. It names the code, states its function and shows specific
data points as evidence. Indeed, Figures 10.2 and 10.3 are reporting on the
same code. As a pair, they show that the Celebration code is manifest in this
particular product category and is also part of a wider landscape of consumer
culture. Top-down and bottom-up findings are easily connected and the
function and characteristics of the code are supported with visual evidence.
Taking this approach makes images work hard for you and it makes your
output more useful because it is clear to everyone what a code is, where it
occurs and how it is deployed in marketing.
You can also use exactly this evidence-based approach to supporting
materials when you come to choose video clips and consumer verbatims if
you have been combining your semiotics with ethnography or discourse
analysis, as described in Chapter 7.

TIP 9: TELL A STORY

Most market researchers are aware that their reports and debrief need to tell
a story, and advice on how to do that will frequently refer the reader to both
fiction-writing and journalism. Both disciplines have many great techniques
that market researchers can use; here I want to mention just one, which is
pace. Your business audience doesn’t want a soulful, literary novel quite as
much as they want a fast-moving thriller. Here’s how to keep people on the
edge of their seats at debrief time.
Start with a hook. Tell your audience that you have a solution to their
problem of how to reposition their brand, or whatever it may be. Tell them
about the success that will result from developing a brand communications
strategy that authentically connects to consumers’ real lives and that uses
well-chosen, reliable semiotic signs which you have helpfully provided and
are about to show them.
Take them on a short and colourful journey that transports them from
their business problem to your solution. Include only material that advances
the plot: keep the journey moving. Your audience wants to get straight to the
action and stay there.
Cut back on exposition. I know you want to talk about the methodo-
logical beauty of the study you just conducted, but let your insights,
recommendations and memorable visual evidence do the work for you.
Move the details of your elegant project design, sampling and analytic
method to an appendix.
 SHARING THE FINDINGS OF SEMIOTIC RESEARCH 205

TIP 10: SYNTHESIZE TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP SEMIOTICS WHEN YOU

WRITE YOUR REPORT
When you are writing a report or debrief document that presents the
outcomes of semiotic research, you will need to make a decision about how
you handle the top-down and bottom-up elements of the project in your
reporting. In my experience, there are two options.
The first option is to write a document that divides the reporting into
two discrete sections. The section at the beginning has a title of something
like ‘Consumer culture’ or ‘The semiotic landscape of Northern India’ and
it is filled with the products of top-down analysis. It makes insightful
remarks, shows memorable photos and leaves the viewer feeling as though
they are seeing the whole world afresh. The following section has a title of
something like ‘Brands and competitors decoded’ or ‘Category codes and
signs’ and dismantles ads and packaging. If you choose this way forward,
this latter half is the part of your report that everyone will pay attention to
later. Part 1 will be regarded as ‘background’ and ‘context’ and no-one will
read it. This is a shame because some of the thinking that semiologists reveal
in these top-down analyses of consumer culture amount to worthwhile
anthropology.
As an alternative, then, you might prefer a second option. Weave together
your top-down and bottom-up insights and bits of evidence throughout
your report. If you have something to say about the meaning of a semiotic
sign that you found on the packaging of certain brands, then demonstrate
your bottom-up ability to decode it and at the same time show how it is
connected to wider society. Figures 10.2 and 10.3 show two ways of recog-
nizing manifestations of a code: it is found in packaging (bottom-up) and
is also found as a naturally occurring feature of the landscape of consum-
ers’ lives (top-down). Use your top-down insights to shed light on the
things that bottom-up analysis calls to your attention in the details of
brands and their communications. Synthesize top-down and bottom-up by
making meaningful connections between the lives of consumers and the
offerings of brands.

Activity: Prepare a report or debrief

Take up your project that you’ve been working on throughout this book,
whether that’s your own, independent project selected with the help of the
Marketing Challenge Hotlist in Chapter 2 or whether you’ve been following
206 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

the baked bean and mental health projects that show up throughout the
book as examples.
Follow this list of action points, which are detailed in Tips 1–10:

●● Say hi to your client or stakeholders. Check in with them and find out
how you can be on their side as you begin to prepare your report or
debrief. What do they need to be able to do with the document or other
product of your research that you are about to craft?
●● Consider making a video, a game or some other product that is more
interactive and experiential than a report. Would your stakeholders
rather participate in a workshop than sit down and listen to a lecture?
●● Organize the entire product around your client’s business objectives.
Keep those objectives in sight at all times. Set up an agenda that gets them
from problem to solution.
●● Aim to make people feel clever, creative and inspired. Respect their
intelligence and help them discover their own skills in semiotics.
●● Be simple, direct and precise in your language. Bring reporting to life with
vivid, memorable examples. Make those examples, such as visual images,
video clips and verbatims, earn their place in your report by serving as
evidence in support of your arguments. Zoom in and out between
top-down and bottom-up analysis as you write your report or debrief.

Advice exclusively for semiotics

Speak the truth
TIP 11: SUPPORT ALL YOUR CLAIMS WITH EVIDENCE
Semiotics offers some great tools and resources for stimulating creative
thinking, as we saw in Chapter 6. Creative thinking and imagination are
invaluable when the occasion calls for it and sometimes this is what our
client or stakeholders are asking us to do. In this book, we’ve considered a
brief concerning a mental health product that was issued by a client that
wanted creative ideas quickly. On many other occasions, though, your
stakeholders are relying on you to tell them the truth about something. They
want flights of imagination less than they want reliable guidance about how
to sell premium baked beans by making changes in store, at the level of the
fixture. They want your recommendations to be firmly attached to some
kind of reality.
 SHARING THE FINDINGS OF SEMIOTIC RESEARCH 207

Because this need for robust insights and reliable recommendations is so

common, I default to the following practice on most occasions. I try to
supply evidence in support of every claim I make. Doing this is not just
about making sure that clients understand and believe my analysis, it’s about
ensuring that my analysis is connected to something in the lives of brands or
consumers that they can empirically detect. If you have an imaginative idea
about what a brand might be signifying with its packaging – perhaps you
want to say that it ‘codes innocence’ or ‘codes nobility’ – ask yourself what
evidence you have in support of the idea. Ask how we propose to reject alter-
native accounts of what the brand or packaging means. What if the evidence
suggests that the brand is a better example of the starkness and discipline of
Bauhaus or American minimalism? What if the evidence suggests that the
brand is mocking the idea of nobility rather than deferring to it?

TIP 12: MAKE PLAUSIBLE CLAIMS

Here are some principles which I return to when I am trying to make a point
of telling a client something that’s true, that they can rely on.

●● Make claims which are coherent. If you claim to have measured

something, make sure it is something which is capable of being measured.
If you claim to have discovered a trend, make sure you know what you
mean by that word. Be able to explain yourself if someone needs more
clarity about the status of your claims on truth and facts. Doing this is
not just better for the semiologist, it’s also better for their audience who
are not left feeling baffled or even suspicious by claims that don’t seem
very straightforward.
●● Make life easy for your client by making claims which are credible
according what they already know and treat as fact within the context of
their business. Resist the temptation to make claims which are too large
and ambitious in scope – claims to have discovered universal features of
humanity that, if true, would contradict centuries of philosophy and
science. Protect the integrity of your research and your reputation by
focusing on the task at hand, which is to market something, not to get
involved in a war on science.
●● Avoid proprietary language, because its usual function is to hide and
obscure rather than reveal or clarify. You don’t need your own special
names for the things that you discover in semiotics. They already have
names. Everyone’s life is easier when we speak the same language.
208 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Be a real expert
TIP 13: EXPLAIN, DON’ T MERELY DESCRIBE
The chapters of this book which concern method go into detail about the
problems that semiotic projects run into and how to avoid them. Perhaps
the most common problem is that the research has focused too much on
bottom-up analysis of semiotic signs in ads and packaging. Codes are poorly
specified and there are no links to top-down elements of the wider consumer
culture which the customer inhabits. For example, the first draft of your
report says something like this:

With its shiny, metallic surfaces and sleek shapes, this brand of pens references
sports cars and other automotives.

You might be on to something, but this interpretation needs some evidence

and in turn the evidence will help us to know what the resemblance of pens
to sports cars means. This is the really important part. Don’t say ‘it resem-
bles a sports car’ and then stop. If there really is evidence that the thing is
borrowing from some kind of automotive code, find out why. What is the
automotive code doing for the people who use it? Why does it exist? This is
what differentiates semiotics that explains why things look the way they do,
and does not simply describe their superficial appearances.

TIP 14: TALK ABOUT THE EFFECT OF SEMIOTIC SIGNS AND CODES ON
CONSUMERS, NOT ABOUT THEIR EFFECT ON YOU
Reserve expressions of personal taste until they are suited to the occasion.
On most projects, the client is paying you to tell them how consumers will
feel, not how you feel. Expressions of personal taste sometimes happen
when a researcher is not quite sure about signs and codes and has used their
analysis time to reproduce a focus-group pack-sorting exercise. It also some-
times happens when a project strays into politics or another subject where
the researcher has some emotional investment.
Overcome these problems by sticking to your functionalist approach that
does not simply name signs, codes or trends but specifies what they are
doing for consumers. The evidence for the function that you have detected
is found in the reactions and responses of consumers when they encounter
these signs. I came to an interesting realization when I worked on a multi-
country project concerning health remedies and pharmacy products, several
years ago. At that time, in the UK, the word ‘homeopathic’ on the packaging
of an item such as a dietary supplement or cold remedy meant that the
 SHARING THE FINDINGS OF SEMIOTIC RESEARCH 209

­ roduct had emerged from a very specific school of thought. It implied a

p
specific theory of treating ailments with small amounts of the substance
thought to have triggered the problem. When I then travelled to the United
States to meet consumers and visit stores, I learned that ‘homeopathic’
communicated ‘natural ingredients’, a much more general meaning. Your
job is to notice and account for these variations, while keeping your own
opinions of homeopathy on ice.

TIP 15: GET EXCITED ABOUT CRITICAL THINKING

Critical thinking means treating your own great insights with caution, just
as you would treat those of a business rival who claims to have solved all the
world’s problems. If you are about to express a point of view about what
women want, why Millennials and Generation Z are overworking them-
selves or what is causing the social and political upheavals of the day, pause
before committing yourself to it. How sure are you that you have alighted
upon the right answer? Could it reasonably be argued that some other
explanation is the correct one?
If you are from a scientific background, you will recognize this as having
something in common with testing the null hypothesis. It’s good practice to
look around for evidence that supports alternative explanations and points
of view before writing a flowery essay about your favourite interpretation.
If you are sure that you have alighted upon the right answer, does it come
with any qualifications or limitations? Test its limits by looking for cases
where it doesn’t apply. As much as clients and other stakeholders like bold,
confident statements, they are even happier when they can rely on you to
critically evaluate big ideas and recognize their boundaries.

Quality control
TIP 16: USE ADEQUATE, CONTRASTING CASES
Don’t try to build an elaborate analysis around a single text or data point.
You may have discovered a particularly fascinating photograph of Che
Guevara or Marilyn Monroe but it does not merit an essay of its own unless
you are doing academic or creative writing. If your intention is to please a
business audience, then know that they quickly become sceptical when too
much is made of single examples of anything. Whatever it is that you want
to talk about, whether it is a brand, an icon of pop culture, an idea or a value
that exemplifies a trend or excites some group of consumers, find at least
one contrasting example and show your audience how they are different.
210 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

This habit brings rewards such as improved buy-in, as readers and stake-
holders feel that they have had a hand in being able to judge and compare
the evidence for themselves.

TIP 17: STAY CLEAR ABOUT WHERE YOU ARE DRAWING THE LINE BETWEEN
TOPICS OF RESEARCH AND EXPLANATORY RESOURCES
We covered this issue in some detail in Chapter 5. Early in your project, you
will have been confronted with all kinds of literature, ad campaigns, market
research reports, sales figures and other interesting materials, all of which
make claims on certain versions of the truth. An internal company statement
of brand essence claims that a brand is the pinnacle of desirability but sales
figures say otherwise. A study of shopping behaviour seems not to line up
with the self-reports of consumers. A book on food crosses your desk. It
offers insights about the meaning of various regional dishes that you regard
as valuable education but at the same time it makes claims about science or
human biology that you regard as highly suspect. Decisions about what to
treat as data points, which are inherently ambiguous and in need of expla-
nation, versus what to treat as reliable sources of explanation will occur at
an early stage of your research. Know why you made your decisions as you
accepted some claims while remaining sceptical of others and you will be in
a stronger position when it is time to write your report or debrief.
You do not have to accept wholesale the worldview expressed in docu-
ments and other literature just because parts of them are useful. It’s possible
for a single writer to be right about shopping and wrong about brains.

Respond robustly to challenges

TIP 18: TALK CONFIDENTLY ABOUT VALIDITY
If people choose to challenge your semiotic research, they will likely do so
on grounds of validity. The essential question they are asking is how you
know your findings are true. Aside from your conscientious analysis of func-
tion and your diligent support of your claims with tangible evidence of the
various semiotic meanings which consumer culture makes available to its
inhabitants, you can use the following ideas in conversation with people
who are seriously interested in validity.
If you think of your semiotic procedures and techniques for answering
questions as tools or instruments, then validity is the extent to which your
instrument successfully detects whatever it is trying to detect. If you are
trying to detect a code or trend, then the method or procedure you used
 SHARING THE FINDINGS OF SEMIOTIC RESEARCH 211

should actually detect codes and trends and not something else. This is why
evidence and critical thinking are so important.
The validity of your research findings can be strengthened through trian-
gulation and also through corroboration and consensus. Triangulation
could mean comparing your insights to those achieved using other research
methods. Did someone carry out a qualitative or quantitative study of the
same topic while you were working with semiotics? Does part of your
client’s job involve explaining how these different reports relate to each
other? Find out whether the discoveries of these other research projects
harmonize with your own. Do they seem to describe similar phenomena,
albeit from different points of view?
Corroboration and consensus can also be achieved by encouraging your
client, end user of research or other stakeholder to form their own interpre-
tations of your data and its features. This is why I’m keen on making
semiotics as transparent as possible, supplying visible evidence and demon-
strations of semiotic thinking as applied to real data. Rather than a black-box
approach that shrouds the details of data analysis in mystery, I like to give
readers and research users enough raw material to make up their own minds
about whether the interpretation I’ve just offered of their breakfast cereal or
fashion brand is reasonable and structurally sound.

TIP 19: YOU CAN CHECK YOUR DATA ANALYSIS FOR RELIABILITY
The definition of this key term is captured in the idea of test–retest reliabil-
ity. Let’s imagine that you take a set of 40 ads for household items. You
semiotically analyse them and you can empirically demonstrate that you
have detected five codes with no outliers or data points that you can’t
explain. If you then take a fresh sample of a further 40 ads and apply the
same method of analysis, the same codes should appear. It should not be the
case that the second time around produces different codes or produces the
same codes but with a lot of outliers. If you try this out and you are not
achieving test–retest reliability then there could be various explanations. For
example, it could be that your sample isn’t large enough. In this situation,
keep sampling data until the reliability of your analysis improves.
Another aspect of reliability is that if your research is reliable then
another semiologist should be able to analyse the same data set and get the
same results. I’ve found this to be true even when the other person is a
different flavour of semiologist, having been trained in the discipline in a
different tradition, which could be a function of the country where they
live. The exact methods and perspectives of, for example, Swiss linguistics,
212 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

French anthropology and American logic can produce quite different ways
of working in semiologists who emerge from these different backgrounds.
Despite this, I’ve found it to be the case that they will usually arrive at the
same answers when asked to interpret a brand, category or aspect of
consumer culture and this is a reassuring sign of reliability. Reliability does
not in itself guarantee validity but it is one of the essential qualities of valid
research.

TIP 20: MAKE FRIENDS WITH REFLEXIVITY

If you’ve followed all the tips in this chapter then probably you have taken
considerable care to make the claims of your research as dispassionately
objective as possible. Despite this, you may want to take additional steps to
help manage the problem of bias. As anyone who has had contact with
behavioural economics knows, bias is rife in human thought and decision
making. Collectively, we are very prone to seeing what we want to see, inter-
preting things according to our own, partial point of view and glossing over
inconvenient details that don’t fit our worldview.
Semiotics does not straightforwardly try to eliminate bias from analysis
and reporting, because it acknowledges that such a thing is never possible.
Research reports, just like brands, marketing communications and the
Instagram accounts of consumers, are made of semiotic signs and codes
which have bias in their DNA. In real life, semiotics invites us to notice,
there is no instance of language or representation which is bias-free. A
popular solution to this problem, if bias cannot be expunged, is reflexivity.
For our purposes – the purposes of your commercial research project –
reflexivity means including something in your report that helps the reader
by making clear what your particular background is. If it is a multi-coun-
try study but you, the analyst and report-writer, are Ukrainian or Mexican,
then say so. It will help the reader fully understand your story. If your
research was biased in the sense that it worked only with a highly specific
sample of brands and consumers, then say so. Make it clear. This type of
transparency strengthens the validity of your research rather than weaken-
ing it.

Activity: Quality-check your work before distribution

Before your report goes out for distribution or you present your findings to
an audience, take a final look over it for purposes of quality control. You are
 SHARING THE FINDINGS OF SEMIOTIC RESEARCH 213

checking to make sure that you are confident about all the things you are
saying. There’s nothing you’re unsure or vague about and you can defend
your project design and analysis if you need to.
Follow this list of action points, which are detailed in Tips 11–20:

●● Check that you have supplied evidence in support of all your analytic
claims. Help convince your viewer or reader by using enough evidence
and showing them contrasting samples.
●● Are all of your claims internally coherent? Are they credible or will they
make big demands on your reader or viewer to suspend their disbelief?
●● If you are pointing out semiotic signs and codes, make sure you are
explaining why they exist and are not merely describing them. Have you
focused on talking about how these signs and codes affect consumers,
resisting the temptation to say how they make you feel?
●● Take pleasure in looking over the whole of your report to make sure that
it is watertight. Find and secure any leaks which occur when a competing
explanation for a semiotic sign or consumer action would do just as well
as the one you first thought of.
●● Make sure you are clear in your own mind about how you distinguished
between research data and explanatory resources. Know how your
research can be evaluated for validity and reliability. Put a reflexive
paragraph or two in the introduction so that your readers know
something about the cultural background of the researcher.

When you’ve performed this final check, your work is finished. Share or
publish your research. Congratulations. That was a job well done.
The next chapter is about industry debates and the future of semiotics.
Turn to Chapter 11 now to learn how your adventures in semiotics might
vary around the world and over time.
214

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 215

11

Industry debates and the future

of semiotics

WHAT’S COMING UP

This chapter is designed to help suppliers and users of research get

involved with the latest developments in semiotics. It asks how semiotics is
changing over time and how it varies in different regions of the world. By
the end of this chapter, you may have formed your own opinions about
some of these topical questions:

●● What is or should be the status of semiotics in the market research

industry? Is it a science, an art, or something in between? This question
is sometimes the subject of hot debate among suppliers of semiotics as
they jostle for position in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
●● What are the implications for semiotics of technology and social change?
Can we automate semiotics? What does semiotics have to say about
digital culture? How can semiotics engage with technical products such
as social media platforms and virtual reality?
●● Commercial semiotics as it is presently known to the English-speaking
business community may have started in the West but is becoming a
widespread, international activity. How can newcomers to semiotics
learn about the semiotic output of regions such as India, China and Latin
America?
●● How should semiologists respond to the interest of the global business
community in trying to predict and shape the future? What can
semiotics do with commercial futurology and what is the probable
future for semiotics?
216 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

As we consider these questions, we are performing top-down analysis of

semiotics itself. Top-down analysis is the part of semiotics that concerns
ideology, politics, economics and social change. Its normal application to
business and marketing problems was the subject of Chapter 5.

Industry debates: Is semiotics a science?

In semiotics, a good approach to any question is to first ask who wants to
know. Who is interested in whether semiotics is a science? Twenty years ago,
when commercial semiotics was in its infancy, the topic would usually arise in
response to the concerns of people who were not already part of semiotics.
Viewing semiotics for the first time and from an outsider’s perspective, they
had questions about its validity. ‘How is this objective?’, they wanted to know.
‘How is this different from someone’s opinion?’ These were the initial chal-
lenges. Some researchers were quite serious about answering these questions
and showing how a semiotic approach is empirical and rational. An example
is the article ‘De-mystifying semiotics’ (Lawes, 2002), an early publication on
British commercial semiotics, which sets out a basic procedure for doing semi-
otic research, tackles questions about objectivity versus opinion and generally
adheres to the philosophical principles of science, in the same way as this book.
In 2019, at the time of writing this book, the world of commercial semiot-
ics has changed: now questions about science come from different sources.
While semiotics itself is rapidly evolving, as you will see in later sections of
this chapter, the marketplace for semiotics has grown and changed as well.
There are many more suppliers of semiotics to the private sector now than
when it was first emerging. While research users have grown in confidence as
they have come to see the difference that semiotics can make to the profits of
their brands, private-sector suppliers have become more competitive with
each other as they increase in number. As they compete, there is a certain
amount of struggle to be seen as doing things which are new, different, more
technological, faster or in some other way more saleable, although this is not
always aligned with a commitment to methodological integrity. In the present
day, when debates arise concerning the scientific credentials of semiotic
method, those debates are usually among suppliers who have their own,
market-driven reasons for supporting one side of the argument or another.
In 2018, intrigued by the criticisms and also the ambitious claims made
in the name of semiotics in these private-sector debates, I decided to make a
provisional map of meanings which shows how the market research ­industry
 INDUSTRY DEBATES AND THE FUTURE OF SEMIOTICS 217

thinks about its own research methods. The results are set out in detail in the
article ‘Science and semiotics: What’s the relationship?’ (Lawes, 2018a),
along with details of the procedure I followed in searching for some answers,
and plenty of samples of data in the form of verbatim quotes, where market
researchers challenge each other and draw lines around science according to
their own priorities.
My provisional conclusion was that when methods are new to the market
research community, they initially attract scepticism that relates to their
newness. This is what happened to semiotics when it emerged on to the
Anglophone business scene at the turn of the century and it has happened
since then to new developments such as behavioural economics. At first,
when something is new, people will wonder whether it has any longevity
and they are suspicious of things that appear to be complicated. This is why
it took semiotics a long time to get off the ground as a commercial venture;
it was held back for years by difficult theory and impenetrable jargon.
When a research method or approach has been around long enough to
establish its credibility, an examination of the way it is talked about seems to
show that it will settle on one or another side of an art–science binary opposi-
tion, and then practitioners will try to distinguish themselves by rescuing it
from whichever side of the fence it ended up on. For example, quantitative
research, the kind of time-honoured measures of central tendency and disper-
sion, correlations and multi-variate statistics, has been comfortably on the
‘science’ end of the art–science binary in market research for many decades.
The advantage of this is that it is considered reliable and valid. The disadvan-
tage is that it is seen as perpetually at risk of being dry and boring, with the
result that people keep trying to rescue it and make it more accessible and
exciting. The arrival of big data (itself a semiotic sign) has increased the urgency
of this activity. Practitioners sometimes joke that data science, which we have
evolved to deal with big data, is just statistics with refreshed, sexier packaging.
It looks as though semiotics may settle on the art side of the art-science
binary. It is occasionally the case that commercial suppliers of research will
criticize semiotics as too fussy and technical, usually when they want to claim
that they have simplified it for a wider audience (and indeed, there is some of
that criticism in this book, at least implicitly). It is more often the case that
semiotics is positioned as ‘too’ artistic – too creative, too ­introspective, too
random, too vague in its outcomes and too slow. This type of criticism of
semiotics usually comes not from an outsider but from people and compa-
nies who are themselves suppliers of semiotics and who want to be seen to
rescue it, usually by quantifying it, dressing it in language borrowed from
cognitive psychology, neuropsychology or other branches of science or
218 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

a­ utomating it so that it goes faster. Ethnography has seen similar attempts to

rehabilitate it with quantification and technology, even though this tends to
correspond to a reduced emphasis on the kind of insightful and creative
thinking that ethnography has become noted for.
In this section, as in the 2002 and 2018 papers I cited, I have offered a
view of two ways to approach questions and debates. The first option is to
plunge into the debate and defend a corner. In this chapter and throughout
the book I have made much of the scientific and rational aspects of semiotics
because I find them useful in my own semiotic practice. However, there are
plenty of practitioners who come from backgrounds in the arts and human-
ities and they could make a good case for semiotics being an irreducibly
creative activity. If this is your interest, you will enjoy exploring semiotics in
the visual arts and as a branch of postmodern theory, which is known for its
willingness to include playfulness, spontaneity and humour.
The second option when you encounter questions and debates is to step
back and regard the debate itself as an interesting quirk of human behav-
iour, in need of semiotic investigation. Here we see very clearly the distinction
between information as explanatory resource and information as a research
topic, to which I’ve referred throughout this book. This second approach,
which is perhaps a more fully semiotic way to go about things, asks you to
apply semiotics to the content of the debate, its form and its setting. Who
has something to say about the scientific status of semiotics? Who are they
addressing? What are the terms of the debate and what are the prizes for
winning? These approaches are different but both will get you somewhere
interesting, according to your priorities.

IS SEMIOTICS A SCIENCE?

Semiotics has branches in both art and science. It is interdisciplinary. In the

form known to the Anglophone business community, semiotics has its origins
in science and contemporary expressions of the method, such as this book,
retain some fidelity to the basic principles of science and rational inquiry.
In the consumer insight and marketing industry, suppliers compete to be at
the cutting edge of innovation and product development. This can result in
industry debates which produce a story or myth, in which semiotics is usually
too free-form and creative, and needs to be rescued, using technology or
scientific language.
How you regard these debates, whether you choose to get involved or stand
back and observe them as cultural action-sequences, is itself a semiotic decision.
 INDUSTRY DEBATES AND THE FUTURE OF SEMIOTICS 219

Technology and social change

It almost goes without saying that the biggest change of recent years to
human culture, considered globally, and indeed the reason why a ‘global
culture’ was able to emerge, is the technological revolution. The scholars
who originally conceived of semiotics, in their various specialisms of linguis-
tics, anthropology and formal logic, were operating in the early part of the
20th century and could not have predicted how much life would change
within 100 years. The internet became publicly and widely available.
Consumers rushed to fill it, forming new relationships across the globe and
making what is now called ‘content’. Out of nowhere, digital culture
appeared as beliefs, ideologies, customs and rituals emerged to tell people
how to interact with each other in digital space.
At the same time, technology itself continued to advance. Smartphones
appeared, then a host of internet-enabled (and internet-dependent) objects –
this was called ‘the internet of things’. Just below the surface of daily life on
Facebook, Tinder and other platforms which are now regarded by many as
essential tools, other kinds of technology operated, just out of sight. In 2018,
Facebook dealt with an international scandal as news emerged that the data
of up to 87 million users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica,
a political consultancy. The story came as a shock to consumers, largely
because they had regarded Facebook as primarily a tool for maintaining
social relationships and realized rather abruptly that Facebook actually
makes its money from advertising. Its special capability is targeted advertis-
ing. Because it has a lot of information about its users, it is able to deliver ad
messages to audiences who are screened for age, gender, physical location,
employer, relationship status and many other variables. Facebook has never
made a secret of the fact that it stores user data in order to provide a better
targeted advertising service; the 2018 scandal concerned a data leak rather
than the fact that Facebook kept data at all. However, for many consumers,
the fact that there was a dark side to technological advances became visible
at that moment.
In the business community and also at the level of government, there
was a rush towards technology. China is famously embracing facial recog­
nition technology, as part of what The Economist called a project of
‘vast ­hyper-surveillance’ of its population (24 October 2018, youtu.be/
lH2gMNrUuEY). Face recognition is useful for security and police work,
it simplifies financial transactions and it can admit – or refuse to admit –
citizens to public and private services, from metro system to hotels.
­
220 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Meanwhile, in London, Google presented at the annual conference of the

Market Research Society in 2019, describing the latest advances in its
augmented reality technology. The technology permits one layer of infor-
mation to be mapped on top of another, so the reality you can view through
the camera on your smartphone or tablet becomes something you can
interact with in new ways. You can annotate it, change its appearance or
layer it with visual cues that help you navigate a path or use a service.
Consumer culture is moving fast but technology moves faster.
All of this technological activity and digital data, endlessly recording and
eventually shaping human behaviour, has necessarily had an impact on the
consumer insight and market research industries, as in any other industry.
New tools and methods emerge to feed the appetite of the business commu-
nity for technologically advanced solutions. Sentiment analysis is an example
of a new tool that emerged because of what we can achieve with technology,
not because we needed a new theory of emotion. Ethnography has become
more and more digital; on the one hand, we can now peer into the lives of
smartphone-owning consumers in a way that was unthinkable a few years
ago. On the other hand, when research design is driven by technology rather
than insight, digital ethnography risks being reduced to a data collection
method, where research agencies compete to win projects based on the size
and speed of the incoming digital feed from consumers rather than a theory-
driven capacity to perform original and thoughtful analysis of the data.
Traditional qualitative research, too, is undergoing changes. Brand owners
have discovered WhatsApp and are experimenting with forming WhatsApp
groups of consumers and firing questions at them directly, getting replies
back in real time, which certainly has its advantages but cuts out the analy-
sis and thinking time that qualitative research agencies used to get paid for.
As expected, semiotics as a commercially available service for marketers
has been touched by the drive towards technology, just like everything else.
The first attempts towards technologizing semiotics have inevitably focused
on quantification, because this is something we can do with the technology we
have – like many technological innovations, it is a solution looking for a prob-
lem. However, technological advances in semiotics are at an early stage where,
as an industry, we are looking at semiotics with a view to how we can make it
conform to our still-primitive technical capabilities, rather than asking how
we can develop tech that would help semiotics evolve conceptually.
The remainder of this section expands a little further on three ways that
semiotics responds to the technological revolution and the arrival of digital
culture.
 INDUSTRY DEBATES AND THE FUTURE OF SEMIOTICS 221

Social media and the semiotics of digital culture

The first interaction between semiotics and technology, which no living
semiologist has overlooked, is the emergence of digital culture as an aspect
of consumers’ everyday lives. Googling has become perhaps the primary
means of getting information on any topic, for huge swathes of consumers
and professional researchers across the world. If you go to Google now and
look for infographics that describe the differences between Baby Boomers,
Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z, you will find that there are
plenty of them and that they are frequently framed in terms of technology
use. Millennials are still using Instagram; Generation Z prefers TikTok. The
younger the consumer, the more time they spend online, the more shopping
they do through digital platforms, the more reviews they write and the more
willing they are to pay a premium to have real-world products and services
delivered to them quickly (for example, see Dyer, 2018).
Their social lives have changed. They photograph everything, especially
themselves and their food. Tourism has changed. Relatively private moments
such as weddings and the arrival of new babies has changed because ‘pics or
it didn’t happen’, a vernacular phrase that means ‘visual evidence is how we
know things have come to exist, to be part of reality’. Romantic relation-
ships have changed, as have friendship groups and the way they are managed.
We speak of digital natives and we mean generations of humans who cannot
remember a time when they did not have their own social media accounts,
when video gaming did not eclipse other forms of digital entertainment such
as music and movies (for example, see BBC, 2019). There’s much more
about Generation Z in the last three chapters of this book.
This situation is tremendously exciting for semiologists and for our fellow
researchers of culture who use ethnography and discourse analysis. New
ways of being human have evolved, through grass-roots uses of technology
such as posing for selfies, friending (verb: to use technology to indicate a
positive relationship with someone you have never met), ghosting, catfishing
and making a career out of being a relationship marketing guru or social
influencer. The data generated by digital culture is abundantly available.
Digital platforms may be designed with the primary motive of selling
targeted advertising but they can also be magnets for consumers who form
powerful and richly informative subcultures around specific types of experi-
ences and political causes, as we see on Mumsnet (a British platform for
mothers) and Twitter. Once you start reading anthropological and semiotic
222 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

accounts of digital culture, you will not be able to stop and will soon find
yourself planning your own projects.
It’s also worth noting that suppliers of mainstream qualitative research
have noted the value of online communities, bringing them in-house as a
service. Communities can be designed like artificial lakes, for market
research purposes. Often lasting just a few days or weeks, they are a cross
between a naturally occurring online community and a focus group. They
generate a wealth of digital data – commentary and conversation in words
but also photographs, video clips, sound files and anything else that respond-
ents can be persuaded to upload. If you work for one of these agencies or if
you are an independent supplier of semiotics and you have these agencies
among your clients, show them what a semiotic perspective can do when it
is applied to their data. You will be able to detect numerous signs and codes
and your only problem will be knowing when to stop looking at digital
behaviour and go outdoors.

Can semiotics be quantified? Machine learning and artificial intelligence

Some commercially available products are emerging which attempt to quan-
tify semiotics. These products are still at an early stage of evolution and are
a case of trying to make semiotics conform to the technology we have, rather
than using technology to do better semiotics. The technology we have now
allows us to count things. It can sort images according to their visible
­characteristics. It can recognize faces some of the time, although it regularly
makes mistakes. It is capable of a primitive type of learning where it becomes
better at sorting, recognizing and eventually predicting, based on past
ex­perience. The upshot for semiotics is that products are starting to emerge
which make the design of research projects conform to this type of task.
Often focused on visual images at the expense of other types of semiotic
signs, products can sort items such as still ads into groups based on their
appearance and superficial content and will even assign names to those
groups, in a gesture towards interpretation. The results of this activity are
thoroughly quantitative and this allows the research user or buyer to create
attractive looking graphs which appear to show that 30 per cent of baby
care ads ‘code freedom’ or have an essential essence of meaning which is
‘nurturing’. This is sometimes glossed as ‘measuring meaning’.
If this were all that humans could do with semiotics, we would be
disappointed. It would not have gained traction in academia or in business
if researchers were doing nothing but sorting chunks of data into groups,
 INDUSTRY DEBATES AND THE FUTURE OF SEMIOTICS 223

based on their superficial similarity, doing this with a fairly high rate of
error and then finding themselves unable to say what a code is or what
specifically is intended by the phrase ‘measuring meaning’ or ‘an essence
of meaning’. Semiotics would have failed to thrive if humans could not do
more with it than this and in fact it is equivalent to some of the problems
described in the earlier methods chapters of this book. In those problems,
aspiring semiologists struggle to distinguish themselves from focus group
respondents, who are also quite good at sorting ads and packs into groups
and giving them names, and do not require any knowledge of semiotics to
complete the task. Semiotics is not a word that means ‘primitive image-
sorting abilities’, it is a set of human skills that involve being able to
extract meaning from diverse data sets and from aspects of those data
which remain invisible to the recognition software we’ve managed to
develop so far.
What is it that human semiologists can see in data that our presently
available software cannot detect? In 2018 I wrote an article for the business
platform LinkedIn, called ‘10 reasons why you can do semiotics and a
machine can’t’ (Lawes, 2018b). Humans are much better at interpreting
texts and semiotic signs than the technology we have now because:

1 Humans are extremely sensitive to context. A human researcher will tell

you what a semiotic sign means based on the other signs in its vicinity.
Being able to accommodate this variability and context-sensitivity of
meaning is going to take technology a long time to achieve.
2 Human researchers understand irony, and this is especially important in
some cultures, including digital culture. We can’t know the meaning of a
semiotic sign unless we know to what degree the message is serious.
3 Human researchers can detect and interpret simulation. You may recall
that I recommended looking for evidence of simulation as a key technique
in top-down semiotic analysis, in Chapter 5.
4 Machines are only as good as their algorithms. They can learn from
experience, but only from the experiences they have from the present
moment onwards. They don’t go back in time and take classes in
anthropology or the history of art.
5 Humans are good at keeping up with politics and ideological change. The
meaning and nuance of phrases such as ‘Great Britain’ and ‘Make America
Great Again’ ebbs and flows over time and from one occasion to the next.
224 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

6 Because semiotics is very concerned with representation, human

semiologists are sensitive to both the form and the content of images.
They can tell you how consumers will perceive the quality and price of
your brand differently if the orange on the front of your juice packs is
photo-realistic, an artistic illustration or a cartoon.
7 Human semiologists ‘get’ self-conscious and reflexive ideas such as
‘retro’. This might be very important if you are trying to market your
brand to self-aware, fashionable groups of consumers.
8 Humans are aware of, and sensitive to, empty spaces, awkward silences
and other meaningful, non-trivial gaps in data. This type of thing is
currently way beyond the reach of automated semiotic products, which
entirely rely on things being visible and materially present in order for
recognition and sorting to take place.
9 They are poor at understanding human body language and they can’t do
the fast, accurate visual assessments that humans carry out of each other
whenever they meet, which evaluate things like how comfortable a person
is in a given situation and what are their likely motives for being there.
10 Lastly, automatic semiotic products do not grasp semiotic theory. Because
they do not know what semiotic signs are, they cannot distinguish
between signs and items which do not carry meaning. Because they don’t
know what codes are, they can’t perform a functional analysis of the
effect of codes on behaviour. Most of all, they have nothing to say about
representation. If semiotics has one defining characteristic which sets it
apart from neighbours such as ethnography, it is this unique focus on the
act of representation, through which so much meaning is conveyed.
Without semiotic theory, our ability to interpret other humans and their
communications is reduced to the level of a machine.

In the above paragraphs, I’ve talked in detail about what technology cannot
do for semiotics. If we try to make semiotics conform to the technology that
is currently available to us, then we cease to do semiotics altogether and
reduce ourselves to image-sorting exercises that any focus group could have
done better, if not faster. In the final section on technology, immediately
following, I switch focus. Instead of trying to make semiotics fit into
­still-primitive technology, we can instead ask what would happen if we tried
to evolve technology that would support our already superior abilities with
semiotics.
 INDUSTRY DEBATES AND THE FUTURE OF SEMIOTICS 225

Augmented reality and other technological innovations

In 2018 I did a lot of writing and interviews about technology. Editors and
podcasters wanted me to talk about the ways that technology could be
useful to semiologists in the future, if we can find a way to invent the neces-
sary tools. Two examples occurred to me, and it’s now clear to me that they
have something in common. One is an area of technology where we already
have millions of users and a lot of information about how consumers want
to engage with it, which then helps to inform the design of future products.
That area is video games. The other is cutting-edge technology that is not yet
part of most people’s everyday lives. That area is augmented reality and tech
brands are thinking hard about its applications, because consumers need to
see its value and benefits before they will pay for it.
Video gaming is interesting because it is worth $135 billion globally
(Batchelor, 2018). It is a category that excels in customer engagement and it
is yielding vast amounts of quantitative and also qualitative information
about what people want to do with tech. It turns out that people want to do
far more than mindlessly shoot things. They want to build structures that
last, sometimes showing amazing architectural talent (Minecraft, Markus
Persson/Mojang). They want to tell elaborate and richly detailed stories
about the human condition (The Sims, EA Games). They love to explore
large maps and make collections (Far Cry, Ubisoft, and the whole o ­ pen-world
genre of games). All of this strikes me as very similar to what semiologists
usually want to do when we are working. The huge map we are exploring is
a map of ideas rather than physical locations. Semiotics is a life’s work
because it takes forever to explore and fill out the entire map with detail.
Researchers make vast collections of semiotic signs. They use the signs to tell
stories and build structures for their clients. The tech product that semiolo-
gists actually need is therefore similar to the small number of video games
which are the titans in their field; games which represent the best-loved and
most successful products of the gigantic industry in which they compete.
Augmented reality is exciting because although it is still too new for most
consumers to have had first-hand experience with it, developers are very
keen to demonstrate its applications. Google Expeditions is a continually
evolving tool with applications in education; teachers can take pupils on
virtual field trips, exploring locations all over the world from Antarctica to
Machu Pichu (see vr.google.com). Classes now have the opportunity to create
their own virtual reality (VR) expedition by taking a panoramic photo on a
smartphone, uploading it to a Google app and then editing it before sharing
226 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

it with others on a VR platform. The editing aspect is the exciting part for
semiotics. Users can make their panorama interactive by annotating it –
adding photos, commentary, clips of video. The obvious application is
making market research debriefs more exciting, but the most semiotic appli-
cation is that it gives researchers a way of annotating a scene such as a
supermarket aisle or shopping mall. It provides for the researcher to pick out
their own semiotic signs, recognize self-contained texts, make visual notes
and piece together a collage or web of ideas as they begin to recognize codes,
ideological structures and other semiotic elements.
These are some of the ways in which technology can help semiotics to
evolve and become more powerful.

Activity: Technology and your next project in semiotics

If you’ve been working on a semiotic research project throughout this book,
you were ready to debrief your client or stakeholders at the end of the last
chapter. It’s now time to think about what your next project will be like and
plan ahead. Will science figure as an important part of your own semiotic
method, going forward? What role will it play?
How will technology figure in your next project? Will you perhaps focus
on digital culture and online communities? How will you decide whether
your project should include any data and analytic techniques that aren’t
digitized? Are there parts of a project that you would like to automate? If
you could design a low-tech or high-tech tool to help with your work in
semiotics, what would it do?
Take out the journal that you used as you worked through this book and
record your thoughts. Semiotics as a profession is not wholly about waiting
for client briefs to come in. As a semiologist, you have a quantity of freedom
that is not found in all research jobs and the future projects you work on are
partly up to you to shape as you refine your skills and develop your own
research interests.

Cross-cultural variations in semiotics

Here are some ways that your ability with semiotics can improve by e­ ngaging
with writing and publishing which emerges from non-Western cultures and
newer markets for commercial semiotics such as India, China and Latin
America.
 INDUSTRY DEBATES AND THE FUTURE OF SEMIOTICS 227

Even though the version of semiotics which is most widely recognized by

the English-speaking business community emerged from the West, in Europe
and North America, it is much more international than it once was.
Researchers and marketers in many countries are producing home-grown
semiotics, publishing on international platforms and speaking at events.
One clear benefit of paying attention to all this is that you will learn some-
thing about countries and cultures which are not your own. You might learn
nuggets of interesting information about consumers’ lives such as how
younger generations of Chinese consumers understand filial obedience and
loyalty or you might learn of the unique and distinct semiotic codes that give
structure to jewellery advertising in India.
A second way that you will benefit is that you will be exposed to
­non-Western thinkers who have things to say about how Western-style semi-
otic method could be improved. For example, Anirban Chaudhuri had
interesting criticisms of Western semiotic method when he spoke at the
international conference Semiofest, in Mumbai in 2018. Chaudhuri points
out that, in the West, business users of semiotics have been very keen on a
lapsed-dominant-emergent model that explains the fate of semiotic codes
over time. That is, because people want to use semiotics to track and predict
change, it has been a popular trope to speak of codes as experiencing linear
change over time where they are at first new, radical and emergent, later
achieve dominance as they become accepted by the masses and eventually
become ‘lapsed’ or ‘residual’, meaning that they are obsolete and have
dropped off the cultural map. If you read business literature, you will notice
that this exactly replicates the Western business-person’s expectations of
how innovations behave. There are the early adopters, then the innovation
goes mainstream, then finally the laggards get on board, when all the cool,
forward-thinking consumers have dropped away.
The problem with this model of change, seductive as it may be to a Western
research user, is that it might not be straightforwardly true or universally
applicable. It might be somewhat of a culturally specific fiction and particu-
larly unsuited to explaining non-Western cultures and consumer behaviour.
Chaudhuri raises exactly this issue and, like most Indian writers on
­semiotics, refers to a characteristically Indian take on time, which is not
linear but is formed of endlessly repeating cycles of birth, death and rebirth.
Acknowledging this different treatment of time in Hindu thought might
mean that the Western habit of describing linear change over time isn’t going
to work for explaining human lives and society in India – or even at all,
anywhere. Here, we are learning something on two levels. We have learned
something about India – it handles time in this particular way. At the same
228 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

moment we have gained a new way to think critically about what passes for
normal semiotic method in the West. Maybe it has some issues. Maybe we
are writing science fiction when we think in straight lines. This type of puzzle
may be perplexing but it challenges us to develop and improve our own
semiotic practice. It gives us new ways to critically appraise our own work.
Engaging with writing about culture, meaning and representation that
emerges from multiple countries will result in your exposure to a lot of
different types of literature. Some of it will be explicitly semiotic and will
use theory and method in a way that doesn’t disturb the philosophical foun-
dations of a Westernized approach to semiotic research. This literature has
the advantage of being easily understood and used by the global, English-
speaking business community that appreciates a common language, straight
lines and rational explanations.
Some of it will be explicitly semiotic but will apply theory and method in
a very different way, as we see in Anirban Chaudhuri’s ideas about time in
Hindu thought and its implications for tracking social change. See also the
ground-breaking journal Chinese Semiotic Studies, which regularly publishes
papers that challenge Western thinking and practice. In ‘Chinese semiotics
and its possible influence on general semiotic theory in future’ (2009) Li
Youzheng advances the idea that semiotics is itself a product of culture, and
that it could be improved as a discipline by the development of ‘non-western
or eastern semiotics’. This paper, which appeared in the first issue of Chinese
Semiotic Studies, set the stage for this now 14-year-old journal in which
writers from China and other cultures collaboratively build a new semiotics
with an international focus. CSS is published in English for an international
readership. You may also be interested in the International Association for
Semiotic Studies (IASS) and its conference, the World Congress of Semiotics,
the 15th iteration of which took place in Greece in 2022. It is principally an
academic conference but it is deliberately inclusive of national and regional
schools of semiotics from Japan, Latin America, Russia, Finland and other
locations.
Some of the literature you encounter as you engage with questions of
culture, meaning and representation in multiple countries will not be explic-
itly semiotic in its perspective but will still be educational and useful. In
particular, you will be rewarded by reading anthropology and ethnographic
studies. As you know ethnography is not identical to semiotics, taking a
different view of the subject matter it depicts in ethnographic film and writ-
ing but it is so closely related to semiotics that you will not want to miss out
 INDUSTRY DEBATES AND THE FUTURE OF SEMIOTICS 229

on it. Start building a reading list by referring to the anthropology modules

listed on the website of the prestigious School of Oriental and African
Studies in London (soas.ac.uk). You will see that there are modules concern-
ing East and West Africa, Japan, the Middle East and various other world
regions not yet mentioned in this chapter. Following the recommended read-
ing of SOAS will lead you to useful collections of essays such as Perspectives
on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation (Grinker,
Lubkemann and Steiner, 2010) and A Companion to the Anthropology of
Japan (Robertson, 2005) as well as journals of original research which are
published by SOAS, such as the Journal of African Cultural Studies. These
types of anthologies will get your study of a particular world region off to a
quick start and inform the design of your own research. Even though semi-
otics and ethnography differ, no time that the semiologist invests in reading
anthropology and ethnography is wasted.

The semiotics of the future

If you take up semiotics professionally, people will ask you two questions
about the future, which you can answer using the skills in top-down semi-
otic analysis that are offered in Chapter 5. The first question is about future
trends and emerging codes in their own category. If you really catch their
attention with your talk of social change, they’ll ask you the second ques-
tion, which concerns the future of humanity, or civilization, or something on
an equally large scale.

What are the emerging codes in my category?

Asking about changing codes within a single category is understandably a
popular question among buyers and users of semiotic research. They want
to know what kinds of ideas, values and design trends are on their way in,
what does the immediate future look like for wine or sports or confection-
ery? If your project has involved identifying codes and their functions, which
is to say, the norms and versions of reality which they uphold, then you may
be able to organize them in order of their emergence. This will be signifi-
cantly aided if you can get hold of some historical materials at the analysis
stage. Happily, it’s not very difficult to obtain historical examples of adver-
tising which show how brands and product categories have changed. You’ll
230 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

FIGURE 11.1 A means to display the changing status of codes over time

Dominant

code

code code
Lapsed Emergent

Time

soon find that you can produce a visual map or a timeline of codes which
shows how ideas such as ‘baby care’, ‘snacking’ and ‘leisure’ have changed
over time. Codes change because ideas change. As codes change, brands and
campaigns which use them become popular and then eventually drop away,
being replaced by other brands and campaigns. For clients who are very
interested in having a linear story of past-present-future, within a specific
category, I will sometimes convey my ideas about how times are changing
using a map based on the model you see in Figure 11.1.
If this is something your client will value and if your analysis has yielded
a story about change over time that you want to tell, then this kind of map
can be useful. If you have five or six semiotic codes to map, identify the two
most dominant ones first. These are the two which at the time of doing the
research are the most widespread and the most influential with consumers.
Place them in the centre, then arrange your remaining codes on either side
to reflect either their recent appearance or their decline in currency.
In this book I’ve placed strong emphasis on top-down research. If you did
some top-down thinking and you can explain what your codes are for, what
purpose or function they fulfil in society, then you are in a good position to
explain to your client why the map looks the way it does. You are not
limited to describing the shifting weather of semiotic codes, you can point
out causes and effects and make educated predictions about what is coming
next. Your top-down research questions about power, ideology, history, poli-
tics and economics will supply you with the necessary insight.

What is in the future for everyone?

If you tell a good story about change over time, people will ask you to
expand on it. Where is humanity heading? What should we think of our
present climate of social change (there is always social change) and what
should we expect in the future?
 INDUSTRY DEBATES AND THE FUTURE OF SEMIOTICS 231

At the end of Chapter 6 I showed how top-down insights about large-scale

change at the level of society and ideology can be expressed using a tree
shape. This type of diagram is much more complex than the simple arc in
Figure 11.1 and as a result is harder for busy clients to get along with. Its
advantages are that it permits multiple changes to happen at the same time
and its larger structure of branches and twigs gives it a much larger concep-
tual scope. It’s a better tool for having big ideas and getting to big answers
about the society we live in and where it is headed. After a time, semiotics
will inevitably lead you in the direction of these questions.
I must recommend to you that you make your own tree to discover your
own view of social change and our probable future. I am reluctant to influ-
ence its content because you might be on the brink of an important discovery.
I will only say that you may want to consider topics such as virtual reality,
biotechnology and the gradual transformation of the human into a live
stream of data. Some writers are talking about transhumanism (for exam-
ple, see Ranisch and Sorgner, 2014), seemingly a process of using philosophy
to will ourselves out of our bodies, a project that I’ve seen unfolding in
Western culture since the 1990s. I leave it to you to decide how you want to
address these topics and which futures are most interesting to you, in which
parts of the world. If you’re keen to know more about my own views on
these important topics and the likely future for everyone, there are several
chapters of discussion in Using Semiotics in Retail (Lawes, 2022).
This has been a chapter of big topics and big ideas. As you piece together
your story about the many cultures of the world and our place in history,
you will develop a ravenous hunger to know more and to grow your ability
with semiotics. In the next chapter, I share what I know about how to keep
up the momentum and continue developing your skills.
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12

Inspiration
How to continue teaching yourself to do semiotics

WHAT’S COMING UP

Seven ways to get inspired

If you’ve read this whole book, I hope that by now you are very excited
about what you can do with semiotics. Semiotics can become a life-long
project, in which you feed your mind with new insights and experiences
and as a result your analytic abilities grow stronger. This chapter isn’t a
reading list, nor is it an exhaustive collection of everything that could ever
stimulate your thinking. It is a curated guide to the types of media I
consume and the types of experiences that I go out of my way to have. I
pursue these things because I’ve found that they add to my stock of general
knowledge of the world’s cultures, they stimulate creative and analytical
thinking and sometimes they have answers to semiotic questions. I share
them with you here so that you can design your own plan of action.
If you take up this style of investigation as an ongoing project,
everything you learn will sooner or later find a business application. I offer
lots of examples throughout this chapter. Pursue as many or as few as you
like, depending on what appeals to you and add your own items to this list
as you go along; there’s really no wrong way to proceed.

1 Product design and architecture.

2 Visual art and graphic design.
3 Entertainment media: cinema, TV, gaming.
234 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

4 Fiction.
5 Journalism and other non-fiction.
6 The social sciences and humanities.
7 Travel and other physical experiences.

1 Product design and architecture

I had been with Dorothy all day and the afternoon was drawing to a close.
We were wandering around the homewares in a large department store and
Dorothy was pointing out various items that suit her taste. Of all the days
of consumer research I’ve ever done, it was the one in which I heard the
word ‘quirky’ the most times. I gradually came to understand the heuristic
that Dorothy uses when she appraises homewares. Encountered on a shop-
ping trip, an item such as a set of cutlery or a serving dish most likely belongs
to one of three categories:

●● Normal
The item might be quite premium or it might be at the affordable end of
the market; either way, it defers to conventional design and classic good
taste. Wine glasses look like standard wine glasses and plates are round
and white. This type of thing does not suit Dorothy’s taste. She is looking
for something a bit different.
●● Extreme
Novelty items and extreme examples of any design style but especially
modernism. Tableware in asymmetrical, angular shapes. Water bottles
with mechanisms so novel and advanced that the shopper cannot
immediately see how they work. This type of thing is outside of Dorothy’s
comfort zone.
●● Quirky
Comfortably in the middle between ‘normal’ and ‘extreme’. This is
Dorothy’s happy place. Whether it’s a decorative tea tray, a bread bin or
a spice rack, Dorothy is pleased when a product demonstrates enough
unusual design features to break out of the category ‘normal’ but without
going too far. Usually one convention-breaking design feature is enough.

I learned a lot from Dorothy that afternoon about her enthusiastic partici-
pation in consumerism, her need to belong and the circle of taste that she
 INSPIRATION: HOW TO CONTINUE TEACHING YOURSELF TO DO SEMIOTICS 235

has drawn around herself and her home. She has gathered things around her
which are interesting and which favour a mild form of modernism over
traditionalism but which are very unlikely to be divisive or provoke negative
comment. There are insights here, not just for makers of homewares, but
also for anyone who wants to innovate.
Not every innovation needs to be the cause of seismic changes in society.
Sometimes you just want consumers to start choosing your new product
over the item they normally buy. There are a lot of people out there like
Dorothy who enjoy shopping and trying new things but who don’t like radi-
cal change. To satisfy these conservative and cautiously experimental
consumers, identify the design conventions that apply in your category and
break just one rule. Don’t go over the top and break them all. One will do.
Although most consumers don’t have a large vocabulary for design, taking
an interest in it yourself helps with semiotics and gives you extra interpretative
resources when you encounter notable objects and products out in the field.
Go to design exhibitions or read industry journals such as Design Week and
you will see how product and furniture design, art and architecture fit together.
Over time, you’ll be able to recognize sturdy American Shaker furniture;
examples of Art Deco such as the indoor swimming pool that agency Fitch
designed for British holiday camp Butlins (see Dawood, 2019); mid-century
modernism in a refrigerator; a French nouveau table lamp. You will be able to
recognize the elaborate, geometric patterns of Islamic art, understand the
importance of rugs in cultures where people walk around at home in bare feet
and why cane furniture such as the planter’s chair commonly seen in India
makes sense in hot weather (for example, see Nandan and Gupta, 2018).
Architecture is closely linked to design and has come up quite a lot in this
book, as I’ve referred to buildings in the United States, Germany, Thailand
and various other locations. While it’s always a privilege to be able to visit
great works of architecture in person, you can gain a lot from going to exhi-
bitions and reading about architecture as well as taking walking tours when
you find yourself in a new city. The modest amount of knowledge of archi-
tecture that I’ve been able to amass has helped me to provide lucid semiotic
commentary on everything from consumers’ bathroom fittings to the experi-
ences created by shopping malls.

2 Visual art and graphic design

Art and graphic design are vast fields of human endeavour and they will
show you countless, previously unimagined, ways of looking at the world.
236 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

The space available here is constrained so I’m going to use it selectively to

share a tiny handful of experiences that changed everything for me.

Graphic design from North Korea

North Korean graphic design is hypnotizing, occasionally beautiful and
shows fantasy triumphing over reality. It favours paintings and drawings
over photography. Everything, from propaganda posters to the label on a
can of flatfish, is rendered in a naïve and wholesome style, using simple lines
and a palette of sunny colours. Smiling factory workers, housewives, cows,
tomatoes: all seem frozen in time. The Democratic People’s Republic of
Korea was formed by Kim Il-sung in 1948, closing its doors to outside influ-
ences. Culturally, it was a closed shop. Unaffected by Western or global
design trends, everyday design seems caught in a time bubble. Boxes of
candy are decorated with thick, bright paintings of roses that look as though
they were made in the late 1940s but could be any time between then and
now. Postcards show state buildings and farms rendered in simple, angular
shapes that are similar to modernist design in Soviet Russia, except stripped
of any darkness or aggression. The sun shines. Fields are green and skies are
blue. Even war scenes are as tame as they are heroic, as comforting as they
are thrilling. Any brand wanting to appear non-threatening and cosy or
wanting to deploy a mid-20th-century ‘retro’ look for Western consumers
will find the design of this region to be a treasury of semiotic signs.
Nicholas Bonner is a collector of North Korean graphic design and has
led tours into the DPRK over many decades. His collection was recently
exhibited with the title Made in North Korea: Everyday Graphics from the
DPRK and the lasting result is a book of the same name (Bonner, 2017). The
exhibition is also fairly well supported with online resources (see the Phaidon
website).

Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa is an African-American artist whose seven-minute film Love is
the Message, The Message is Death has been touring art museums interna-
tionally since it was made in 2016. It is a gut-wrenching seven minutes. It is
African-American culture authentically depicted from the inside. It is a song
of mourning for those we have lost. It is rare, early footage of the rap artist
and gifted poet Biggie Smalls, who was killed in a drive-by shooting, aged
24. It is Obama singing Amazing Grace. It is Martin Luther King Jr. It is
 INSPIRATION: HOW TO CONTINUE TEACHING YOURSELF TO DO SEMIOTICS 237

frightened adults and children who were ordinary citizens, not touched by
fame, experiencing violent police intervention. It is a film about Black people
who are permitted to succeed as athletes and entertainers, who are even
venerated by mainstream America, at the very same time that racism and
violence persist.
Love is the Message has been extensively reviewed. In the art blog,
Hyperallergic, Seph Rodney (2017) describes the experience of viewing the
film on a large screen in a dedicated space in an art museum. He says that
when the film finished, nobody moved. Everyone remained riveted to their
seats. The film started again. He also tells readers that everyone should know
that it is OK to cry during this film. I was glad of this advice when I read it,
even though it came slightly too late. I had already seen Love is the Message,
at which time I wept uncontrollably and took more than 30 minutes to
recover. Nate Freeman gives a thoughtful discussion of Love is the Message
in ARTnews (2018). Freeman also notes that when he saw it, people cried.
It’s hard to imagine how anyone could fail to benefit from seeing it but I have
to recommend it as essential viewing for semiologists, who are interested in
the relationship between visual communications and emotional impact.

Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky is a contemporary German photographer, best known for
his large-format photographs of groups or even multitudes of humans inter-
acting with built environments, urban culture and natural settings. Over a
40-year career, he has produced gigantic, sharply detailed panoramas of
Amazon workers in a fulfilment centre; financial traders at the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange; ceremonial gymnastic displays in North Korea; shop-
pers in a vast 99-cent store. His photographs of shoppers have the most
obvious lessons for the commercial semiologist but all of his photographs
offer one or another insight into the human condition.
99 Cent (1999, and see also 99 Cent II Diptychon, 2001), is a photo-
graph which shows a supermarket interior from the perspective of a security
camera placed at ceiling height. The store is bathed in artificial light. There
is no natural daylight and no windows. There are no clocks. The aisles are
unbroken, stretching from one side of these gigantic photographs to the
other. There are no doors. There is no escape from the supermarket.
The aisles are lined by fixtures which are stuffed full of packaged goods,
mainly confectionery, snacks and carbonated drinks. In the foreground we
can detect the brands KitKat and Rolo. At shelf level, all the brands are
238 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

making a lot of noise and competing for attention. Various shoppers are in
the aisles, inspecting the products. From this angle, they look like rats caught
in a maze, the unwitting subjects of a psychological experiment. They are
shoppers; exercising their free will, enjoying their freedom of choice. They
are absorbed in their task. One of the messages of this art work might be
that their freedom is illusory. Whether you are interested in the free will and
agency of the consumer or whether you are simply interested in designing
packs that stand out on shelf, 99 Cent is unmissable and one of the defining
photographs of the turn of the century.

3 Entertainment media: Cinema, TV, gaming

As with the art in the previous section, there’s a whole world to explore here
and not many words in which to do it, so I offer just a couple of things that
I would not want to have been without on my journeys in semiotics.

Japanese horror
Audition (1999) is a Japanese horror movie directed by Takashi Miike. It is
the story of a couple. One party is a middle-aged man named Shigeharu
Aoyama; a lonely widower. The other is a disturbed young woman named
Asami Yamazaki. Aoyama idolizes Asami but he also deceives and objecti-
fies her. Asami is beautiful and fragile but also a vicious murderer and
torturer. She takes her revenge on her lover.
Western culture has had an ongoing love affair with the horror movie; in
recent years we’ve been obsessed with zombies and these creatures have also
found their way into countless novels and video games. If you are a Western
reader of this book, you may think you know what horror looks like. In that
case, look closely at Japanese horror, because it will teach you something
about itself and about the variety of horror which you grow at home.
Western horror movies are very focused on action. Stories move forward
quickly and the horror element can be very physical, with zombies taking
bites out of each other or people fighting with heavy weapons. While
zombies are not strictly products of nature, they usually function as a meta-
phor for real-world problems such as mob mentality and epidemics of
disease. In contrast, Japanese horror movies are much more about psycho-
logical horror and suspense. There may be lengthy dream sequences and
mirages, characters hallucinate and supernatural elements such as ghosts are
drawn from traditional Japanese myth and folklore.
 INSPIRATION: HOW TO CONTINUE TEACHING YOURSELF TO DO SEMIOTICS 239

East meets West in the Resident Evil franchise of video games by Shinji
Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara for Capcom (1996–2019), a long-running
series of games with Japanese characteristics such as puzzles which the
player must solve and an intricate, episodic narrative alongside a zombie
theme which excites Western consumers. Japanese horror poses questions
for the semiologist about why people fear certain things and it shows very
clearly how Japanese ideas of gripping storytelling are different from
Western conventions, which has to be interesting to anyone who works with
advertising or is required to tell brand stories.

Moral dilemmas in American TV drama

Breaking Bad (2008–13) is a crime drama series set in New Mexico. It is a
neo-Western drama, meaning that it is a contemporary version of the once-
popular genre of films that concerned gun-slinging cowboys in the Wild
West of late 19th-century America. Now that Westerns have declined in
popularity, the South-western region is an unusual setting to a TV-viewing
audience that has become used to seeing stories set in glamorous New York
or Los Angeles. As well as reviving some of the conventions of the Western,
Breaking Bad drew on another US tradition, that of large-scale landscape
painting, this time captured with a camera. Depictions of landscapes are an
important part of American history and were a way for white settlers to
describe their new home. The vast, colour-saturated skies, red rock forma-
tions and expanses of yellow sand seem to go on for ever. On the one hand,
they are a visual metaphor for the seemingly endless possibilities and ambi-
tions of the white settler, at the same time the enormous sky above, the sand
below and the oppressive, shimmering heat form a kind of open prison for
Breaking Bad’s main characters.
Almost limitless freedom combined with tight constraint are the essence
of the moral dilemmas faced by those characters. It is a story of moral decay
that occurs over many months as a seemingly mild-mannered, law-abiding
chemistry teacher gradually becomes a feared drug lord. The constraint on
anti-hero Walter White is that he is dying of cancer. Pressure is added in the
form of a family who will struggle economically after his death unless he
can find a way to provide for them. The freedom that White experiences is
also his cancer. Knowing that he has only a short time to live, the inhibitions
and moral constraints which would normally result in cautious and legal
behaviour are released. He begins to cook methamphetamine and eventu-
ally finds ways to justify exterminating people who are obstructing his
business affairs.
240 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Alongside freedom and constraint, the themes of Breaking Bad include

the meaning of family and the ability of the individual to know right from
wrong. It has this in common with TV series such as The Sopranos and
Nurse Jackie which also represent some of the best that contemporary
American drama has to offer and which are full of insights into the culture
and moral values of that nation. These are rich resources for semiologists
within the US or outside it, shedding light on the issues that American audi-
ences think are important.

4 Fiction
Dame Blanche is the name given to a certain dessert in the Netherlands and
Belgium. It is a delicious but uncomplicated dish consisting of vanilla ice
cream topped with whipped cream. I learned of it while in the Netherlands
researching Dutch food culture. The thing to know about Dutch cooking is
that it is relatively plain. Even though elaborate confections may be created
to celebrate special occasions, everyday Dutch cuisine is unpretentious.
Meat with a side of potato. Stews with only two or three ingredients. It’s
quite different from cooking in France and exemplifies a Dutch opinion
that things which are direct and straightforward are better than things
which are fussy.
While in the Netherlands, I used my spare time to read The Dinner, a
novel by Dutch author Herman Koch (2009). It sold a million copies across
Europe. It concerns the predicament of two middle-class couples; one of
the men, Serge, is an ambitious politician on the brink of an election. It
transpires that their teenage sons have been involved in a crime, an event
which now makes demands on their responsibilities as parents. Much of
the action centres around a fraught dinner attended by the four adults. The
two men are brothers and not on particularly good terms. One of the men,
Paul, is also the narrator and he gives the reader a harsh and unflattering
account of Serge. In Paul’s opinion, Serge exemplifies ‘the despicable boor-
ishness of these Dutch people’. He assumes that everyone must like him, if
he likes them. He takes everything at face value and cannot see below the
surface of things.
Through the character of Paul, author Koch returns repeatedly to food to
emphasize Serge’s failings as well as those of the other characters. In Paul’s
view, Serge is the kind of man who raves about French cheese and then eats
Boursin, which Paul regards as a fake product for uneducated foreigners.
 INSPIRATION: HOW TO CONTINUE TEACHING YOURSELF TO DO SEMIOTICS 241

When eating dessert at an exclusive restaurant, Serge orders dame blanche.

It ‘had to do with his lack of imagination … In fact, I had been surprised to
see such a straightforward dessert on the menu in this place.’
Of course, this is a novel with a twist and the reader will later discover
that Paul is a far more morally dubious character than Serge. However, for
a semiologist interested in Dutch food culture, the novel has much to offer,
no matter who turns out to be the real villain of the story. Koch understands
Dutch and French ideas about food very well; cheese, desserts, meals of
potatoes and gravy all serve as powerful semiotic signs which exist to display
characters, their ideas of normal behaviour and their petty prejudices. A
Wikipedia search for Dutch dishes will yield factual descriptions of dame
blanche and also recipes but it will not tell you what the dame blanche
means, what it is capable of meaning. If your work in semiotics causes you
to travel, read the popular novels of the region. If you are trying to under-
stand another generation, read their fiction, which describes the world as
they see it.
It’s not my opinion that a person can be good at semiotics and an intel-
lectual snob at the same time. It is not necessary to restrict yourself to
reading difficult literature just because you are capable of understanding it.
If you want some insight into how consumers think, read what they read. If
you are really finding a genre of fiction too far outside of your taste, read
commentary and discussion of that genre. Romance novels outsell most
other genres, whether they are Fifty Shades of Grey by former television
producer and writer of fan fiction, E L James, which sold over 100 million
copies, or a work by Danielle Steel. Steel has authored 146 novels and is one
of the best-selling fiction authors of all time. Romantic fiction is not my idea
of pleasurable reading but I am determined not to be a snob about it and I
had enormous rewards from reading two books which analyse the genre.
One is Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades, a collection of critical essays specifically
concerning Fifty Shades of Grey, edited by Lori Perkins (2012). Another is
Reading the Romance by Janice Radway (1984). Reading the Romance is
an exemplary work of sociology and a study of an under-researched
phenomenon. Radway interviewed dozens of romance readers in a working-
class American community and gives an analysis of their reading habits and
their favourite books which is respectful and academically fruitful.
If some work of literature is popular with consumers, read it, or at the
very least, read about it. Fiction is too rich in semiotic signs and accompany-
ing semiotic analysis to miss out on.
242 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

5 Journalism and other non-fiction

I love books by journalists and other kinds of mass-market non-fiction, and
so do many of the consumers you are researching. In publishing circles,
non-fiction is recognized as a popular and profitable category. In literary
and academic circles, it is regarded with concern and even disdain. Sam
Leith is the literary editor of The Spectator magazine. In 2018, he published
an opinion piece in The Guardian, titled ‘Why yet more books about Nazis
and the future make my heart sink’. He despairs over what he sees as a
bloated category:

The large number of books that make confident predictions about the future,
that offer totalising explanations about how we reached the here and now
(it’s all down to genes, or one commodity, or 12 key battles), that promise to
encapsulate the human condition in 356 friendly pages, that give you an easy-
to-grasp handle on the basic laws of the universe, or that offer a formula for
transformative personal change.

Other writers, especially academics, sometimes dislike popular science and

science journalism, because it often fails to be transparent about research
methods (crucial for evaluating the validity of a study), lapses into anecdote
and is prone to losing sight of the need to be objective. For me, the way to
acknowledge and recognize these criticisms without turning away from all
that journalism and non-fiction have to offer is to regard the whole category
as another branch of fiction. You’ll recall the discussion in earlier chapters
about the semiologist’s dilemma over how to treat potentially interesting
literature. You can treat it as a true account of the world and therefore as an
explanatory resource or you can treat it as a cultural product and therefore
in need of semiotic investigation. I prefer the latter strategy for journalism
and mass-market non-fiction which is not required to fit itself to the proto-
cols of academic research.
Treating non-fiction as a branch of fiction gives me the opportunity to
particularly enjoy gonzo journalism. Gonzo is the name given to a style of
journalism where the writer is expected to perform thoughtful analysis but
attempts at objectivity are dropped. The writer becomes part of the story
they are relating and tells the reader about their own, first-hand experience,
in the first person. Barbara Ehrenreich is an American journalist who went
under cover to investigate the reality of life as a low-wage worker, taking a
series of jobs as a hotel chambermaid, a domestic cleaner and retail assis-
tant. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) details her
 INSPIRATION: HOW TO CONTINUE TEACHING YOURSELF TO DO SEMIOTICS 243

struggles to survive over the months, while experiencing the physical

demands and daily humiliations of low-wage, low-status work. It set a
benchmark for journalistic investigations of Western poverty cultures and
was followed by the excellent Hard Work by Polly Toynbee (2003) and by
the more recent Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by
James Bloodworth (2019). As a set, they paint a vivid picture of the lives of
the working poor in affluent, English-speaking countries.
Ehrenreich authored another dozen books besides Nickel and Dimed.
Her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the
World (2009) uses her own breast cancer and resulting contact with health-
care services as a platform from which to launch a critical investigation of
the rhetoric of positive thinking. As I composed the last sentence, I almost
wrote that the book is ‘courageous’ and then stopped myself because this is
just what Ehrenreich is talking about when she describes the way that people
with cancer are encouraged, patronized and ultimately oppressed by the
cheery dialogue of people who do not have cancer. Cancer is not a battle, she
says. You can’t courageously beat cancer with positive thinking. What’s
more, an epidemic of unwarranted positive thinking might be what causes
global financial crises. Reading this type of literature tends to lead to more
in a similar vein until you have consumed nearly everything in print on low
wage work, positive thinking, narcissism, Generation Z or whatever the
topics du jour happen to be. Doing this will not make you an expert on these
subjects but it will make you an expert on the way they are being written
about, which in semiotics is exactly the type of thing that we want to study.

6 The social sciences and humanities

Every year, new books by academics appear in categories that are the life-
blood of semiotics. Psychology, sociology, socio-linguistics, anthropology,
cultural studies, social geography, history and philosophy all offer more of
an education and more exciting intellectual adventures than one can
complete in a lifetime. As I survey my own reading habits in this area, I can
see that I’m drawn to the ability of academic research to explain how people
behave and cope when they are under stress. When people are stressed, their
feelings show, their values become very important to them, and they try to
manage their social relationships and their place in the world. If you are
selling to consumers, then you are selling to people. You can learn a lot
about your customers by taking a close look at how people deal with chal-
lenging situations.
244 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

If you follow politics and political debate, perhaps you have noticed that
when people are confronted with evidence that contradicts their firmly held
opinions, they often become even more entrenched in their position rather
than relaxing their views. You aren’t imagining it and if you want to know
more about how it happens, take a look at When Prophecy Fails by the
legendary social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues Henry
Riecken and Stanley Schachter. It was first published in 1956 and has lost
none of its explanatory power. You have encountered Festinger if you’ve
heard of cognitive dissonance, a widely-used psychological term describing
an uncomfortable state wherein an individual holds conflicting beliefs or
items of knowledge. When Prophecy Fails reports on what happened when a
team of researchers, led by Festinger, managed to join a small doomsday cult
in the United States. The group firmly believed that the end of the world was
nigh and were able to specify an exact date, a few months hence, when there
would be a terrible flood and aliens would arrive to airlift the members of this
select group to safety. Needless to say, neither the flood nor the aliens appeared
and many of the group members coped with this disconfirmation of their
beliefs by strengthening them rather than abandoning them. Among a few,
there was increased proselytizing, a redoubled attempt to share their beliefs
with the world.
Festinger’s analysis of the situation has many interesting features; just
one is that outcomes for individuals seemed to vary depending on whether
they had any social support from other group members following the emer-
gence of clear evidence that the world had not ended. Those who had no
social support in the following days were more prone to giving up their
beliefs or else keeping them but with residual doubt and confusion. Those
who had a lot of social support from other group members in that crucial
period were also those who emerged from the experience with seemingly
intact beliefs, expressed more strongly and to a wider audience. As semiolo-
gists, the most interesting part of When Prophecy Fails is not the cognitive
psychology but the social behaviour and especially the patterns of commu-
nication. As marketers or researchers of consumer culture, the attractive
part has to be the demonstration of how people preserve and sustain their
opinions and become public advocates for certain ideas when they receive
social support for those beliefs, even in the presence of contradictory facts.
No wonder brands are so keen to create communities among their consum-
ers, the better to create proselytizing believers.
 INSPIRATION: HOW TO CONTINUE TEACHING YOURSELF TO DO SEMIOTICS 245

Let’s jump forward 50 years for one more example of the exciting and
compelling writing that has emerged from academia. Why Love Hurts: A
Sociological Explanation was published in 2012. Eva Illouz investigates
romantic disappointment and pain as it is experienced in the present day, in
countries which include France, the United States, Israel and Germany. She
gives an informed account of how ‘character’ gave way to ‘personality’ as
one facet of the heightened individualism in Western culture in the post-war
20th century. She describes how the economy of romantic choice changed.
Once, the driver of that economy was female reserve – modesty and unavail-
ability for sexual congress outside of marriage. Later, it was replaced by a
different driver: male detachment.
The evidence for this, says Illouz, is an abundance of modern ideas such
as ‘commitment phobia’ and modern cultural practices such as the enact-
ment of romantic disappointment. That is, if you go on a disappointing date
with someone you met online, you may keep it to yourself and think no
more about it, or you may choose to discuss it with others, post about it on
your blog, interpret it using the culturally available language of the day. In
2019, you may change your Tinder profile to say things like ‘no mind games’
and ‘no drama’ and ‘tired of having my heart broken’. You may start to
frame your experience using psychological notions such as ‘compatibility’.
You may use regionally specific ideology such as the Anglo-American idea
that romantic partners should be fully transparent to each other and keep
no secrets. You may use terms and concepts which have emerged from digi-
tal culture. You might say of a romantic disappointment, ‘he ghosted me’ or
you might say ‘catfished’ or ‘gaslighting’ to describe the exact nature of the
problem. Some of these things were not problems a century ago and are still
not problems in non-Western cultures. Some of them have become problems
only within the last 10 or 15 years.
The insights offered by Illouz are interesting in their own right, because
they reveal something about people, and they help to explain phenomena
such as the present-day romantic novels which become international best-
sellers. If you sell entertainment, if you sell therapy or self-help, or if your
product is a platform such as Tinder which attracts people in search of
romantic opportunities, Illouz’s work has obvious applications. More than
that, if you work in advertising or if you are ever going to want to tell a
brand story which captures the universal yet culturally specific experience of
being in love, then Why Love Hurts opens a window on what turns out to
be, after all, a public and not particularly private experience.
246 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

7 Travel and other physical experiences

What are the most unusual days out you’ve ever had? Have you ever found
yourself in an unexpected place or situation? What did you make of it and
how did you cope? I never thought I would visit any of the Disney theme
parks because if I’m taking a holiday from work I will usually default to
places that have more historic architecture and fewer children. Despite this,
I spent a full week at The Walt Disney World Resort in Florida with a young
relative. It was a thoroughly immersive experience: we stayed on site at one
of the resort’s more premium hotel complexes, one with a Polynesian theme.
We had our pictures taken in front of the Cinderella castle, at which time a
staff member helpfully showed us how to strike a dramatic pose. We were
transfixed by a spectacular parade of characters from Disney films, only
some of which I recognized. We left the resort only once, when we ducked
out to visit the competitor offering of Universal Studios, just down the road.
By this time I was thoroughly soaked in the micro-culture of Disney and in
comparison Universal Studios seemed adult, edgy, almost anarchic. We rode
rollercoasters that threw us up and down slopes at impossible angles, having
patiently done the extra queuing that secures a seat in the front row. We
screamed and cheered on a sidewalk as the Bluesmobile swung into view.
The vehicle we were cheering for was a sedan car driven by two actors
who were not the Blues Brothers, fictional characters portrayed by Dan
Ackroyd and John Belushi in the classic comedy of the same name, directed
by John Landis and released in 1980. The actors were semiotic signs. Dressed
up as the popular fictional characters, they stood in for those characters and
were the recipients of ecstatic applause. The film itself, if you haven’t seen it,
is worth it. It concerns the re-formation of a fictional rhythm and blues band
and features James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles,
Cab Calloway and other giants of mid-20th-century American music. It’s
semiotically interesting that none of these virtuosos takes the lead roles in
the film and that Ackroyd and Belushi, while being gifted comedy actors,
exhibit no special musical ability. My young companion and I had joined a
crowd in cheering for two actors who were pretending to be two other
actors who were pretending to be musicians. The people driving the car
were not dressed up as James Brown or Aretha Franklin and of course the
originals are no longer alive to participate. Multiple semiotic signs, all work-
ing together to produce meaning, were layers deep. Any material ­reality
sitting beyond those layers of representation was far out of reach. Both
theme parks, in their different ways, created a sealed bubble of e­ xperience in
 INSPIRATION: HOW TO CONTINUE TEACHING YOURSELF TO DO SEMIOTICS 247

which nothing was real and semiotic signs, from Mickey Mouse ears to a
sedan car driven by men in black suits, were all that mattered.
I began to realize, in a very personal and first-hand way, why the post-
modern theorist Jean Baudrillard had wanted to write about Disney. These
immensely profitable palaces of leisure and tourism sell semiotic signs and
they sell meaning. They don’t sell the ‘real’ Mickey Mouse because he
never existed and they don’t sell actual Aretha Franklin because she is no
longer with us.
This type of activity, which may present itself as part of your leisure time,
is an opportunity for participant observation and semiotic thinking. Disney
resorts would not have been my first choice if I were planning a holiday for
myself but semiotics has taught me to say yes to opportunities for new expe-
riences and activities, even and especially if they are outside of the sort of
thing I would normally do. I learned a great deal from Disney and Universal
about how totally unnecessary the real world can be if you can connect with
consumers at the level of their memories or emotions. If you can bring to life
items linked to nostalgia for childhood or young adulthood, or convert
much-loved entertainment media into living flesh, then the fact that you
don’t have much to sell which is tangible or has any practical utility is no
barrier to either profit or brand loyalty.
If you have a career in marketing, your work may have taken you to lots
of different places around the world. In Chapter 7 I talked about how to
design travel into your semiotic research in the form of field trips. There I
gave advice about how to become alert to unusual features of the local envi-
ronment, whether it is a faux 19th-century sweet shop or a glittering
monument to capitalism. I offered some critical questions and prompts
which stimulate semiotic thinking, such as ‘where have I seen this before?’
and ‘where there is choice, there is meaning’. Use these tools for thinking
whenever travel for leisure purposes presents itself to you. Say yes to every-
thing, even experiences which you are not sure you will like or which you
suspect were not designed for you. If you take your semiotic tools with you,
you will see why some of the most vibrant writing in semiotics emerges from
the willingness of writers to engage with seemingly the most superficial
aspects of popular culture and mass culture.
This chapter has been about the many types of media and experiences
which anyone can use to stimulate their semiotic thinking, strengthen their
analytic abilities and ultimately become better at marketing. Of necessity,
there are many things I had to leave out. Perhaps your imagination and
critical thinking are set alight by other cultural forms such as sport, music,
248 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

theatre, poetry or crafts. If you keep at your side the various tools for think-
ing which are presented in this book, then no human cultural endeavour will
disappoint you. There’s almost nothing you could be personally interested in
or pursue as a hobby which will not turn out to be packed with semiotic
signs, binary oppositions and other items of treasure as soon as you start
looking for them.
On that happy note, the first edition of this book reaches its conclusion.
I hope that you use this chapter and everything which precedes it to plan
your own adventures in semiotics and at the same time become a skilled
marketer of brands. As you continue on a path which you will now make
your own, you may enjoy using the supplementary resources which accom-
pany this book. Further tools and materials that will help you design and
implement your own projects in semiotics can be found on the website of
this book’s publisher, Kogan Page, and on my own website and social
media. I hope that semiotics brings you both business success and personal
joy and fulfilment. Supporting marketers and researchers as they pursue
that quest is my own, ongoing project. The new chapters of the second
edition of this book start on the next page.
 249

13

Consumer needs in the 2020s

WHAT’S COMING UP
This is the first of three new chapters which describe an important change
in consumer culture. If you sell to customers who are part of Western
culture or are in countries where Western and especially US culture exerts
an influence on people’s shopping behaviour and attitudes to brands, this
change affects you. It is such a large change that even though I have
managed to simplify it for your convenience, there remain three different
lenses through which we can look at our businesses and our customers. I
have called these lenses ‘metamodernism’, ‘sincerity’ and ‘feelings’. We’ll
take a look through each lens in this and the following chapters.
This chapter, specifically, is about new consumer needs. Needs (and
wants, desires and impulses) emerge afresh when society and culture
undergo a big change. In these pages, I’ll show the new and emerging
needs that cluster around metamodernism, sincerity and feelings. By the
end of this chapter, you will be able to:

●● Describe cultural change. Confidently use the key terms and phrases
which thought leaders have identified as central, as we collectively
attempt to explain what is going on.
●● Identify at least eight distinct needs that are particularly important to
younger generations and visualize how marketers may respond.
●● Connect changes that you’ve noticed in daily life, such as people telling
each other to be kind, to deep insights concerning your customers’
priorities, beliefs, ambitions and pain points.
●● Define sincerity and explain why it has overtaken authenticity.
●● Empathize with consumers as they experience and share their feelings.
Recognize feelings as different from ‘emotion’ and ‘sentiment’ and know
what you should do about that difference.
250 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Metamodernism
Western culture has changed. People want different stuff. They mostly
know what they want.
The purpose of this book and hence this small section is to help you develop
as a consumer insight specialist and make the brands that you work on more
successful. Success, which most business owners think of primarily in terms
of profit, crucially depends on certain pillars, of which consumer insight is
one. It is non-negotiable that we understand our present and future custom-
ers, learning as much as possible about their changing moods and priorities.
If you already have marketing and market research experience, then you
may have noticed, in recent years, a changed mood and tone in Western
culture and also global consumer culture, which is rather soaked in Western
individualist ideas, mainly from the United States. The US is not only an
economic superpower but is powerful in propagating its ideas and values.

●● People urge each other to be kind. Brands do this too – perhaps including
yours – and sometimes even the state gets involved, for example it’s been
a theme in poster campaigns overseen by the Mayor of London and
Transport for London in the UK.
●● Feelings are of prime importance. It’s not acceptable to hurt each other’s
feelings. It’s not funny. Feelings are involuntary, live deep inside the body
and give rise to identities. Confessing and sharing feelings is regarded as
an important way to bond with other humans and show a willingness to
communicate.
●● People are very concerned with identity, as an individual characteristic
and a group membership. This connects to social justice movements
which try to elevate and share stories from people whose identities are
considered to be marginalized (for example, non-traditional gender iden-
tities, minority ethnic groups).
●● People are suspicious of brands and large organizations as much as ever,
but their expectations have risen regarding how these entities ought to
behave. For example, they should express values that are mission-aligned
and be demonstrably working towards making the world a better place.
●● People seem quite committed to the project of trying to be happy, despite
and perhaps because of massive challenges such as war, pandemics and
economic instability. Negativity is frowned on, and younger consumers
exhibit a taste for cute and wholesome content.
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 251

Metamodernism is a word that comes out of academia that has various

useful functions.

1 Number 1 for our purposes as marketers is that it describes this whole

phenomenon in the West, because all the above items and more are
connected. It gives an overall name to what’s going on.
2 The number 2 function is that it offers reasons why this cultural change
has happened. Putting this in as few words as possible: new generations
saw something they disliked in the postmodern culture of their parents,
so they fixed it. They like the ability of a postmodern perspective to see
through nonsense but even so, they found it needlessly snarky, alienating
(a form of loneliness, being disconnected from other humans), all talk
and no action, and failing to offer any hope of redemption or vision of a
better world. So they invented something better and committed to it.
3 The number 3 function is that it can be viewed as recommending how to
engage with people – an assessment that is achieved partly through pure
theory and partly through analysis of the sorts of media and messages
that people occupying this habitus seem to like. That third part is what
we’ll concisely inspect here. The language of metamodern theory can be
a bit technical but that’s no reason why you and I should miss out on key
insights, so here I break it down as simply as possible without skipping
anything. Here are four hallmarks of metamodernism, as found in cultural
products such as literature, digital entertainment, social media, online
communities and of course brands and marketing.

Hallmarks of metamodernism
In this section, I point out four pillars of metamodernism. Individually and
together, they say something about the expectations and cultural output of
your customers who are younger and/or very engaged with Western indi-
vidualism, which permeates much of consumer culture. These pillars are
very important. If you get into reading about metamodernism, beyond this
book, you will find these four themes popping up wherever you look. I
introduce them now as a way of getting a handle on emerging consumer
needs, but we will revisit all of them in Chapters 14 and 15, where we find
out how they apply to business models, brands and marketing comms.
252 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

COLLAPSING DISTANCE
People – consumers, your customers – don’t like being talked at. I’m sure
you’ve experienced this already – metamodern culture is not entirely a revo-
lution but builds on social change that has been rumbling for a long time.
People are suspicious of brands, of governments and state institutions, and
lately they are also suspicious of charities and of experts because they are
seen as representing the interests of the establishment and the elite. They
would rather talk than listen to your ads talk.
On top of this, the global economy is changing. Real-world economies
contract when there are pandemics, wars and changes of political regimes.
At the same time, digital culture keeps expanding. Technological innovation
continues. Businesses become more efficient. Traditional lines of work such
as delivery courier, traffic cop, retail cashier, waiter and train driver gradu-
ally become automated and jobs in those sectors are lost. New occupations
emerge. People become self-employed social media influencers and diversity
educators. The number of software developers increases year on year. I
wrote quite a lot about the future of work and economic activity in Using
Semiotics in Retail (Lawes, 2022).
This is why some very clear wants and needs have emerged. Consumers
want to close the gap between:

●● People without much money or power and people with a lot.

●● Experts such as doctors, and lay people who are experts on their own
lived experience.
●● People who work and people who own the means of production.
●● Remote, distant celebrities and intimate friends.
●● Feelings and reality.
●● Reality and the conventional, sanitized world presented in ads.

There are lots of ways to collapse distance in your business and marketing,
with examples coming up in these chapters. In general, you can do your bit
to collapse distance by speaking to your consumers as peers: don’t talk
down to them, but on a level. Give them as many chances as possible to feed
back and get into a dialogue with you: aim for a conversation, not a lecture.
Don’t try to sell things, instead use content marketing and relationship
marketing to create value. Be as relatable as possible and be able to explain
what you are doing to make everyone’s lives better. None of this is trivial; it
amounts to a new but real set of consumer needs.
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 253

EXPLORE LAYERED IDENTITIES

You already know that identity is important and that it often finds its point
of difference through group memberships. There’s more to it, though.
Intersectionality is a word that captures the idea that real people aren’t just
members of one category. For example, you might present as female and
have brown skin, attracting prejudice and discrimination as a consequence.
What’s more, it’s not just that those kinds of ill-treatment and oppression
coincide; there are specific versions just for you, that are designed for you
and apply to you at the specific intersection of your being female with brown
skin. The essential insight here is that people are well aware that their iden-
tities are multiple and not singular, and they find that intersectional identities
give them a unique view of the world – a view that is regularly pushed aside
or overlooked.
The consensus is that, despite the deep embodiment of feelings which
convince people of certain aspects of their identity, identity is just as much a
certain way of appreciating the world around you, and a certain way that
the world treats you. For example, if you are going about interacting with
things and people as a gay man or lesbian and as a person who is neuro-
divergent, then you are likely to appreciate the world around you in ways
that other, more privileged, people are oblivious to. This sometimes results
in angry criticism, as when you see people on Twitter getting angry with
‘white men’ who are seen as holding all the power. But angry polemic and
smashing boundaries without erecting anything in their place is the strategy
of Generation X. So it’s not a surprise if Zoomers are looking for a more
positive take on intersectional identity, which they achieve by exploring it,
and using it to hold up a mirror to what they see as mainstream society.

OSCILLATE BETWEEN POLES

Imagine a pendulum, rapidly swinging back and forth. That movement is
oscillation, a term borrowed from physics where it describes movement
about a central point. In the context of metamodernism, it describes a move-
ment back and forth between ideas and ways of communicating that seem
to be very different or even opposed to each other. Here are a couple of
examples.

●● Sincerity and irony. This is the main one that you’ll hear about if you start
searching for information on metamodernism. Sincerity gets lots of atten-
tion in these chapters. For now, let’s just ask how could a brand or its
marketing ‘oscillate’ between sincerity and irony? What does this mean?
254 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

There are two main strategies. You could have a very sincere and purpose-
ful message (let’s say ‘End Prejudice’) but wrap it in something frivolous
so that there’s an element of surprise. The other strategy is to make sincer-
ity very overt but ram home the message using an ironic and unexpected
point of view or even an absurd situation.
●● Modernism and postmodernism. There’s a century of art and Western
thought in this binary pair, which I’ll try to compress into a couple of
sentences. After World War II, there were Baby Boomers and there was
modernism. Boomers had principles and values which they assumed
everyone agreed with. Modernist design was clean, spare and elegant
(look at the iPhone or a Tesla for contemporary examples), but later
regarded by some as slightly elitist. After that, from the 60s onwards,
there was Generation X and there was postmodernism. Gen Xers were
committed relativists, had a superpower in the area of being able to detect
bullshit, and were moody. Postmodern design was playful but arch and
sarcastic (for example, in 2015, Italian design brand Alessi created a
limited-edition kettle that has a whistling dragon attached to the spout).
Eventually, metamodernism flowered among younger Millennials and
Gen Z. Metamodernism, as a third wave of thought and habit, does not
simply reject its predecessors as wrong, nor does it try to mash them both
together. Rather, it likes to build things (activism, art, brands) which move
back and forth; first one thing, then the other.

To summarize: oscillation in marketing is when a brand flips back and forth,

showing one face, then another. Usually, in metamodernism, a minimum of
one of those faces is sincere, smiling, optimistic and convinced of a few
essential truths, even as the other face is laughing at its own absurdity.

RADICAL OPTIMISM
There are lots of reasons why postmodernism came to an end. If I were to
highlight one reason, aside from it being the responsibility of every generation
to do things differently from their parents, it would be that postmodernism
was making people depressed. When they were young, Generation X, creators
of punk and grunge, knew they were doing something radical by being scepti-
cal and mocking everything. But when younger generations of people came
along, they had no reason to recognize postmodernism as the voice of rebel-
lious youth, instead regarding it as negative and nit-picking; the sort of thing
your parents might do when acting superior. These young people wanted
something better than continually pointing out how fake everything is. They
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 255

wanted a positive vision of something that we can really achieve. So that’s

how radical optimism was born. It’s not considered naïve or embarrassing
now to say that you have values and that you want the world to be a happier,
more beautiful place, even though this is enough to make many a postmod-
ernist choke on their Gauloises cigarette.
In Western culture, radical optimism can manifest in lots of ways. It can
be a determined happiness and firm commitment to principles such as kind-
ness and preservation of the Earth. It can be wholesome projects and
products. In Using Semiotics in Retail (Lawes, 2022), I quoted Wholesome
Games, a collective that exists to promote and share games with wholesome,
uplifting content: ‘Sometimes it’s a radical act to make dark or upsetting art,
and sometimes it’s radical to make hopeful art in times of adversity’.
If you want to build this into your marketing, you should know that,
from the point of view of metamodernism, to be optimistic is an act of brav-
ery. The optimism of metamodernism is not a return to the naïve optimism
of post-World War II prosperity, when Western people thought that robots,
plastic and affordable automobiles would make everything all right. It is too
late for simple naivety since postmodernism came along and pointed out the
comical flaws in our thinking. Metamodern optimism is the decision to be
happy and to unironically try to build a better, fairer world, despite every-
thing we face: mistakes, struggles, challenges where the odds are stacked
against us.

Semiotics turns ideas into action

Semiotics pre-dates metamodernism, having taken off during the earlier
period of postmodernism. Even though metamodern culture values pre-
verbal feelings more highly than words, semiotics remains a crucial part of
our intellectual toolkit. This is because the evolution of digital culture, in
which we encounter all of humanity through a screen, keeps plunging us
more and more deeply into a world of representations. We are surrounded
by a cloud of tweets, TikTok comedies, LinkedIn boasts, Instagram stories,
YouTube reaction videos, memes, ‘shop now’ buttons, dating profiles,
WhatsApp groups, mobile games and time-wasting subreddits. As digital
culture grows, we increasingly apprehend the world and the people in it, not
directly, but through all these elaborate representations made of words,
sounds and images that say, ‘this is how things are’. Obediently, we recipro-
cate with even more representations. Semiotics is defined by its focus on
256 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

representations – this is exactly what we are analysing when we do semiot-

ics. Representations are often found in ‘texts’ (this book, your branded
website, your retail store) and all of them are composed of semiotic signs.
So – one reason why semiotics has lasting power and relevance is because
there is no escape from semiotic signs; in fact, they are proliferating. The
other reason why semiotics is still here and gaining strength in the market-
ing industry is because where there are signs and symbols, there are tangible
data points and visible evidence. This type of thing goes down well with
businesspeople, especially compared to nebulous feelings which consumers
enjoy because of, not despite, their inarticulacy.
Client-side and agency-side marketers like the tangible signs and symbols
of semiotics because:

●● They lead to practical advice about what to do with your brand mark,
packaging, product photography, web copy and more. All these things
require the marketer to make firm decisions about colours, typefaces,
materials, language, interior design and so on. Semiotics, with its unique
ability to ‘decode meaning’ helps you make the right decisions so that you
are better able to communicate with your target customers.
●● Signs, symbols and habits of representation (which we have explored
earlier in this book as semiotic codes) are all trackable over time. You can
do this quantitatively, as when you look at a handful of years of language
use on Google Trends. You can also do it more like a philosopher or
historian who considers the evolution of ideas and communications over
decades or centuries, far further back than Google Trends can extend.
The major advantage of this is not that we can see where we have been,
but that we can see where we are heading. Developing this skill of being
able to see the emerging shape of things over time is the beginning of
futurology. Remember that you can return to Chapter 6 to read more
about futurology and the twig-to-branch method that helps you explore
change.

A checklist of emerging consumer wants and needs

In Table 13.1 is a summary of what we’ve learned so far about metamodern
culture and the new consumer needs that it ushers in.
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 257

TABLE 13.1 What consumers want and need, and how brands may respond

Consumers want and need How brands may respond

Kindness. They want a generally high Brands that are sincere in their
standard of being kind to each other, because communications and trustworthy in their
they hope that people will be kind to them. delivery. Excellent customer service that
really cares.
Feelings are to be respected. In metamodern Business models, products and services can
culture, people want to confess, share and all be designed for the cultivation and
make themselves vulnerable with their expression of feelings – stationers have
feelings. Feelings are a pleasure, a source of done well out of a recent surge of interest
knowledge and a way to bond with other in journaling. Marketing comms may
people. stimulate and encourage feelings.
Social justice. Too many people are Brands may make a point of showing what
marginalized, discouraged, deprived of they are doing to make society fairer and
opportunity, excluded and made to feel as more inclusive.
though they don’t count.
Organizations that behave ethically without Drive energy around a company’s ethical
expecting a fanfare of thanks. behaviour by making it a central part of the
company’s mission – it’s not just
greenwashing, rainbow-washing or a staid
CSR policy.
Positivity and optimism. They want to Find ways to reward faith and hope. Give
support each other in choosing to be reasons to be optimistic. Tell stories in
optimistic. Optimism is good for your mental which optimism is justified and validated.
health and makes everyday burdens easier to
carry. It’s also good for setting goals so that
we can all have a better life in the future.
Equity, meaning ‘equality of outcomes’. For Collapsing distance becomes a useful
example, if certain groups are under- technique for brands. Collapse distance
represented in the workplace, they may need between the consumer and: your brand or
support to help them access work that goes organization; the product or service; other
beyond simply making jobs available. Equity consumers. Encourage collaboration,
means building a better society by providing co-ownership, co-creation, user-generated
support to people who have less power. content and community.
To see and be seen. They are always Exploring layered identities is a technique
interested in new, creative ways to look at the that you can build into a brand and its
world. Those who are left out or ignored communications. Done well, it empowers
appreciate someone noticing their existence. marginalized people, raises quiet voices
and reveals a view of the everyday that is
as strange as it is beautiful.
(continued)
258 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

TABLE 13.1 (Continued)

Consumers want and need How brands may respond

To build something genuinely new. To halt Oscillating between poles finds its business
climate change, end prejudice and application here. The simple application is
democratize society. To find a way to use the to design for audiences that like earnest
lessons of the past without repeating its and sincere messages wrapped in playful
mistakes. and surprising packaging.

These are the central ideas of metamodernism. In the following chapters I’ll
suggest ways to build metamodernism into your brand or business
(Chapter 14) and marcoms (Chapter 15). In the rest of this chapter, we’ll take
a deep dive into two topics which are part of metamodern culture but deserve
special attention: sincerity and ‘the turn to affect’, which means feelings.

Sincerity
New Sincerity: A development in Western culture
We have already met sincerity in the above section, where I introduced it as
one feature of this large cultural change in the West that goes by the name
of metamodernism. In that section, I said that metamodern cultural prod-
ucts such as digital entertainment, books and advertising like to oscillate
(rapidly swing) between sincerity and irony as though they were two poles.
This suggests a tension or difficulty with sincerity in metamodern culture. It
is valued but people remain a bit worried about it. In this section, we can
explore this tension more deeply, but first I need to make you aware that
sincerity is more than just a detail in the architecture of metamodern culture.
In fact, there’s an entire movement called New Sincerity that you’d be
forgiven for not knowing about if you didn’t go to college to study American
literature. New Sincerity is very important, despite its obscure and culturally
specific roots, because:

●● It challenges ideas about authenticity, which marketers have tirelessly

chased in recent years.
●● New Sincerity theory describes and explains recently emerging consumer
needs.
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 259

●● New Sincerity is making itself felt in your customer’s daily lives if they
consume a lot of Western media as part of inhabiting global consumer
culture. New Sincerity is on their TV, it’s in the books they read, the
games they play and the social media accounts that they follow.
●● While brands and their marketers have been well aware of sincerity for a
long time, they mostly don’t show awareness of New Sincerity. They are
overlooking it or just not doing a good job because they don’t really ‘get’
it. So that’s what this section is for.

Let’s begin by talking about what sincerity means today and then we’ll be in
a good position to think about why people need it and start to formulate a
response as brand owners and marketers.

Sincerity is different from authenticity. It’s more about other people than
yourself and is crucial for establishing trust
Here’s why sincerity is overtaking authenticity.
Marketers grasp the idea of authenticity and have done their best to use
it. Consumers also grasp the idea, and you will see that their social media
communications regularly feature ideas of ‘being true to oneself’ – just not
quite as much as in the past, it is becoming a bit dated. Other ideas and
language are taking its place.
What went wrong with authenticity? It was an enjoyable idea, in which a
person finds and examines their ‘inner self’, then behaves in a way that
matches their feelings. In fact, you can see an example of authenticity in
Chapter 4 of this book, where I present a photograph of a window display in
a women’s clothes shop, which exhorts passers-by to ‘dress the way we feel –
for real’.
The major drawback of authenticity was that it tended to clash with
another metamodern value, which is that we ought to be considerate of one
another’s feelings. Do you know someone who ‘always speaks their mind’,
who is ‘straight-talking’ and ‘to the point’? Does this put you in mind of the
popular truism we met in Chapter 6, ‘If you can’t handle me at my worst,
you don’t deserve me at my best?’ Too much authenticity risks becoming a
problem for other people (see Figure 13.1).
Sincerity is a newer alternative, built on different ideas. In this model,
people and brands commonly say things that are amiable, and this poten-
tially reflects well on them as well as being better for the recipients of their
remarks. The recipient decides whether the speaker seems sincere, a decision
260 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

FIGURE 13.1 Authenticity is about you and your inner self

True ‘inner I am being

self’ exists in authentic by
MY OPINIONS ...
here. sharing my
views. This is horribly
insensitive and
upsetting.

STEP 1: THE PAST STEP 2: THE PRESENT

which is ultimately a prediction. ‘I assess this person as sincere; I predict that

their future behaviour will match the words I’m hearing today’.
The big advantage of sincerity is that it is kinder and more in line with
contemporary Western values. Compared to authenticity, it is much easier
for those around us to get along with, and less demanding of their patience
and goodwill. The disadvantage is that sincerity is a rather fragile state. It is
an expression of trust (‘I choose to believe that this person or organization
is sincere’) but also constantly awaits disconfirmation. One big failure or
let-down of behaviour will be interpreted as finally having revealed the real
inner self, and sincerity is nowhere to be found (see Figure 13.2).
If you’d like to explore more deeply the differences between sincerity and
authenticity, the conversation in academia often starts with literary critic
Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) and his book Sincerity and Authenticity (1972).
As for business, here are the key takeaways so far:

1 Relax your grip on authenticity and instead concentrate on becoming

sincere. Instructions follow, here and in the next two chapters.
2 To assess someone as sincere is to place your trust in that person. Brands
like being trusted so it is in their interests to learn and display sincerity.
3 Sincerity is a kind of promise about a person’s or organization’s future
behaviour, so you need to be consistent and keep delivering to justify
people’s trust.
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 261

FIGURE 13.2 Sincerity is about successful social relationships

Oh that’s
Seems legit,
I’m really good, they
but let’s see.
nice! HELP! Help is here are sincere.

STEP 1: THE PRESENT STEP 2: THE FUTURE

People urgently need sincerity – here’s why

New Sincerity meets needs, which we can begin to uncover by exploring
why it is happening. There’s a short, snappy answer and a slightly more
in-depth version.
The short, snappy answer is that ever since the invention and eventual
global domination of the internet, people have become progressively more
horrible to each other. First we had trolls and online bullying, which were
bad enough, then we added disinformation, revenge porn and political radi-
calization. Younger generations of consumers cannot be blamed for yearning
for a new style of interaction that is less bleak, lonely and bitter.
The slightly longer version is about generational change and the evolution
of cultural values in the West over the last several decades. Here’s the story.
Baby Boomers were able to be born because their parents survived World
War II. With their parents, they dealt with its aftermath. They rebuilt post-
war economies, a huge task, launched protective social institutions such as
the NHS in the UK, had babies, retained a sense of duty and tried to do the
best for their country, their employer and their family. Values had the feeling
of being universal because they described this whole post-war effort. People
were glad to have washing machines and affordable automobiles. Success was
defined in conventional ways even among protestors. ‘Hippies’ proclaimed
universal values of peace and love but they weren’t about smashing patriar-
chy or trying to bring down capitalism.
262 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Then came Generation X with its postmodern ideas. Priding itself on its
ability to see through government and corporate propaganda, it grew a protec-
tive shell of scepticism around itself, protecting people from being misled and
exploited. The then-young rebels of this new generation railed against one-
size-fits-all universal ideals, suburban blandness, smiling conformity and
obedient consumerism. Its sense of humour was dark and highly critical, skew-
ering the prominent people and ideas of The Establishment. A great example
if you were online in the early 2000s is New Atheism. This was a movement in
which atheists spontaneously organized online, delighted in mocking religion,
particularly Christianity, and celebrated their own cleverness. In those days,
‘the internet’ still had the lingering feeling of being the Wild West, newly colo-
nized and still relatively lawless: a free-for-all, where people could say whatever
they wanted.
Millennials were generally nicer and more sympathetic than Gen X, with
their pastel pinks, cursive typefaces and floppy hair, but they often retained
Gen X tones of boredom and irony, talking about their unwilling struggles
with ‘adulting’. Real change, and the reason we’re discussing this now,
became visible with Generation Z – the Zoomers.
By Zoomer standards, the older Millennials were still quite mean to each
other, not to mention seeming a bit uninterested in trying to make things
better, being more interested in a ready-to-drink box of wine with a straw in
it. If you are not yourself a Zoomer, try to imagine coming of age and enter-
ing adulthood, with your whole life ahead of you, to find that you’ve been
preceded by two generations who seemingly have done absolutely nothing
to try and solve the world’s problems and have let the planet burn while
sitting around drinking and making homophobic jokes with their friends.
This is why climate activist Greta Thunberg is angry. It ushered in meta-
modern culture. And it is the reason why sincerity has caught on among
consumers. It thrives in the lives of your customers outside of academic
theory, because people have real needs in areas such as:

●● Safety. For example, digital culture can be very threatening, but it is our
home now.
●● A sincere effort to actively build a better world and future.
●● Sincere relationships and communications which reward trust.

New Sincerity is a movement in the arts, entertainment and mass culture

Academics are usually the first to notice oncoming cultural change and they
were able to see the signs of emerging New Sincerity well before it showed
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 263

up in everyday life. Here’s a prophet of New Sincerity, David Foster Wallace

(1962–2008), the American novelist and professor of literature, making
predictions about the sincerity of future generations in an essay in the jour-
nal Review of Contemporary Fiction back in 1993:

The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird
bunch of ‘anti-rebels’, […] who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-
entendre values. […] The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn,
the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs[.] Accusations of sentimentality,
melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered[.]

Ahead of his time, Wallace predicted the newly sincere generation of consum-
ers that we have now. He anticipates their bravery in not shying away from
the obvious difficulties of a sincere approach to life, art and business. Older
people, the previous generation of rebels, will think you childish and credu-
lous. Despite all this, the future ‘they’ and Wallace himself see the redeeming
power of honesty, straightforwardness, and values such as love and kindness.
If you’d like to know more about Wallace’s take on sincerity and its rele-
vance to today, you can of course read his own work and also that of Adam
Kelly, presently Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin,
a specialist in American literature and writer on New Sincerity.
By the early 2000s, as postmodernists in the form of groups such as the
New Atheists were having a last hurrah, New Sincerity was making itself felt
in popular media. Amélie (2001), a French romcom film directed by Jean-
Pierre Jeunet, charmed audiences worldwide with its story of an innocently
happy young woman who tries to bring sunshine into the lives of others. In
2005, TV sitcom The Office launched in the US and ran until 2013. It was a
kinder, gentler remake of the British original. It retained postmodern, ironic
elements such as the ‘mockumentary’ format. In lead character Michael
Scott, it smoothed out the dark, bitter edges of his UK counterpart, anti-hero
David Brent. And it gave a lot of sincere and unironic airtime to the roman-
tic story of Jim and Pam, culminating in a tear-jerking wedding.
In the 2010s, Instagram poet Rupi Kaur became a sensation, published
her collected works in book form and sold millions of copies in 42 languages.
Her poetry is short, emotional, sensitive and uses clear language. Her newest
book aims to help readers ‘heal themselves’ by therapeutically writing, using
Rupi’s tips.
In 2022, Gita Jackson, a journalist writing for Vice, published a feature
called ‘I tried to adopt a traumatized Sims 4 baby from Instagram’. The
Sims 4 (Maxis/Electronic Arts) is a long-running life simulation game, in
which families and domestic arrangements are commonly a central part of
264 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

the stories that players weave. The game’s fan community is well-practised
at inventing new aspects to the game that were never coded into the soft-
ware, but which enhance gameplay when players co-operate. Imagination
and role-play are a huge part of The Sims and Jackson’s feature concerns her
discovery of a large Sims fan group on Instagram, who develop elaborate
back stories concerning abused Sim children, then create pretend adoption
agencies and advertise these children to prospective parents who will later
download them into their own game. Apparently, the application process is
very stringent.
New Sincerity is now thoroughly soaked into mass culture and is enjoyed
by consumers who are never going to plough through a long novel by
Wallace and don’t care about philosophy or literary theory.

Here’s what’s new about New Sincerity and the resulting new needs.
Brands don’t embrace it because they don’t really get it
New Sincerity was quick to leak into the arts and entertainment because the
early discussion of it as a new movement originated in academic literary
theory. It is now very widespread in video games, Instagram poetry and TV
dramas, to name just a few cultural products. It is less evident in brands and
marketing. There are a few reasons for this. First, communicating sincerity
is always a bit tricky, because to try to appear sincere is to somewhat under-
mine sincerity itself. Second, sincerity may be seen as worthy but not very
exciting compared to some other attributes or personalities that a brand
could adopt. Third, if they are aware of New Sincerity, it may not be obvious
which aspects of it are new. Let’s address that third point now and we’ll
explore the other two in the following chapters.

WHAT ’S NEW ABOUT NEW SINCERITY?

New Sincerity does not simply mean that ‘today, more brands should be
sincere’ or ‘sincere brands are having a moment’. Here’s what’s new:

●● New Sincerity is a quality of consumers, not brands. Western consumer

culture has changed, people have changed. Cultural products like novels
and TV shows change to anticipate the reformed consumer, the earnest
anti-rebel predicted by David Foster Wallace.
●● It is a mood. If postmodernism was and is aloof, mocking and annoyed,
then metamodernism is happier, more wholesome, more fun and more
chill. There is an assumption that everyone is pleased to share in a brighter,
happier attitude to life.
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 265

●● It is a set of principles and values and a style of relating to others that is

seen to promote trust and facilitate constructive relationships. One prin-
ciple is ‘being vulnerable is a great way to show that you are receptive to
open communication’. One value is ‘people’s feelings are precious and
should not be hurt’. One style of relating to others is to be humble and
compassionate.
●● It is an expectation. It’s not just ‘sincere brands’ that are expected to be
sincere. All brands – or in fact their owners – are expected to be sincere.
It’s a responsibility placed on every business.

New Sincerity is much more than an appearance of telling the truth. As a

pillar of metamodern culture, it represents both a moment in time and an
attitude of compassion, renewed faith in love, belief in our ability to make
change, willingness to do things to bring about change. It’s a good time to
be creative. More guidance for brands is coming up in Chapters 14 and 15.

Feelings
Why ‘feelings’?
In this section, I hope to explain why feelings are so important, on top of all
the things I’ve already said about newer generations rejecting the snarky,
postmodern carping of their parents. I planned to introduce you to a distinct
movement in academic theory called ‘the turn to affect’ (affect roughly
means ‘feelings’), show how it anticipated the rise of affect among consum-
ers, and coolly pick out some clever insights to turn into business advice. But
as I was reading academic literature, which of course is where semiotics
itself comes from, something unexpected happened.
As well as bits of theory lighting up my brain, I started to feel something.
The trigger was a book chapter by anthropologist Kathleen Stewart in The
Affect Theory Reader (2010). She wasn’t talking about the disasters of here
and now, the horrifyingly familiar facts of everyday life in the 2020s, like
climate change, Covid-19 and Russia’s attack on Ukraine. She was talking
about an earlier experience, in a period nearly forgotten, of living in a mining
town in West Virginia when Ronald Reagan was elected President of the
United States, in 1981. Like Stewart, I was young and poor in the 1980s,
and my memories of the prime ministership of Margaret Thatcher in Britain
are so dark that I mostly keep them locked in a box. Stewart opened the
266 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

box, 40 years after the fact and from across the Atlantic. Here’s what she
had to say about how things changed in her country during the Reagan
presidency:

Right away the stories started about the people who were getting kicked off
Social Security disability […] Old people were buying cans of dog food for their
suppers […] Young people were living in cars […] Snake handling boomed in
the churches whenever the economy went bust […] Later, when the talk shows
started, young people who were overweight or ‘didn’t talk right’ were flown to
Hollywood to be on the shows. Fast food chains in town became the only place
to work. […] Oxycontin happened. Tourism didn’t happen. (ibid., loc. 4661–85)

Dear younger readers: the world is in a terrible state now and, if you weren’t
economically privileged, it was almost unspeakably terrible in the 1980s, so
be glad that you missed it. The bleakness of that period is why your Gen X
parents and colleagues are the way they are. As a generation, we coped with
the darkness and misery by growing a hard, protective shell around ourselves
so that we couldn’t be hurt any more. That’s where our cynicism and biting
humour come from. If you are a younger Millennial or a Zoomer, you cope
differently, and I now think that there’s something rather magnificent about
your refusal to be spoiled by dark times. So here I am, agreeing with you,
rather belatedly. Feelings are important and paying attention to them might
be our only chance of a better future.
And now, before we proceed any further, an important note concerning
language.

●● Affect is not emotion. The general consensus in affect theory is that affect
occurs in the body, like a blush or a sudden tightness in the chest, and
emotion is what results when we interpret and civilize affect by giving it
a name such as ‘embarrassment’ or ‘anger’.
●● Affect is not sentiment. ‘Sentiment analysis’ is a procedure in which text
is analysed, and remarks such as ‘I like Coke’ are coded as positive, while
‘Coke tastes bad’ are coded as negative. It is not particularly (or at all)
sensitive to the nuances of human conversation. Its redeeming features
are that it lends itself to quantification and it is suited to the abilities of
the primitive AI that we have so far managed to evolve.

Affect is important now because those irrepressible bodily sensations are

widely seen as truthful and much more trustworthy than words, which tell
lies. That’s where the phrase ‘feelings outrank facts’ comes from. It’s usually
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 267

expressed as a complaint, but it’s also a fair description of Western and

Western-influenced consumer culture in the 2020s.
Now let’s talk about how affect converts into needs.

Safety: The starting point

When it comes to safety, there is being unsafe and then there is feeling
unsafe. The material reality of being unsafe has not gone away, as you’ll
have noticed if you’re in the US and are distressed by the overturning of Roe
vs Wade. A pro-choice maxim is that legal bans on abortion do not end the
practice of abortion, but result in a lot of unsafe abortions, carried out by
unskilled people in unsuitable and unsanitary environments.
In recent years, feeling unsafe has also become very important – we are
taking it more seriously than in the past, because feelings are more of a
priority now. Feeling unsafe can be the result of an ongoing or recurring
atmosphere of threat at home or at work, it can be about picking up ‘bad
vibes’ from someone who came to collect an item that you sold on Facebook,
it can be about someone seeming to follow you to your car, and as I
mentioned earlier, it’s quite possible to feel unsafe online.
Do you remember Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs? According to
Maslow, the most basic human needs are physiological: food, water and
shelter. One level up from that, and before everything else, is safety. In
Maslow’s model, that means physical safety and also secure employment,
secure health, a secure home. All the higher things that make life worth living,
such as positive feelings of love and intimacy, enjoying the esteem of others
and eventually fulfilling our potential through self-actualization, are contin-
gent upon feeling safe.
Safety is what we risk when we decide to trust each other. Safety is the
starting point from which everything else follows.

Feelings and mental health

Younger Millennials and Zoomers have created a culture in which openness
about feelings is encouraged. You have almost certainly run into the phrase
‘It’s OK not to be OK’. It is the rallying cry of a generation which has decided
that we are going to get mental health issues out in the open and talk about
them, once and for all. The phrase is so widespread that it has achieved the
status of a meme, is the title of an internationally successful TV series (from
268 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

South Korea), a song by Demi Lovato and at least a dozen books on my local
version of Amazon, aimed at both adults and children. It’s also emblazoned
on a few thousand items on eBay, including shirts, wristbands, badges, post-
ers, stickers, decals and mugs. There are mental health influencers on social
media platforms (ironically, since social media use is itself linked to declining
mental health, a topic I discussed in Using Semiotics in Retail (Lawes, 2022)).
It’s possible to make mental health influencing into a full-time job (e.g.,
Mackie, 2020), and the topics that influencers cover include anxiety, sadness,
grief, pregnancy loss, sobriety, body confidence, career confidence, self-
esteem and self-care.
It’s impossible to avoid noticing that the campaign for better mental
health is almost entirely about feelings. I do not simply mean that physical
health can be measured objectively, as in tests of physical fitness (you can
either run down the street or you can’t, the numbers representing your lung
function and blood pressure either look good to your doctor or they don’t).
I also mean that what we call ‘mental health’ is rather different from ‘mental
illness’. Mental illness is medicalized: people understand it to mean serious
problems such as schizophrenia. Mental illness might be treated with drugs,
it might result in hospital stays and, most of all, there is more to it than feel-
ings. Hallucinations aren’t feelings. Delusions, hearing voices, hoarding,
addiction and self-harm – none of these are feelings, although feelings may
be part of the experience. But mental health? The kind you see on the
accounts of social media influencers? It is almost entirely reducible to feel-
ings. People try to help each other feel less anxious, less sad, more confident,
more worthwhile. Illness requires a doctor; health and ‘wellness’ have much
lower barriers to entry – and that’s why they are much loved by marketers.

Expressing feelings
HAPPINESS
Postmodernism, with its deep, protective scepticism, constrained the circum-
stances within which one could have and express feelings such as happiness.
Of course, there were private moments, like a romantic encounter or finding
money in the pocket of your jeans. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the done thing to
go around grinning, unless at some cutting joke, for fear of being seen as a
fool or perhaps a religious zealot. Interiority, such as emotional experiences
inside your head or body, wasn’t fashionable in those days. It was all about
surface. It was considered clever to observe of just about anything that ‘if
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 269

you scratch the surface, all you get is more surface’. It’s not that emotions
didn’t exist, but they were untrustworthy and left a person open to exploita-
tion, so we retreated into sarcasm and pretended not to like anything.
As time passed and metamodernism took over, feelings started to return.
‘Positivity’ and ‘positive attitude’ became part of everyday language. A
Google Trends search for ‘positivity’ in the category ‘people and society’
shows that as recently as 2008, there was virtually no interest in the subject,
but by 2016 it was skyrocketing, reaching a peak in August 2020, just as
people were enduring the first and worst wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. It
was not just that people were willing to express happiness; positivity devel-
oped a moral quality, becoming somewhat of an imperative and an article of
faith. Did you develop cancer or lose your job? Expect to be gently encour-
aged to ‘put your positive pants on’. To refuse is to undermine other people’s
comforting belief in the transforming power of a positive demeanour. To
co-operate is to participate in a huge group effort of ‘lifting each other up’.
In metamodern culture, happiness is not just an individually pleasant expe-
rience, it is socially responsible.

SADNESS
At the same time that happiness stopped being embarrassing, a correspond-
ing shift occurred which rehabilitated sadness – particularly crying. Just as
common sense has it that people can’t make themselves blush, tears are seen
as involuntary for all but a few, highly skilled actors. Crying is (treated as)
pure affect. It is physical and inarticulate. It does not require words and
indeed obstructs them. What’s more, it is visible to others in a very obvious
way. For all these reasons, there’s something trustworthy about crying.
People offer it to each other as something you can believe in. I even did the
same thing in the first edition of this book, as you can see by turning back
to Chapter 12 where I described my own and other’s people’s tears in the
passage on Arthur Jafa’s film-making.
As I was preparing to write this new chapter, I went to a social media
platform to refresh my memory of ‘crying’ as a social action. I did not go to
TikTok, Instagram or Twitter, perhaps the easiest options, but to LinkedIn.
It’s a place where people go to present themselves professionally and advance
their careers. With its millions of users and daily posts, it’s not wholly
rational, but has a micro-culture that is relatively level-headed. I searched
for the word ‘crying’; here’s a sample of what I found (from a seemingly
infinitely large number of cases).
270 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, described ‘almost crying’

while reading an obituary in The New Yorker. His point was that other
people should also read it.
●● An author announced the publication of her book on coping strategies
with a long post that included three separate references to the author’s
own uncontrollable crying (including on the day of writing the post).
Commenters thanked her for ‘being real’.
●● A television presenter posted a photograph of herself with a young child,
both smiling. The accompanying text said, ‘I’m crying’ – they were ‘happy
tears’, reflecting a proud and hopeful moment of parenting.
●● A young retail worker posted a photo of herself crying in a stock room
and asked readers to please be kind and considerate customers, not angry
and abusive ones.
●● The CEO of a small company, a man in his 30s, posted a photo of himself
with large tears rolling down his cheeks. The accompanying text described
his heartfelt grief after making some of his staff redundant.

The last two met with only partial support. While many replies were sympa-
thetic, a sizeable proportion accused the authors of ‘fake crying’ to get
attention. While I do not wish to endorse these accusations, we can perhaps
detect why they happen. Both photos were self-taken and as such they
violated conventional beliefs about what crying is and what it means. That
is, the belief that crying is the visible evidence of affect – embodied, natural,
honest and irrepressible – is challenged when the person doing the crying is
self-possessed enough to take a selfie and post it on social media. Actually,
you can get away with it if they are happy tears and part of a public occa-
sion. But if the tears are unhappy, photographed as a self-portrait in a private
moment and presented in a request for sympathy, people are going to object.
They object, not just because they suspect that they are somehow being
defrauded, but because insincere tears ‘let the side down’. Just as positivity
is part of a public morality in which we agree or decline to ‘lift each other
up’, open displays of sadness, especially crying, are part of a public practice
around ‘vulnerability’. To make oneself vulnerable, done correctly, is seen as
an act of generosity which reassures the silently suffering people around you
that ‘it’s OK to not be OK’.
 CONSUMER NEEDS IN THE 2020s 271

Activity: Metamodern needs and your brand

If you arrived here from Chapter 12 and you did all the exercises along the
way, you’ve already completed a whole project using semiotics and have
started to think about the next one. If you have in mind a few ideas for
interesting categories, brands or products that you’d like to explore, you can
use them in this exercise. Alternatively, consider a few pipeline projects that
you have coming up in your professional life where semiotics could be
useful. Make a short list. For example, my list would feature fountain pens,
a category I’m very engaged with at the moment, plus household appliances
and the type of food that you buy at petrol stations, because they’re in my
pipeline.
With your list in hand, go to the table which I presented in this chapter,
just at the end of the section on metamodernism. Observe that I set out eight
wants and needs, plus possible responses by brand owners and marketers.
For each row of the table, ask yourself what needs metamodernism leads
you to expect are relevant to your category. Record your thoughts. For
example, when I look at the second row in the table, which says that people
want to confess and share their feelings, it’s obvious to me how we can use
that to market a fountain pen brand. Even better, and perhaps surprisingly,
there are lots of people out there who love pens and ink, are willing to
spend, but don’t need to do a lot of writing for work and are stuck in finding
anything to write about for non-work reasons. A marketing campaign is
waiting to happen. At the same time, when I look at the sixth row of the
table, which talks about equality of outcomes, it makes me think of my
household appliances project. Not everyone can afford a premium washing
machine or fridge. Plenty of people are on low incomes. But they have a
right to expect clean clothes and cold food. What can we do as a business to
create a good outcome for everyone?
Have fun with this thought experiment, and we’ll build on it in the
following chapters.
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14

Brands and businesses

WHAT’S COMING UP
This is the second of three new chapters which concern important, recent
developments in consumer culture. In the previous chapter, I introduced
quite a few big topics and technical terms and explained as well as possible
how big cultural change shows up as emerging consumer needs. In this
chapter, we get more deeply into the business applications of metamodern
theory by taking a look at how companies find ways to design new values
and needs into their brands and businesses. By the end of this chapter, you
will be able to:

●● Align value propositions with the metamodern consumer’s

preoccupation with the future.
●● Collapse distance between organizations and consumers by encouraging
them to modify our products and finding ways for them to have a stake
in the business.
●● Recognize the business opportunity in the layered identities of
Generation Z. Encourage individual expression.
●● Support optimism with beautiful products, and user experiences that
transcend everyday problems.
●● Live up to consumers’ high expectations regarding how brands and their
owners should behave. Build respect by having a driving moral force at
the centre of the business.
●● Satisfy consumers by showing them that longed-for social change is
achievable through the expression of positive feelings such as joy and
happiness.
274 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Metamodernism
Metamodernism is the latest stage in Western culture. It’s a good time to
think about how we create value.

Let’s think differently about value propositions

Who among us is unfamiliar with the idea of ‘Jobs-to-Be-Done’? Outside of
conversations with clients, I encountered it in print in Strategyzer’s book
Value Proposition Design (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2014), but Strategyzer
is careful not to take the credit for having invented it, writing ‘the concept
was developed independently by several business thinkers’ such as Anthony
Ulwick, Rick Pedi, Bob Moesta and Prof. Denise Nitterhouse. Anthony
Ulwick published his own book, Jobs to Be Done, in 2016.
As Ulwick remarks on his website, jobs-to-be-done.com, you grasped the
idea of ‘JTBD’ the first time you encountered marketing professor Theodore
Levitt’s famous maxim, ‘people don’t buy drills, they buy holes’. People buy
things (and let’s remember that the point of marketing is to sell something)
because there’s some JTBD that’s demanding their attention.

Jobs-to-Be-Done Theory provides a framework for defining, categorizing,

capturing and organizing all your customers’ needs. Moreover, when using this
framework, a complete set of need statements can be captured in days – rather
than months – and the statements themselves are valid for years – rather than
quickly becoming obsolete. (Ulwick, 2017)

While reading this passage, I paused at the ideas of ‘ALL your customers’
needs’ and ‘need statements’ that don’t become obsolete, because these
things strike me as extremely modernist. There’s no postmodern relativism
in here at all, it is very concrete and universal. It strikes me as extraordinary,
given the complex and subtle needs and desires which flavour contemporary
Western culture. But let’s not critique JTBD from a postmodern perspective.
Instead, let’s think about this from a metamodern point of view.
Jobs-to-Be-Done are set in stone and set in the past. Something happened
and now you have to drill a hole. That’s when you start shopping for drills
and paying attention to their marketing. The reason why you should care
about JTBD, according to Strategyzer, is because they are the basis for your
products and services. You see that people need holes, so you sell drills. The
JTBD is at the centre of everything. When the Job isn’t going well, it’s
because your customer is facing some frustration or obstacle. Therefore,
maybe your product or service is a ‘Pain Reliever’ (Osterwalder and Pigneur,
 BRANDS AND BUSINESSES 275

2014). Or perhaps the customer is experiencing the benefits of using your

drill. It not only drills holes perfectly but is idiot-proof and is cordless. Your
drill has become a ‘Gain Creator’ (ibid.). Now you have a value proposition.
There’s a relentless and rather material logic to all this that resists chal-
lenges. This simply has to be what happens when people buy drills. Right?
But metamodern culture is very much here now. It has soaked right into the
fabric of Western culture and is not going away. One of the most prominent
features of metamodern culture is its preoccupation with the future. Your
metamodern consumer does not passively wait for something to go wrong
and then try to fix it by buying a drill. It’s more the case that a great many
things are already fundamentally wrong and your metamodern consumer is
rather courageously choosing to imagine and focus on a world that is better
in multiple ways.
The reason I say all this is because I had an experience, not that long ago,
where JTBD became a problem. A client very kindly sent me a brief; the
project concerned a range of products that are used in caring for children.
The main focus of the brief was the future: how will people care for their
children in 15 or 20 years? But the brief came with lots of qualifications and
modifiers. In particular, the brief came equipped with ready-to-use JTBDs,
all of them following this model of ‘an event happens, creating a Job’. The
event is concrete, well-defined and in the past. The JTBD emerges from that
past event. You can probably imagine the type of thing. We’re talking child
care, so the Jobs were things like ‘remove nits from child’. Can you see the
chain of causality? First you have a child. Eventually, it gets nits. This creates
a Job: apply some kind of nit treatment to remove them.
I have to say that my colleagues and I found JTBD to be somewhat of a
hindrance when addressing the main objective, which was to reveal the
future. On the one hand, the client wanted us to talk about things which
have not happened yet and might not emerge for a few years. This is all very
sensible, and a lot of clients contact me when they want to do some kind of
future-planning for their business. On the other hand, they wanted us to
anchor our recommendations to their JTBDs which all described discrete,
bounded, well-known events and needs such as ‘child gets nits: need to
remove nits’. Can you see the problem?
I think we would be better off designing value propositions which are less
focused on retroactive JTBDs and more aligned with the metamodern
consumer’s focus on the future. Examples:

●● Creative play. Creativity, for most people, is not a Job-to-Be-Done. It’s

relaxation, self-expression, introspection, sometimes fandom, sometimes
a way to share joy with others, including children.
276 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● Skill- and experience-building career opportunities. This morning, I

happened across a LinkedIn article which told employers not to try to
tempt Gen Z workers with their ‘dream job’ because they don’t have
those types of dreams. Their dreams do not involve doing a job. They are
working for you as a temporary measure while they figure out how to
organize their own lives.
●● People want to flourish (e.g., see Josephson-Storm, 2021). Flourishing
means fulfilment, living a life which is meaningful and worthwhile, and
not being stopped in your tracks by negative experiences, as and when
they happen.

Metamodernism is trying to imagine new worlds and new ways to live, says
Josephson-Storm. That includes child care, pet care and even the sort of
home care that involves drilling holes in walls.

Empower people by designing them into your business and your products
What I’m about to propose is not quite ‘co-creation’ because we marketers
have been using that word for at least the 20-ish years that I’ve been in the
business, and it has rarely referred to anything very adventurous or future
facing. Typically, the scenario would be that some huge company invited
half a dozen consumers to travel to their (usually intimidating) offices,
pressed them for ideas for new types of lager or cat food and then sent them
home again. All the power and decision making remains with the brand, and
the consumer is a glorified market research respondent. I think that meta-
modernism, especially two of its four pillars – ‘collapsing distance’ and
‘explore layered identities’ – offers new ways to involve consumers as real
participants in our businesses and our brands.

COLLAPSING DISTANCE
‘Distance’ is exactly what I mean when I describe consumers being invited
to someone’s head office to ‘co-create’ and then being sent home again. They
are never really part of the team, they’re more like show ponies. However,
some companies do a great job of collapsing the distance between the
customer and the organization.
Studio Wildcard is a games developer, founded in 2014. It appears on
LinkedIn as having fewer than 200 employees. The kind of websites that like
to speculate on these matters (e.g., growjo.com) estimate it has fewer than
85. Its flagship product is ARK: Survival Evolved (2015), a survival game
 BRANDS AND BUSINESSES 277

which has players wash up on a beach, as though from a shipwreck, and

attempt to stay alive while enduring constant attacks from each other and
from an impressive array of dinosaurs. The game was reported as having
been installed 35 million times by 2020 (Desatoff, 2020), across multiple
platforms, generating revenue of $270 million (Balbrusaitis, 2022).
I talk about games a lot because the industry is so progressive with its
business models. For example, traditionally published commercial fiction –
let’s say, Harry Potter – generates a colossal amount of admiring and
imitative ‘fan fiction’ among enthusiastic readers. We’ll dig deeper into fanfic
a bit later. But authors and their publishers do not usually invite their fans
to become part of the team, sharing the wealth. In contrast, Studio Wildcard
positively encourages fans to ‘mod’ (modify) the game by writing and distrib-
uting bolt-on software that changes the way it is played. Only a year after
the 2015 release, when ARK was still rather new and shiny, and newly
acquired fans were already modding the heck out of it, Studio Wildcard paid
the creators of two especially popular mods the equivalent of ‘several
months’ salary’ and hired them into full-time jobs. This is a dream come true
for a loyal fan, it gives renewed hope and ambition to all the other fans and
makes Studio Wildcard look welcoming, accessible and democratic. Quite
an achievement for a profit-making, privately owned company.

EXPLORING LAYERED IDENTITIES

Fluide (www.fluide.us) is an American cosmetics brand. The company makes
a point of being LGBTQ+ friendly and this is reflected not just in its market-
ing but in its products. If you are not LGBTQ+, you might be wondering
what this means. Universal Balm is a shea butter moisturiser that – of
course – is perfectly effective on the skin and lips of men, women and every-
one in between. It makes the ‘For Men’ moisturisers of other brands look
like historical relics. Added to this, the brand’s colour cosmetics arrive in
electrifying colours, often with added glitter or shimmer. There’s a dual
benefit here. It’s not just that men have traditionally been denied the chance
to buy loud, sparkling colour cosmetics. It also causes one to realize how
conservative most women’s cosmetics are. For years, women have been sold
‘the natural look’, perhaps so that they conform to a society that requires
them to be pretty but not challenging. It is a sea of brown and beige. Fluide
does things differently. Its celebratory cosmetics are good for everyone, of
every gender expression and skin tone, who wants to discover and express
their identity through sparkle and colour.
278 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Vogue Business, in a 2020 report on gender-neutral retailing, quotes Vice

in the same year: ‘as many as 41 per cent of Gen Z respondents identify as
neutral on the gender spectrum’, ‘56% of Gen Z consumers already shop
[for clothes] outside of their gender’ (Maguire, 2020).

Beauty and transcendence: What your business has to offer

‘Beauty and transcendence after postmodernism’ is part of the title of an
essay by American-German academic Raoul Esherman, which appeared in
Metamodernism, the essential guide to metamodernism by Van Den Akker,
Gibbons and Vermeulen that was published in 2017. I use the phrase here
because it is going to help us see how your business, brand or product can
embrace the other two pillars of metamodern culture: ‘oscillate between
poles’ and ‘radical optimism’. Let’s review them one at a time.

RADICAL OPTIMISM
Radical optimism, as you’ll recall from the previous chapter, is a conscious
and quite brave decision to be happy, despite compelling reasons not to be,
and to try to build a better world – despite the planet being on fire, econo-
mies contracting and Covid-19 continuing to hang around. Part of radical
optimism, then, is the willingness to see, discover and make beauty, even
though things around us may seem to be in tatters.
Let’s talk about ocean plastic. Lots of companies know that ocean plastic
is a motivating issue among their customers, so they make commitments to
fishing it out and recycling it or stopping it from entering the sea in the first
place. In 2020, Evian announced that some of its bottles (40% of its product
portfolio, considered globally) are made entirely from recycled plastic,
except for the cap and labels. The business aims to become entirely circular,
using only recycled materials, by 2025 (for example, see Holbrook, 2020).
This is most certainly a worthy ambition. But what we are talking about
here is the reduction or removal of something ‘bad’: plastic waste. It’s not
the addition or creation of something good or beautiful which didn’t exist
before. This is where brands can go the extra mile, to support and encourage
radical optimism.
Perhaps you’re already thinking of cosmetics and fashion brands. Like
Evian, they tend to be big users of plastic and so there are plenty of oppor-
tunities for them to redeem themselves by using recycled or otherwise
sustainable materials. For example, Nike Air shoes have cushioned soles
 BRANDS AND BUSINESSES 279

which are made from ‘at least 50% recycled manufacturing waste’.1 Of
course, this still leaves another 50% available for consumers to object to,
but it’s a great start. As a perhaps more complete example of plastic waste
transforming into beauty, there’s the art of Mike Perry, who I discovered via
Esherman. Perry collects and photographs items of sea plastic that wash up
on his local beach in Wales.2 The exciting thing about Perry’s plastic, as
Esherman observes, is that it ‘has been corroded by the ocean and been
rendered hauntingly beautiful because of it […] If the ocean can beautify
plastic junk, there is some hope somewhere’ (Esherman, 2017). There’s no
compromise; Perry’s work is pure creativity, beauty and optimism.

OSCILLATE BETWEEN POLES

Oscillation is not a common or easy word, yet it is important in metamod-
ern culture. As I mentioned in Chapter 13, ‘oscillation’ describes a tendency
or a desire in metamodern culture to improve on the ideas of both the
Boomer generation (modernism) and Gen X (postmodernism). It aims to do
this without either (1) rejecting both sets of ideas outright and/or pretending
they didn’t happen; or (2) mashing them together. The effect is achieved by
swinging back and forth between two poles: first one thing, then the other.
If you are wondering how anyone would build this into a product or
business model, consider ‘glamping’, or ‘glamorous camping’. In my country,
and perhaps in yours, family holidays require choosing among a few differ-
ent types of accommodation. If you can afford it, there are hotels. If you feel
a little adventurous, there’s Airbnb. If you are extremely lucky and you have
friends or relatives who live in a nice location and have space in their home,
you could stay there. People who are wealthy sometimes have second homes
for holidaying. And then there is camping – typically this means going to a
designated field and pitching a tent. Advantages: it’s very affordable, lots of
people like being outdoors ‘in nature’. Disadvantages: quite a few, of which
the main one is ‘roughing it’, meaning that sleeping on the ground can be
uncomfortable, camp-site toilet blocks can be unpleasant, and you will be
obliged to listen to the noisy activities of your neighbours who are only a
few feet away.
Glamping emerged to solve this problem. A glamping holiday could see
you in a bijou wooden cabin rather than a tent. It might be an elaborate tree-
house with spectacular views. There might be a hot tub or outdoor bath.
There might be fairy lights, a fridge and ice bucket, and you might pay the
same nightly fee that a hotel would have charged, if not even more than that.
280 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Crucially, though, you’re not staying in a hotel. Glamping oscillates or

swings back and forth between glamour and camping. On the one hand,
there you are, out ‘in nature’, with not much separating you from the great
outdoors, even when you are asleep. On the other hand, there’s champagne.
The problems of camping are transcended and only the beautiful elements
remain.

Sincerity
Sincerity can be baked into a business at multiple levels
Technology, which is driving consumer culture into the future, was supposed
to be the great liberator. You don’t have to waste your life queuing at the
bank any more, you can use the app. Here’s the problem: ‘Let’s be real with
ourselves: how many of us are using the time afforded us by our banking
app to write poetry? We just passively consume crap on Instagram’
(Catherine Price, in a 2022 report by Rebecca Seal of The Observer on digi-
tal amnesia). To summarize: the problem with digital culture in the 2020s is
that it has ushered in a lot of crap.
A New Sincerity approach to business and branding tries to solve the
problem, not at the level of the consumer, making it their job to attempt
‘digital detox’, but at the level of the crap. People want to consume, we can’t
stop them, and businesses want to add value. If we want our customers to
consume and experience less crap, it’s our responsibility to do better.
Doing better is not just about marketing communications, which get their
own chapter, coming up next. Sincerity can be baked into a business at
multiple levels, such as organizational culture, brand purpose and product
design. Recall that I earlier defined authenticity as something like ‘being true
to oneself’ and sincerity as broadly ‘being true to other people’. Examples of
how to become sincere are shared in this section.
Do consumers everywhere want this? Is it global? The chapters you are
reading now, in this second edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing, describe
metamodern culture, which is the name given to a cultural shift in the West.
Global consumer culture becomes more diverse as it expands and certainly
the leading players such as China make their own culturally specific contri-
butions, changing the ways that people around the world shop and think
about brands and retail, wherever they encounter Chinese businesses. In this
context, the United States, birthplace of metamodernism, continues to
 BRANDS AND BUSINESSES 281

spread and propagate its cultural values, which is why you may have noticed
the message ‘Be Kind’, which became a meme and achieved viral status in
2018–2020, popping up in dozens of countries.
What about research showing that people don’t really care about brand
purpose compared to price and other everyday considerations? Not every
consumer will rank your sincere brand purpose highly, relative to other
much more pressing concerns such as price and quality, especially during a
cost-of-living crisis (e.g., see Andrew Tenzer of Reach plc, quoted by Innes,
Marketing Week, 2021). Despite this, I propose that as an organization, you
don’t lose anything by being sincere or having a worthwhile purpose. It’s
like sustainability: committing to it has society-wide benefits and strength-
ens the integrity of the organization, even if some customers don’t care
about sustainability. Indeed, at the same time as publishing sceptical research
for Reach, Tenzer has led a change of strategy for its news brand The Mirror,
which is having a makeover and becoming ‘warmer, human, empathetic’
(Jefferson, Marketing Week, 2021).

Ditch outdated brand personalities, we’re all sincere now

Our ideas about brand personalities and archetypes may be holding us back
at a time of cultural change.

●● They encourage marketers to take flights of fancy and gradually risk

losing touch with reality, ascribing qualities such as innocence to non-
human entities and their corporate owners.
●● Choosing a brand personality or defining archetype from a menu may be
seen as a reason to ignore or neglect all of the other menu items. For
example, if you’ve decided that your brand has a ‘rugged’ personality or
aligns with the ‘rebel’ archetype, you may ignore ‘sincerity’ because it is
some other brand’s personality and not your business.

The first problem has been around ever since we invented marketing. Ever
since Jennifer Aaker published ‘Dimensions of brand personality’ in 1997,
we’ve had fun deciding which of five personalities our brand would have, if
such a thing could ever happen, in much the same way that Western TV
viewers once used to amuse themselves by asking ‘of the Friends, am I
Phoebe, Monica or Rachel?’ or ‘which of the Sex and the City girls am I?’
The thing is, consumers know that it’s not real. It’s just a game. Phoebe of
282 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Friends is not a particularly complex personality, and no real person ‘is’

Phoebe.
In her original paper, Aaker notes that consumers in market research situ-
ations anthropomorphize brands very easily, comparing them to celebrities
and other well-known figures. She even acknowledges that they may have
learned this behaviour from marketers who are very keen for people to
animate brands and give them imaginary personalities. The trap is that we
marketers are generally taking the exercise way more seriously than the
average market research respondent. We get into a situation where we are at
risk of believing our own hype. We train people to say that brands have
personalities, just like the two-dimensional sitcom characters on TV, and
then when they co-operate with our requests, we act as though we have
made some great discovery about human nature. If you’d like to read more
criticism of brand personality, a well-organized summary is provided by
Kumar (2018).
The second problem is relevant now because, as I keep mentioning,
Western culture has changed. Jungian archetypes have existed in marketing
for 20 years, in a form so colourful, glossy and stripped of nuance that Jung
might not be pleased with the results, had he lived to see them. The ‘wheel’
of 12 archetypes, which you have certainly run into on your travels in
marketing, appeals to our industry not only because it is accessible but also
because it claims to be universal, around the world and over time. The
wheels come off this stylish yet faulty vehicle when culture turns a corner
and words like ‘sincerity’ and ‘optimism’ gather new layers of meaning
which cannot be accommodated by a model that is designed not to change.
Here’s a summary of the situation, as I see it.

●● Consumers may be co-operative in market research situations, but they

are not stupid. Today, they are less likely than ever to accept that a non-
human entity that exists only to be an asset to a large corporation
straightforwardly ‘is’ sincere or innocent just because the marketing said
so, because these are human qualities. It might not seem important, or it
might seem that I’m over-stating people’s scepticism, but the fact remains
that consumers aren’t as gullible, passive and obedient as they were when
Jung was alive, or even 20 years ago when Mark and Pearson (2001)
published their Jung-derived wheel of opportunity. They are very alert to
 BRANDS AND BUSINESSES 283

attempts by marketers to trick them and have learned that profit-making

companies don’t always act in the best interests of the people.
●● Because of this sceptical alertness, as well as the whole metamodernist
movement, sincerity is becoming a hygiene factor. Don’t think that we
brand owners and marketers are being let off the hook. Consumers who
place a high value on sincerity raise their standards when looking for any
sign of it in the way that companies behave. They don’t stop looking for
sincerity, they look harder. That’s why it’s a good idea to design New
Sincerity into our businesses from the outset and not ignore it or wait for
the marketing department to apply a sincere gloss at the last minute.

Find an altruistic brand purpose, make and keep promises

In light of the things I’ve been saying above about more informed and
media-literate consumers, it could be useful to consider that while consum-
ers may not credulously imbue your brand with a personality, they are aware
that behind the brand is a company, and where there’s a company, there are
people. People are capable of sincerity and integrity, and they are capable of
moral decisions. This is why you need to be able to tell a convincing story
about why your company or brand exists, beyond self-interest. If you get it
right, the story of your company’s purpose, explained by a real person with
a name and a face, will do a lot to boost your credibility.
The reason why this matters is because sincerity is a matter of trust.
Recall my discussion and crude diagrams in Chapter 13. If authenticity was
about being true to oneself – even if it made others uncomfortable and
promoted discord – then sincerity is about being true to other people.
Sincerity becomes their business and their decision, as they evaluate the like-
lihood that your future behaviour will line up with the face and message
that you are presenting to them today.
Sincerity is important because trust is important. Remember that meta-
modern consumers are actively trying to build a better world. The whole
project of building a better, kinder, more sustainable society crucially
depends on our ability to trust and rely on each other. None of us can do it
alone. Sincerity as an action or behavioural habit rather than mere intent
means that our faith in each other is justified. An initial evaluation of a
person as sincere is an expectation that promises will be kept.
284 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

SINCERITY IS A PROMISE YOU MUST KEEP

Because sincerity makes a promise about the future, it is always precarious, at

risk of let-down. If you’re a brand, you’re asking consumers to trust you, so you
really have to be serious about keeping your promises. Know the reason why
your company exists, beyond a self-interested profit motive, and make sure you
deliver against that purpose.

In the 2020s, sincerity is not optional. It’s not a personality that you can
choose from a menu, like fries or salad. It is expected to be built into the
reasons why you, a human, get up in the morning and go to work. Now let’s
look at some potential sources for all that sincere energy.

What you should care about: Not just causes but values
The earnest, sincere, sometimes playful young consumers who are rebuild-
ing Western culture are capable of getting behind causes, whether it’s climate
change or police brutality. But this is only part of their activism. Another,
perhaps bigger, part concerns not causes, which are linked to specific issues,
but values, which apply everywhere. I just have space to give you two quick
examples. Have you heard of K-pop stans? A ‘stan’ is a super-fan and K-pop
is Korean pop music. K-pop stans love their music, the singers and every-
thing that goes with fan culture. They behave in interesting ways on social
media. On Twitter, during the opening years of the 2020s, they spontane-
ously formed flash mobs to suppress disliked (usually political) messages.
They did this by spamming the offending accounts with what they see as
wholesome K-pop content. Before the K-pop stans, there was the Cybertwee
movement. Cybertwee is a loose arts collective founded in 2014 which exists
to combat male aggression and other symptoms of male dominance online
by flooding the internet with things that are cute, fluffy, pink, optimistic and
‘dear’. This is all about values. There will probably never come a time when
the worst aspects of life online are under control – there’s no measurable
target for K-pop and twee art. What matters is being a part of something,
expressing values and taking action in pursuit of them. This is a much more
free-form activity than following a one-track cause. I mention Cybertwee
and the K-pop stans because it will help highlight the values in the ­businesses
that I’m about to cite as good examples of New Sincerity.
 BRANDS AND BUSINESSES 285

Serlina Boyd is the founder of Cocoa Girl and Cocoa Boy magazines, the
first magazines in the UK for Black children. If Serlina just wanted to make
money, I’m certain she could have found a less risky business venture, but
the whole Cocoa project throbs with purpose. Each issue of the magazines
aims to build up children whose life opportunities risk being curtailed for
reasons that are rooted in racism. Magazine covers explicitly announce ‘role
models’ and say unironic things like ‘let’s build your confidence’. Importantly,
we don’t have to look very far past the inspiring adult role models to find
that the magazines are full of ordinary Black British children who are
discovering that they have talents and ambitions as journalists, artists and
future leaders. How much Serlina may personally profit is credibly a second-
place priority compared to Cocoa’s unmistakable purpose. ‘What’s important
is shining a light and illuminating our little Black girls’ says a sincere looking
woman in the video ‘Michelle Obama Photo Covershoot’, one of several on
the Cocoa website.3
The other company I particularly want to highlight in the space available
here is Luminary Bakery. Luminary is a London-based company that bakes
delicious cake. I’ve sampled it myself and it is out of this world. But the
fantastic product, like Serlina’s magazines, is only part of the story. The
purpose of the company is not just to make cake but to give new life and
hope to women who have experienced ‘multiple disadvantages’. This means
things like being victims of human trafficking and gender-based violence.
Luminary provides women with training, employment and healthy, trusting
relationships. A graduate of the Luminary programme says: ‘Before I came
to Luminary, my life had fallen apart […] Luminary has gifted me with so
many opportunities, I honestly don’t know where I would be without them’.4
I bring these businesses to your attention because there are causes, and
then there are values. Values such as loving and supporting ‘our little Black
girls’ and being unable to rest while there are severely disadvantaged women
in our own towns and cities who are ‘struggling to get by every day, ques-
tioning their value and unable to provide a different future for their children’
(Luminary Bakery, 2020). Can you see how emotional this is, and how rich
in empathy? What is sincerity? Sincerity is experiencing real love for the
people who need it the most and being committed enough to your own
values of compassion and justice to get out of bed every single day and work
to make things better. Causes are specific and sometimes fade with time.
Values are everywhere and they are forever.
286 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Sincerity, irony and your business

‘OK’, I can hear you thinking, ‘I get values and brand purpose. But you said
a lot earlier about metamodernism swinging between sincerity and irony.
Where is irony in this mix?’
It’s true that New Sincerity likes a little irony and it’s also the case that
irony combined with sincerity is much easier to design into marketing
communications than into your core values or brand purpose. Still, it can be
done, and we just have enough space to consider a couple of examples here.
Dollar Shave Club was founded in 2011 as a direct-to-consumer start-up,
eventually being bought by Unilever in 2016. In its formative years as a
small DTC outfit, it displayed an equal mix of postmodern and metamodern
influences. Millennial consumers, with their emerging metamodern culture,
discovered in young founder Michael Dubin a plausible personality with an
unwavering gaze and a real-world commitment to bringing good quality yet
astonishingly affordable shaving to the public. Postmodern Gen-Xers liked
his earthy language, his willingness to take pot-shots at leading brand
Gillette and his resistance to being fooled, a talent with which they also
credit themselves. Inevitably, Dollar Shave Club has lost most of its edgy
irony since being adopted and rehabilitated by Unilever, while at the same
time benefiting as a business from the experience and structure of the
Unilever organization.
Summer camps for adults are a thing now. Originating in the US, where
summer camp is a culturally specific childhood tradition, the adult version
has now spread to the UK, Australia and Europe. The UK was more than
ready for a pretend American ‘summer camp’ as it was already awash with
semi-ironic ‘school discos’ for adults and restaurants that served ‘school
dinner’ food such as mashed potato and custard. If you can’t guess, adult
summer camp is essentially a camping holiday but with a lot of distinctive
features seen in the children’s version. For example:

●● Wholesome group activities, outdoors and with an emphasis on physical

exercise, such as races, ball games such as rounders and sometimes
woodsman-like sports such as archery.
●● The clear expectation of being sociable and making new friends, even if
you are shy.
●● Sincere commitment and delivery, on both sides – the camp and the
customer. Innocent, clean fun is reliably co-created.
 BRANDS AND BUSINESSES 287

Irony, which is very much present, is found in the absurd situation of adults
imitating kids. The friend you made while trampolining isn’t a shy 11-year-
old who goes to a different school. They’re a city banker, project manager or
social media consultant who works 60 hours a week and needs illegally
procured benzodiazepines to fall asleep.
Sincerity is sweet because life is cruel. As a business, try to soften the cruel
parts and make them more bearable.

Feelings
Feelings are important for your business because they are important to
consumers
I began the story of ‘the turn to affect’, or the rise to supremacy of pre-verbal
feelings, at the end of the previous chapter. If you remember, my claim was
that feelings (not yet ‘emotions’) have become tremendously important to
younger generations of consumers because they are seen as more truthful
and more trustworthy than words, which tell lies.
I take it that you already know that, in the 2020s, consumers expect your
company to be good and ethical, not just relying on slick marketing. If we
can take that as read, then we can get to some semiotics, in which I’ll try to
show how we can incorporate the supremacy of feelings into the design of
our businesses, products and customer experiences. Here’s what we’re
aiming for:

●● Acknowledge the truth of people’s feelings. If people feel a certain way,

that’s their reality.
●● Facilitate desirable feelings and aspirational relationships (sometimes
called ‘relationship goals’).
●● Harmonize with contemporary ideas about the extent to which feelings
are a problem, and who is responsible for any problems.

On that last point, I’m not trying to build up suspense, so I will say it plainly
now. People tend to feel unhappy when they are having problems. Sometimes
those problems arise from a mismatch between the individual and the norms
of their society. For example, being a compliant university student or office
worker can be difficult if you have any flavour of attention deficit, autism,
dyslexia or other forms of neurodiversity (formerly ‘neurological condi-
288 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

tions’). At one time, individuals tried to absorb these problems. They would
try to battle through them at work, cover them up and perhaps look for
ways of altering themselves. Times have changed now – and your legal
responsibilities as an employer may have changed too, depending on where
you live. The feeling now is that it is not the individual’s responsibility to
‘fix’ or repair themselves, if such a thing were even possible. Instead, we
accept that people are all different and that the world around them, includ-
ing the workplace and including your product or service, needs to change to
be more inclusive.
Now let’s look at how we can honour feelings and their status in our
businesses, products and services.

People use products and brands to allow wholesome feelings to rise

to the surface
On 29 June 2022, journalist Lora Kelley published a feature in The Atlantic
about the current state of dating. The story is about, at first glance, people
dating using video platforms such as Zoom, but it is also about LEGO. It
opens with these words:

In the summer of 2020, Andy Rattinger went on a video date with a woman he
met on an app. He had such a nice time that he planned a second date, dinner
over Zoom, with her. He then suggested that they order identical London-
themed Lego sets [sic] and build them simultaneously from their respective
living rooms, while also talking on Zoom.

The fact that online daters turned to meeting new prospects on Zoom for
their first and second dates rather than putting their coats on and going
outside is not that surprising, especially at a time when people were staying
indoors because of the pandemic. The more interesting part, from a semiotic
point of view, is the role of LEGO in this story. Note that the LEGO set was
the idea of the man rather than the woman. So – why LEGO? The date
could have taken any number of other paths. They could have left things
open and just chatted, perhaps using props such as a glass of wine. They
could have watched Netflix together or compared holiday photos. Instead,
it was LEGO. Why?
Not having met Mr Rattinger, we have only semiotics available to find
the answer. Dating, even in the relative safety of Zoom, is always somewhat
of a risk, especially for people who date men. You just don’t know who is
 BRANDS AND BUSINESSES 289

going to appear on the call. Will it be creepy and inappropriate? Will you be
pushed into saying or doing things you don’t want to do? Are you being
covertly recorded?
As a semiotic sign – a unit of communication that conveys meaning – the
LEGO brand is incredibly wholesome. It is entertaining for adults, while
maintaining a level of unspoiled innocence that makes it a favourite gift of
parents to their children. It is creative without being demanding or reveal-
ing. Even the detail ‘London-themed’ is meaningful. Andy knew that his date
had enjoyed a period of time in London, so his choice of LEGO set was a
chance to be thoughtful. Overall, we might say that LEGO, an internation-
ally recognized semiotic sign for clean, wholesome play, was so powerful
that it was able to exert a kind of controlling, stabilizing influence on an
uncertain and potentially awkward situation. It was the beginning of a rela-
tionship that lasted several months.
Here’s what you can do if you own a brand. Make something wholesome,
clean and pure. Maybe it’s ingredients for baking bread, a service in which
people write each other encouraging letters (see the British charity From Me
to You), a conservation project or yoga gear. Make it available to consumers
in situations where they want to be trusting and trustworthy, and they want
to give their true feelings a chance to shine.

People like products and experiences which make them feel more
powerful while greatly simplifying the world around them
There’s a useful book by Jesse Schell called The Art of Game Design, now in
its third edition (2020). I’m not a games developer but I read books about
game design, in the same way that I read books about the craft of fiction
writing, despite not being a novelist. We marketers have everything to learn
from experts in these fields. Schell delivers solid and up-to-date advice about
storytelling and interactive user experiences, including this tip:

Offer the player a combination of simplicity (the game world is simpler than the
real world) and transcendence (the player is more powerful in the game world
than they are in the real world). This [is a] potent combination.

We already met ‘transcendence’ a bit nearer the start of this chapter when I
spoke about beauty. Mike Perry’s ocean plastic is transcendent: it comes out
of the sea more beautiful than it went in, and as an art object, it transcends
our daily anxiety and struggles with the waste that consumerism generates.
290 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

But when Schell talks about transcendence, it’s slightly different. Here, the
player of a game, immersed in an imaginative game world, transcends the
limitations of their daily lives (for example, not being a muscular superhero
or a world leader) and revels in newly discovered power.
To share an example of Schell’s, generations of gamers have enjoyed
Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series of games. The central mechanic of the
game is driving, and the fun of it is that it offers the player the chance to go
on an anarchic crime spree, the more chaotic and the further outside the law
the better. As Schell carefully notes, GTA is pitch-perfect in its simplicity and
transcendence. ‘The Grand Theft Auto series uses criminal life to give both
simplicity (life is simpler when you don’t obey laws) and transcendence (you
are more powerful when you don’t obey laws)’.
Popular life simulation game The Sims is a much tamer and more domes-
tic expression of the same dynamic. In The Sims, the lives and households
you manage are pretty simple compared to their real-world, flesh and bricks-
and-mortar versions. Responsibilities exist but are easily manageable and
there’s only just enough challenge to keep things interesting. At the same
time, the player has the power of a god. To achieve perfect design, Schell
reminds readers that the package of simplicity/transcendence should not be
arbitrary or contrived. You want to link it to wish fulfilment for the user,
whether that’s pretending to be an incorrigible outlaw, the progenitor of a
dynasty, a fearless dragon-slayer, a magic-wielding wizard or whatever it
may be.
You can use these insights in designing CX and UX. There’s an entertain-
ment facility in London called Kidzania, which is based on a great idea, even
though reports of customer service sometimes vary. The idea is that kids can
try out different adult professions, or at least play-act them, in convincing
settings, while fully dressed in an authentic British Airways pilot’s uniform
or similarly appropriate costume. The facility even opens to adults from
time to time, serving alcohol to lubricate the atmosphere of play.
Canva is a bit like this too. It’s a free-to-use, online graphic design tool
that anyone can use to make professional looking social media graphics,
presentations, posters and more. The results are quite good enough for most
smaller businesses that lack much of a design budget, and it is fun to use.
There’s plenty of simplicity: anyone can create good-looking content even
though most people did not have the benefit of art school or graphic design
training. There’s also transcendence: the user experience is empowering and
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it’s exciting to find that you have made a creative item that exceeds your
expectations and your perceptions of your own ability.

Please customers by showing them that expressing their feelings leads to

social change
When consumers vigorously express their feelings on public platforms, it’s
often because they are angry. As the outrage economy shows, anger is easily
roused and very contagious, spreading like wildfire on social media. I don’t
encourage you to build this into your business model, it’s not what I have
in mind.
Unfortunately for us all, positive feelings are rarer, more difficult to
arouse and perhaps more difficult to convert into likes and shares. However,
I think it’s important to remember that when people are expressing and
sharing anger, it’s usually because they sense some kind of injustice, they are
profoundly dissatisfied with some aspect of the world around them and they
wish things were different. There is, then, at least a potential opportunity to
please and satisfy people by showing them that change is possible through
expressions of joy and delight.
At the time of writing, there’s an unusual amount of happiness being
expressed by English supporters of football (and even quite a few people
who have never previously taken any interest in football). The source of the
joy is two-fold. First, the England women’s team took home a prize (they are
the new European Champions), the size of which has eluded the men’s team
for decades. This is a celebration of something which has already happened –
the match is over, the England team won and now it is time to party. Second,
there is suddenly a huge sense of optimism about the future. Proud parents
are saying that their little girls have bigger, more expansive futures ahead of
them. Girls suddenly have more options and more role models.
The part of this that I want to highlight is the perceived connection
between expressions of support and real-world change. In a sense, football
fans have always known this. They wear their scarves, buy tickets to attend
matches if they can afford it (or otherwise cheer at the TV) because they
perceive that the success of ‘their’ team is materially facilitated by those
actions – even if they are simply watching the game at home with a few
friends. The difference between that and current events is that men have
always played and watched football, so there isn’t much change to bring
about, except for the hoped-for victory of one’s favourite team, whichever
292 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

that happens to be. But the situation with women’s football is different.
Evidently a lot of people are hoping for a better and different future, not just
for ‘their’ team but for women’s football, women’s sport, and girls and
women in general. Creating a better future for ‘women in general’ is a big
ambition and a tall order, but here we are, and it turns out that cheering,
making joyful posts on social media and otherwise publicly celebrating is
not just a reaction to change, but a driver of change. Enthusiasm is expressed,
enthusiasm spreads, more people buy tickets and watch games, corporations
become more interested in sponsorship, football becomes a more viable
career for women, and eventually women’s hopes and aspirations become
less constrained. To express joy is to be the start of a chain which works to
create a better future.
On a smaller scale, crowd-funded projects can be like this as well. To take
a couple of examples from recent experience, when I made a donation to a
crowd-funded funeral for a sadly departed friend, it was an action that was
anchored to past events. People wanted to ‘give him a proper send-off’ and
also to ease the financial cost of a funeral which had landed on his unwealthy
family. But I’ve also occasionally made donations via Kickstarter to assist
the development of products which I felt needed to exist. At the time of
making a donation, it’s not possible to know whether the products will ever
launch, never mind succeed. So these kinds of donations are an investment
in a possible future and an expression of hope.
People believe that their feelings are important and as a business owner,
you can choose to validate that by showing them how the world around
them is improving because of that belief.

Activity: Review your brand’s core purpose and values

In this chapter, I cited Cocoa Girl and Cocoa Boy magazines and Luminary
Bakery as examples of sincerity. The passion of the founders, who all have
names and faces, is totally convincing. Both organizations make decisions
which demonstrate a belief in a better future and a willingness to make it
happen. They also demonstrate a lot of commitment to values which tend to
evoke feelings in customers and the general public.
I’m sure this won’t be the first time that you’ve considered your brand’s
core values or composed a statement about why the company exists. I know
this isn’t new to you. But the main message of these three chapters is that
 BRANDS AND BUSINESSES 293

consumer culture, which usually rolls along, changing gradually, has reached
a tipping point. Change has rapidly accelerated, its ideas are popular with
consumers, there’s a public mood to take account of. That’s why I invite you
to revisit these aspects of your brand or organization now. Evaluate their fit
with the expectations and priorities of metamodern culture. Luckily, the
new generation of consumers is making it very clear what matters to them
and how they want to feel.

Bonus activity: Learn from LEGO

The story of Mr Rattinger, twin LEGO kits and a successful online date
reflects very favourably on the LEGO brand. In this story, LEGO is not just
hanging around, waiting to be built into a tower or a robot. It is imbued
with considerable benevolent energy, which empowers our hero on his quest
for love. Taking this situation as a model, ask how your brand, or a brand
that you admire, could help consumers in a similar way. Note that finding
love is less a Job-to-Be-Done than an expression of hope and belief in the
future. What would happen if people used your refrigerator, family car,
delivery service or cloud storage as magical tools that dispel some feelings
(perhaps anxiety, mistrust) while encouraging others (confidence, human
connection)?
Turn to the next chapter now to see lots of exciting examples of meta-
modern culture in ads and marketing communications.

Endnotes
1 See www.nike.com/gb/sustainability/materials (archived at https://perma.cc/
HJ7H-Y3BK)
2 See https://m-perry.com/portfolio/mor-plastig (archived at https://perma.
cc/8VE4-HCT3)
3 Cocoa (2021) Michelle Obama photo covershoot, Cocoa Girl, www.cocoagirl.
com/cocoa-kids-tv/ (archived at https://perma.cc/Q5NY-3D38)
4 Anon (n.d.) Luminary women’s programmes, Luminary Bakery, https://
luminarybakery.com/pages/luminary-womens-programmes (archived at https://
perma.cc/SGQ2-YDFM)
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15

Marketing and communications

WHAT’S COMING UP
This is the last of three new chapters which explore the impact of
metamodernism on consumer culture, in the West, and everywhere that is
reached by the tendrils of Western individualism. In the last two chapters,
we looked at emerging consumer needs and examples of businesses that
are doing an excellent job of responding with their business models,
products and services. This chapter is about marketing communications.
Semiotics exists to decode all the signs and symbols that make up
professional and amateur communications. It is the best and perhaps the
only tool we have for decoding the secrets of metamodern ads and
multimedia campaigns. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

●● Name seven ways to create brand communications that are right for
metamodern culture.
●● Recognize ads and campaigns that are examples of best practice in
metamodern marcoms.
●● Design ads and marketing messages that make your organization appear
completely sincere (it’s your job to back that up by being trustworthy).
●● Skilfully mix sincerity with the right amount of irony, using recipes that
are popular with Gen Z.
●● Offer people chances to have enjoyable emotions, especially in the
context of satisfying friendships and relationships.
●● Express optimism in marcoms in a way that resonates with and rewards
metamodern ideals.
296 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Metamodernism
Tips 1–7: How to use metamodernism in marketing communications
INTRODUCTION TO THIS SET OF TIPS
In this first set of tips, each tip is anchored to an example of a recent ad for
Nike, the Paralympics, tourism in Western Australia, Amazon, The New York
Times, Vice Media or AMC. The set therefore presents seven ads which are
highlighted as great demonstrations of marcoms engaging with m ­ etamodern
culture and meeting metamodern consumers’ expectations.
Some of the ads presented here are also successful at being sincere and at
engendering positive feelings. These two special topics are explored through
more strategic and conceptual advice in the next two sections.

1. MAGIC, FABLES AND FAIRY TALES

In 2022, ad agency Droga5 London created a mixed-media campaign for
Amazon, promoting its books. There’s a one-minute film called ‘That Reading
Feeling Awaits’ (which you can find on YouTube). The campaign is primarily
online, with support from outdoor poster ads and even a 3D installation at
Penn Station in New York (and see Gurjit Degun in Campaign, 25 July 2022,
for more details).
In the film, various people are shown utterly engrossed in books. Some
are at home; some are in busy public settings such as the street or a crowded
train. The viewer comes to see what is in the mind’s eye of the reader, as the
contents of the book spring to life, mixing fantasy with reality. Robots burst
through the surface of the earth, animated manga characters swarm over a
café table, a tiny boat struggles to stay afloat on a roaring ocean that has
flooded a laundrette. The film graphically depicts the power of fiction to
transform and transport – the readers are experiencing augmented reality of
a majestic stature that is not yet available to most people, using the technol-
ogy that we have now.
It’s worth noting that a diverse range of humans are shown in this
campaign. A mix of genders, ethnicities and age groups are included in a cast
of engaging characters who are enthralled by their books. The reason this
matters is not just because diversity and inclusivity are self-evidently a good
thing. It’s also important to realize that this specific technique of mixing
magic and fairy tales with reality arrives with the expectation of revealing
diverse points of view, in the metamodern cultural climate that now surrounds
younger consumers.
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2. STORIES WITHIN STORIES

Droga5 again rose to meet the expectations of metamodern culture with
‘The Truth Is Worth It’, an award-winning campaign for The New York
Times.1 Launched in 2018 as the latest iteration of a long-running brand
campaign series, it features five ads, each of which highlights the distinctive
qualities of NYT journalists (e.g., fearlessness, rigour, resolve). Thrilling and
pacey, each short film – ranging from 30 seconds to two minutes – uses the
unswerving commitment of journalists as a foil for the urgency and the
austere beauty of truth, which sometimes comes from surprising places.
‘Resolve’ is the film in this series which concerns Myanmar and the
Rohingya genocide, described by some governments as ethnic cleansing.
‘Resolve’ takes the viewer on a journey with a very persistent journalist who
manages to gain access to Myanmar, to glimpse government camps before
being whisked away, and to finally escape her chaperones and slip unnoticed
into a small village of Rohingya people. The quest is to challenge the govern-
ment’s official story that no ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people has
happened. All seems lost at the last moment; the villagers she speaks to seem
withdrawn and only repeat the government’s own story without deviation.
Finally, the journalist reaches out to people who are not usually treated
as expert witnesses – children. The village children talk; children everywhere
are acknowledged to be candid rather than diplomatic. They reveal a story
very different from the official line. There are burned villages and people are
made to disappear. The truth has come out, and ultimately the moral of the
story is that the truth must come out. Stories are wrapped in stories. Where
there’s one story, there might be another hidden behind or inside it. In this
film, the metamodern principle of paying attention to those who otherwise
go unnoticed plays a special role in helping the truth to come out and
perhaps slowly moving the world towards peace and justice.

3. PLATFORM MARGINALIZED PEOPLE AND VOICES

Channel 4 is a British public service TV network. It was set up in the early
1980s with a government mandate to give airtime to people, causes and
points of view which were not well catered for by the BBC. It has long
supported and promoted the Paralympics, demonstrably lifting public aware-
ness and perceptions of people with disabilities. In 2021, Channel 4 launched
the latest episode of its long-running campaign, promoting its coverage of the
2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games (which were held in 2021 because of the
pandemic). You can read an interesting interview with Eoin McLaughlin of
298 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

agency 4 Creative in a feature about the campaign, published on the WFA

site the same year.2
The simple fact of this campaign promoting the Paralympics is not the
reason I draw it to your attention, although that may already qualify it as
‘platforming marginalized people and voices’. It makes clever moves in show-
ing two sides of Paralympic athletes: we might even say that it oscillates back
and forth between one view and another. On the one hand, the distance
between the viewer and the athlete is shortened as the campaign reveals a
‘behind the scenes’ view of athletes as people, who face relatable challenges
and make sacrifices for their sport that the viewer can empathize with. On
the other hand, the thrilling, nearly supernatural determination of the elite
athlete is reinforced in the strapline: ‘To be a Paralympian, there’s got to be
something wrong with you’. Paralympian athletes are simultaneously
included, part of all humanity, and awe-inspiring achievers that make unmiss-
able TV. It’s a refreshing new view of life with a disability that was supported
by Paralympian athletes.

4. LAYERED IDENTITIES REVEAL NEW POINTS OF VIEW

In Chapter 13, I introduced the concept of intersectionality, giving to a big
topic a simplified definition. At the centre of intersectionality is an aware-
ness that people have complex and overlapping identities. A person may find
themselves outside or at the edge of mainstream society in multiple ways.
With that multiplicity might come specific life experiences and perhaps the
development of a unique point of view. Ordinary people regularly experi-
ence the effects of nationality or ethnicity, gender, social class and many
other variables, not individually, but in concert.
If all this seems overly complicated or overly focused on the individual, a
2021 report by The Unstereotype Alliance (with UN Women and research by
Ipsos) reveals why intersectionality is so important.3 ‘Beyond Gender 2’
shows that, in Japan, Turkey, the US and the UK, 53–68% of consumers ‘felt
under-represented in advertising’, meaning that they do not see their lives
and identities in the stream of advertising output to which they are continu-
ally exposed. The people depicted in advertising are overwhelmingly reflective
of majority ideals. There are idealized families; mum, dad, two kids. People
present their gender in a conventional way. Minority ethnic groups may be
represented on the condition of never being disruptive to a prevailing major-
ity culture. In advertising, ‘real people’ are making an impression, but we
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 299

could still do more to close the gap between the safe, normative versions of
reality in advertising and the intersectional real world.
A nice example of intersectionality in advertising is found in ‘Queens on
the Edge’, a 2022 campaign by 303 MullenLowe.4 Made to promote tourism
on Australia’s Western coast, it follows the adventures of four women who
go on a road trip. The ads share the unique view of Western Australia held
by women of a certain age. One says, ‘when you get to about 60, you’ve
reached a level of comfort with who you are, yet you’re still healthy enough
to do all these things’; another observes that she travelled a lot when younger,
looking for adventure in the style of young people everywhere – but in
matur­ity, she’s developed a strong desire to deeply know Australia, her home.

5. COLLAPSE DISTANCE: BREAK DOWN BARRIERS

In 2021, Nike unveiled a campaign, ‘Play New’, by wieden+kennedy port-
land.5 It features professional athletes, and this is to be expected from a
global and fairly aspirational brand with money to spend on marketing.
Despite the power of the brand to attract celebrities and its willingness to
use them, Nike is consistently good at bringing its customers – ordinary
people of every conceivable level of fitness and physical aptitude – into the
fold and making them feel part of a celebration of movement. I’ve seen this
happen lots of times and even been privileged to work with Nike London on
some of these enterprises, which have reached out to disadvantaged urban
youth and given platforms and opportunities to young, ethnically diverse
artists and designers. During the pandemic, when swathes of its customer
base were trapped indoors, Nike put a thrilling spin on exercising at home
in front of a YouTube video or online trainer by reframing it as one huge
community event and tempting consumers with the chance to bring their
dreams of stardom to life: ‘If you ever dreamed of playing for millions
around the world, now is your chance’ (for example, see Nike, Twitter, 21
March 2020).
In ‘Play New’, the distance between the average consumer and elite
athletes is again shortened. Basketball star Sabrina Ionescu is revealed to be
hopeless at tennis and sprinter Dina Asher-Smith makes a mess of golf. The
core message of the ad is often taken to be ‘play is better than competition’
(for example, see Faierman, 2021). It’s a cheerful message, but I think the
deeper connection to metamodern culture is found in its continuation of
Nike’s ongoing endeavour of reaching out to the average person and lifting
them up.
300 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

6. GET CREATIVE WITH DIFFERENT MEDIA

‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ by Dentsu Creative for Vice Media won
awards at Cannes Lions in 2022, including Brand Experience and Activation.
At the heart of the experience is an app that uses augmented reality filters
and an attention-getting soundtrack to provide an unexpected new view of
the British Museum (e.g., see Canton and Stewart, Adweek, 22 June 2022).
When used to view key exhibits, such as the Rosetta Stone, a surprising and
immersive alter-reality is revealed. It tells a vivid story of the histories of
these precious objects, stolen from their countries of origin and kept in a
museum thousands of miles from home.
The pièce de résistance of the campaign is that the experience was created
without the participation and seemingly without even the knowledge of
British Museum staff. The user (and later, the viewer of films about the
ex­perience) is drawn into a delicious subterfuge and subversion of the
museum, which becomes a museum of theft and loss.
The campaign makes innovative use of mixed media. It showcases Vice
Media as a brand that challenges the establishment and exposes secrets. It is
also perfectly pitched for younger generations of consumers who care
passionately about social justice issues and are very interested in knowing
the truths that sit behind the ‘official’ stories and beliefs that glue together
the scaffolds of British society. As such, this is also an example of a story-
within-a-story, as seen in Tip 2, above.

7. USE TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING

Distinguishing itself from simply distributing a message via different media,
‘transmedia marketing’ implies a cohesive and coherent approach, wherein
the choices you make about which media to use and how are informed by a
clear idea of your business objectives and target audience (Zeiser, 2015). If
you are doing transmedia storytelling, this can mean relaying unique parts
of the story using different media. The jigsaw pieces, so to speak, are collect-
ible on different platforms and make their own contribution to the big
picture. The rules and dynamics were crisply set out by academic and
thought leader Henry Jenkins (e.g. Convergence Culture, 2008). He is clear
that transmedia storytelling is not mere repetition of a story across plat-
forms and channels, but is an extension of the story, introducing original
elements and expanding the consumer’s or user’s understanding. Zeiser
(2015) highlights numerous commercially successful examples, such as TV
series Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead (both campaigns by Playmatics
for AMC). Both drew excited fans deeper into the story-world of their
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 301

favourite TV shows by playing mobile games and experiencing interactive

graphic novels. Users could role-play leading characters and make their own
decisions and choices which were reflected in the outcomes of these games
and stories.
I bring transmedia storytelling to your attention here because it is more
than a momentary fad, and it is more than spreading your marketing across
different media just because they are there. In fact, transmedia storytelling is
important now because it is aligned with the four pillars of metamodern
culture that we’ve come to know in these chapters. In particular, notice:
Collapsing distance. Fans want to get closer to, and more immersed in,
the objects of their desire. It’s rewarding to be a more knowledgeable fan,
more fully engaged. It’s not just ‘more’ content; belief in the story-world is
itself a pleasure and is sustained by transmedia storytelling.
Radical optimism. The newest thinking in transmedia storytelling leans
towards what we could call ‘good causes’ – social justice projects and chari-
table drives which satisfy the metamodern drive to make the world a better
place (for example, see Moloney, 2022).

Sincerity
Tips 8–12: How to be sincere in marketing communications
INTRODUCTION TO THIS SET OF TIPS
We’ve already seen, in the first set of tips, a few ads that are doing a good
job of being sincere.
In this section, the goal is not to rattle off half a dozen more examples of
similar ads, even though I mention a few. Rather, my aim is to use this space
to explore more deeply the dynamics of sincerity and give more detail on
how to make the idea work for you, in your marketing communications.

8. SHOW REAL PEOPLE, WITH FACES AND NAMES

Sincerity is, in part, an assessment. The recipient of another person’s amiable
words or gestures makes a decision about whether to trust them. It is a
prediction that in the future, this person’s behaviour will reveal their inner
self or true self to be consistent with the way they are presenting themselves
now. I hope these remarks are highlighting the importance of humanity. It’s
very difficult to be a sincere organization or a sincere brand because these
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things are abstract, conceptual entities with no inner self and no moral
sensibilities.
Wherever possible, include real people with names and faces in market-
ing communications. Real people have inner selves, emotions and moral
codes. They are appealing and susceptible to appeal. Real people understand
when a customer is having a problem, in a way that ‘a brand’ or ‘a company’
cannot understand. What’s more, human faces attract attention. Media-
literate viewers recognize the difference between a real smile and the fake
smile of a model, so try to use real smiles.
There are so many ways to incorporate real people. They could be the
founder of the company or its employees, people in roles that aren’t market-
ing. You could put a face and a name on the person who generates your
Twitter content, so people know who they are talking to. Let’s also appreci-
ate that where there are real people, there is diversity. Take the opportunity
to break free from the white, heteronormative, suburban world of photo-
library stock.

9. MAKE EYE CONTACT

Direction of gaze is taken very seriously in photography. Having the subject
look away from the camera is a legitimate technique and is great for a
purpose such as a fashion shoot, where the objective may be to portray a
fantastical scene with the focus on the clothes. In this situation, the model’s
face potentially distracts from the story, so is turned away. But if the purpose
of the shoot is professional portrait photos, the kind where people wear
business suits and try to look trustworthy, it’s best to have the subject look
into the camera. Later, when the photo is viewed, people will have the feel-
ing of the subject returning their gaze, clear and steady. As the discipline and
profession of photography is experienced in managing semiotic signs like
these every day, this is insight we can use. There are conventions that support
the appearance of sincerity, and this is one of them.
If you’d like to learn more about photography and gaze, please enjoy the
feature ‘Looking away in pictures: Should you look away from the camera’
by photographer Eddie Hernandez, 10 March 2022. It is not academic
theory but a lay person’s guide to portrait photography. Its special charm is
found in its graphic description and illustration of why newspapers like
photos where the subject is looking away. This type of pose is great for
making people look either sad and pensive or else ludicrously confident,
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 303

according to the story the newspaper wants to tell. You probably want to
avoid that, so make eye contact to look more sincere.

10. MANAGE THE IMBALANCE OF POWER

Manage the tension of the fact that you own a company or brand and the
person you are addressing doesn’t. For most consumers, there’s an imbal-
ance of size and power that undermines sincerity.
In 2021, The Guardian celebrated its 200th anniversary with an ad
campaign that placed billboards in London and Manchester, UK. The ads
are all about text: a headline takes up most of the space. One headline reads
‘The cat among the pigeons’, another, ‘Reader funded, not billionaire backed’.
The organizing idea of the campaign is to celebrate The Guardian’s status as
a challenger brand (Campaign, 30 April 2021).6 It is not beholden to Rupert
Murdoch, owner of Fox News, The Times of London and The Wall Street
Journal. It is independent and free to publish the news as it sees fit.
There are at least two messages in this campaign. The larger message is
self-congratulation, which I suppose is allowed on The Guardian’s birthday.
But within that is a second message: ‘reader funded, not billionaire backed’.
It speaks of democracy. It speaks of ambition and even rights: rights to
ownership, the right to freedom of thought and expression, the right of the
ordinary person not to be manipulated. This makes sincerity easier to pull
off. It reduces the inbuilt tension in every business transaction where an
individual hands over their hard-earned cash to an organization that already
has money.
What’s more, ‘reader funded’ makes a promise of likeability. Similar to a
crowd-funded project, it implies widespread approval. People like The
Guardian so much that they pay for it themselves.

11. ACT NATURAL

Feature people who behave like amateurs. In 2016, Burger King released a
short film that doubled as an ad and a staff training video, introducing a new
hot dog. The film is narrated by Snoop Dogg who is on camera most of the
time, in a BK restaurant. But the real stars of the show are BK staff in the
background whose behaviour ranges from shy to starstruck. It’s not clear
whether they are real staff or actors (Reddit later claimed to have spotted
actress Monica Padman in a supporting role). This ambiguity does not
detract from their charm. This is because the delight in this little tableau,
where Snoop hangs around the kitchens at Burger King, is found in the
304 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

contrast and the interplay between Snoop, the supremely confident star, and
the clumsier, less polished, average person. Both parties are sincere. Snoop, a
loved and trusted anti-hero, holds a genial and steady gaze. His face is inter-
nationally recognizable; he’s been Snoop Dogg for a long time and we can all
rely on him to be Snoop and nobody else. His sincerity is above question.
As for the BK staff (or ‘staff’), their sincerity resides in their unguarded
mannerisms. They openly stare at Snoop, slack-jawed, in a way that is not
composed and therefore looks honest and credible. It’s not that they are
there to make Snoop look even more supreme. He is there to provide a foil
to their bewilderment; they are the ones that the viewer is supposed to iden-
tify with. You can see the video on YouTube. There are a lot of comments of
uncertain origin, which say things like ‘I was at BK when this training video
came out, and the time I spent being paid to watch it was the best time I’ve
ever had at work’.

12. TELL STORIES IN WHICH TRUST AND FAITH IN HUMANITY ARE REWARDED
When you as a marketer create and broadcast communications which seem
sincere, you’re asking the viewer to take a risk by trusting you. This contem-
porary, Western, metamodern take on sincerity applies to all kinds of
situations outside of marketing. Having any kind of social life, merely inter-
acting with other people, is full of these same little risks and gambles.
In the section on Feelings in the previous chapter, I spoke about LEGO, a
powerful semiotic sign which is capable of normalizing and stabilizing the
mildly risky and awkward situation of having a first date with a stranger on
Zoom. The discomfort of Zoom is outranked by going outside for a date in
real life, though. People are more of a threat in real life – they might be
physically invasive or bring Covid-19. They might not show up, leaving you
standing outside in the rain. They might reject you – somehow worse in real
life than on a Zoom call, where you could blame it on bad lighting. Social
anxiety is much worse in real-life situations. In any case, we have become
used to staying indoors.
In 2022, beauty brand Maybelline New York co-operated on a campaign
with Time Out – the media and hospitality brand that most consumers
know as Time Out magazine. The campaign encourages people to go out on
real-life dates.7
Maybelline wants to sell Fit Me foundation – there’s less need for make-
up on a Zoom date where the software includes filters, much more need for
it when you are outdoors. Time Out needs people to want to go out and
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 305

explore cities. Together they have created a multi-platform, digital and video
campaign that reassures and reminds people that real-life dating is terrific
fun and real-life relationships are both rewarding and achievable. Trust in
each other pays off. The brand becomes sincere by helping consumers find
and benefit from sincerity.

Tips 13–16: How to mix sincerity with irony

13. MISTAKES, BREAKS AND FAILURES
Mistakes, breaks and failures (Groys, 2012 quoted in Daynes, 2019) can
work in your favour. People fluffing their lines, interrupting each other and
having seemingly unplanned emotional outbursts are all semiotic signs
which are capable of communicating unembarrassed sincerity. Artist and
academic Daynes, quoting art critic and theorist Groys, says that mistakes
appear to the viewer as ‘windows into the interior of submedial space’.
People like these kinds of mistakes because we feel they allow us to glimpse
the truth of things. We feel that we are able to see a real person, such as a
polished celebrity who is captured in a candid moment, or the real face of a
beauty influencer who makes a messy mistake with her mascara and leaves
it in the video that she later posts online. Sincerity is disruptive. Sincerity is
the self that bubbles inside, constantly erupting and making itself known
through behaviour. It is nature, intruding into civilization.
Mistakes can also include props falling over and even technical faults
such as a loss of sound, which make us feel a real world that exists behind a
TV set. With digital culture, a new kind of screen has entered our lives and
achieved a dominance over the TV with its sitcoms and sets and TV news.
Glitches get a special mention for this reason. A glitch is the kind of techni-
cal fault in digital products or broadcasts that interrupts the flow of
communication (e.g., see Kemper, 2022). A glitch can be a snowstorm on the
screen, a splintered and fractured image, noise, the intrusion into one broad-
cast of another unrelated broadcast, and so on. As semiotic signs, glitches
signify not only a break-out of truth but also a critique of the smooth gloss
of digital culture (e.g., see Griner, 2017).

14. ‘BAD’ DESIGN

Adorkables are disruptive brands that target a Gen Z audience, helpfully
explained in a video published by Bloomberg and featuring journalist Ben
Schott (‘The Rise of Adorkables’, 7 July 2022).8 Schott tells a story of design
306 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

in which there were ‘Boomer brands’ with their rational, corporate, literal
and boring design (he highlights Clearasil packaging as an example), then
there was ‘Millennial bland’, awash with pastel pink and using minimalist
gestures such as leaving plenty of empty space on the pack (Schott highlights
Rael Beauty blemish patches). As a rebellion against both of these, Adorkable
design is:

●● Lo-fi, meaning that imperfections are allowed to remain.

●● 8-bit graphics, meaning a limited palette of 256 colours, alluding to the
early days of computing, when 256 colours was considered a lot.
●● Blocky pixel art, as seen in the earliest video games, played on the
Commodore and Amiga.
●● Jarring colour choices – look at TikTok’s red and aqua.
●● Photography that is free from professional mannerisms such as careful
lighting, make-up and set dressing.
●● Accompanied by an ironic tone of voice that lets viewers know that all of
the above is on purpose, it’s not a mistake.

This type of design is not very appealing to older adults, especially those
who were present for the early days of computing. They are not nostalgic for
it because they remember the struggles of dial-up modems, download speeds
of about 4mb/hour rather than the same amount per second, and games
whose crude graphics placed most of the responsibility of creating a convinc-
ing game-world on the user’s imagination, in contrast to the cinematic
experiences we have today. If you weren’t there for the stone age of the
internet, then the awkward design of that period is all super fun.

15. WARM HUMOUR
The leading writers on metamodernism, Vermeulen and van den Akker, in
2010, explained the difference between postmodern (Gen X, early Millennial)
and metamodern (late Millennial, Gen Z) irony like this: ‘Metamodern irony
is intrinsically bound to desire, whereas postmodern irony is inherently tied
to apathy’. It’s a very academic thing to say, so here’s a more everyday
version. When postmodernists make jokes, the ironic element (the part which
is surprising, reveals a different reality lurking beneath the surface, or shows
self-awareness of the joke being a joke) is usually focused on pointing out
how rubbish everything is. This type of ‘skewering’ (Poniewozik, 2021) does
not sit well with metamodern consumers whose morality is more earnest and
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 307

who prefer media which tell the stories of marginalized people. Metamodern
irony, wrapped up in New Sincerity, heads in another direction. The ‘surprise’
element of metamodern jokes does not reveal a ‘worse’ reality sitting under-
neath the surface of the reality that we all experience through convention
and habit. Rather, it reveals a ‘better’ reality which exists beyond or outside
the everyday and resists capture by old-people things like words and TV ads
(sorry).
How would a meme, a cartoon or a story in a social media post express
the uncapturable? Often it happens by showing that a character is lost for
words. Language has collapsed and failed them. They turn instead to using
non-words. They might use a neologism such as ‘uwu’. Uwu is a sound more
than a word, its etymology is emojis rather than other words, its meaning is
predictably ambiguous but depending on the context it can mean simply ‘I
feel happy’ or more specifically ‘I find something to be so cute that it is
almost unbearable’. Alternatively, a character might turn to baby talk (see
Adam Kelly’s 2016 analysis of New Sincerity in Jennifer Egan’s 2010 novel,
A Visit from the Goon Squad).
To make it even simpler: make jokes, but steer clear of cruelty and
sarcasm. Show people discovering that relationships and emotional experi-
ences involving other people are better than first expected. Surprise with
love and delight, not with a wrecking ball. Use non-verbal (sounds, gestures)
and post-verbal (emoticons) at the place where your punchline would
normally be.

16. IS QUIRKY MARKETING A GOOD IDEA?

It would be so easy to use this last small section to tell you to ‘do’ quirky
marketing. It’s not difficult and I have examples for you. But first, a couple
of caveats.
Recall that in Chapter 12 of this book, I introduced you to Dorothy, with
whom I went shopping for homewares. Dorothy’s taste is firmly ‘quirky’ and
it is one of her favourite words. To Dorothy (who is not a young person and
has no interest in rebellion), ‘quirky’ is a teapot or breadbin that has at least
one unusual design feature without ever becoming puzzling or radical. Like
situation comedy, ‘quirky’ is here something rather conservative, which
keeps innovation at bay while expressing just enough personality to be
interesting.
Advice for aspiring novelists often tells writers not to apply a layer of
quirkiness to characters to brighten them up. ‘Quirkiness for the sake of
308 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

quirkiness is a fool’s game’, says Larry Brooks, author of Story Engineering

(2011). The clumsiness of an otherwise careful policeman, or the quirky
habit of carrying a dog in your handbag or always wearing purple, means
nothing to readers until they’ve been given a reason why the character is like
this. Unexplained quirkiness makes readers unhappy and complain of ‘shal-
low clunkiness’ (ibid.).
I am telling you all this about quirkiness because I want you to handle it
with care. It will not work if you are timid, half-hearted or have bolted it on
at the last minute. After all this, if you are sure that you still want quirky
marcoms, here are the essentials:

●● Be a little weird and strange. Have fun with absurdity, which Zoomers
appreciate (the fancy term for this is ‘neo-dadaism’).
●● Be sincere (there’s that word again). Find a value or principle that you are
committed to and stay that way, even while you are joking around.
●● Make jokes at your own expense, not someone else’s expense.

Feelings
Tips 17–23: How to design feelings and emotions into marketing
communications
INTRODUCTION TO THIS SET OF TIPS
In this final section, as well as useful advice, there’s a creative exercise to
help us experience and create some of the feelings that we want consumers
to enjoy. Have fun with this section and in your own semiotic practice going
forward, look for opportunities to play. This will help you meet your more
strategic goals around things like being sincere and being in line with the
expectations of metamodern culture.

17. ANXIETY: ADORKABLE PEOPLE AND SITUATIONS

In Tip 14, I highlighted Bloomberg’s influential video report, ‘The Rise of
Adorkables’. Design decisions that are jarring or primitive can be very
appealing in metamodern culture and may convey fun, a degree of innocence
and a youthful sense of humour. But adorkability is not just about design, it’s
about people and situations. Remember that people – your consumers – are
anxious. Anxiety is especially prevalent among younger people and rates are
climbing. On top of that, people are lonely, and digital culture, with all its
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 309

distanced and digitally mediated relationships, produces feelings of deper-

sonalization and a sense of being merged with the hive mind of the internet
(for more on all these topics, see ‘Sicknesses of Consumer Culture’, in
Chapter 8 of my 2022 book, Using Semiotics in Retail).
Bloomberg’s valuable insight re adorkables goes beyond the nostalgia,
sincerity and cosy humour of ‘bad’ design. In a masterstroke of sincerity,
adorkable consumers have decided that the best way to deal with their own
awkwardness and vulnerabilities is to be up-front about it. The video
particularly highlights Hydro-stars, a product by Starface. The product
treats acne and is used by sticking brightly coloured stars to one’s face, over
the blemishes. It’s important to realize why awkward yet ever hopeful meta-
modern consumers want to do this; to draw attention to their imperfections.
It’s all part of that aesthetic of being sincere, trusting and building rapport
by exposing our vulnerabilities to one another. In the words of prophet of
New Sincerity, David Foster Wallace, to be human might be ‘unavoidably
sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic’. Putting shiny
stars on your acne renders you simultaneously camera-ready and part of a
collective effort in which we are all spotty and awkward together.

18. EMPATHY: IDENTIFYING WITH ANOTHER’S PAIN

As with the socially awkward situation of having acne and then drawing
attention to it with silver stars, there’s a layer of meaning and a hidden
benefit attached to acts of empathy. It is not just that empathy – the ability
to feel another’s feelings – is self-evidently an ethical and selfless thing at a
time when feelings are paramount. It’s also that to empathize is to be hope-
ful. Here’s David Foster Wallace again, in Dunne (2018, p. 1307):

We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece
of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we
might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This
is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that
simple.

In 2018, agency BMB created ads for client Campaign to End Loneliness
(CTEL). Made for the UK market, a film of two and a half minutes shows a
team of adorable six-year-olds confidently chatting to lone adults in a café.9
It’s all very sweet and happy but inevitably there’s pathos. It is there to
justify the message and give it some moral heft. Suddenly there’s an abun-
dance of relatable pain. A middle-aged woman is drinking tea alone because
310 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

all her friends are back home in Jamaica. A nervous young man reveals that
he is new to London. An older man poignantly reveals that he once had
‘hundreds and thousands of friends’, but now they are only on Facebook.
The children’s candid conversation cuts through to essential truths that
adults are reluctant to reveal (see also the New York Times ad in Tip 2).
A happy tone is quickly restored; the film ends with smiling children
expressing a wish that everyone in the world could be friends. But the darker
moments are the centrepiece of the film because this is when the viewer is
moved. We recognize these people’s lonely situations, and we wish for our
own loneliness to be recognized and understood. There’s more on being
emotionally moved in the next tip.

19. SENTIMENTALITY. EMOTIONAL TRUTHS IN FLUFF

In 2018, GDC, the Game Developers Conference, featured a presentation by
Leighton Gray, co-creator of Dream Daddy, a remarkably successful indie
video game.10 Gray gives an efficient breakdown of metamodern culture,
differing from academic writers and thought leaders on only minor points
(notably, most experts on metamodernism maintain that irony is not
­cynicism; one is desirable, the other to be avoided).
There are two stand-out elements of this presentation. First, if you’re a
brand owner or you serve brands, you’ll enjoy Gray’s story of business
success. She and her colleagues who make up the small independent devel-
oper Game Grumps systematically applied the rules of metamodernism to
their product, and it took off. It hit just the right spot with the target
customer. Second, Gray introduces a very important topic, which is fluff.
You already know from the preceding content in these three chapters that,
according to the new, metamodern view, sentimental feelings are valid, just
like all feelings. ‘Fluff’ tells you how sentimentality is and should be
expressed. This is relevant to you and your marketing even if your category
is far away from entertainment.
In this account, fluff is a sub-genre of fan fiction. In fan fiction, readers and
hobbyist writers express their love for Harry Potter, Star Wars and other
popular franchises by writing their own stories. Novelist E L James devel-
oped Fifty Shades of Grey by writing fan fiction of the romantic novel series
Twilight, by Stephanie Meyers. Writing fan fiction is an active area of fandom,
and stories typically show favourite characters having new ­ adventures,
getting into relationships, and so on.
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 311

Within this thriving area of cultural output, fluff is its own sub-genre – a
sizeable one, which Gray has numbers to support. Fluff is often short-form,
a few lines or a couple of paragraphs (while fan fiction can be the length of
a novel or even a series). Fluff need not include any recognizable figures such
as celebrities or well-known fictional characters. There’s a sub-sub-genre
called [Y/N], where Y/N stands for ‘your name’. It’s a very interesting liter-
ary style that uses the second-person pronoun ‘you’ to orientate the action.
‘You are lowered into a bath’, ‘y/n darling, I love you’. It’s not a perspective
that’s ever taken off in traditionally published fiction – the novel originated
in the third person (‘they did this and that’) and gradually modernized itself
to become more inclusive of first-person accounts (‘I did this and that’).
I bring it to your attention because semiotically it is fascinating. Y/N fluff
explicitly asks the reader to insert themselves into the scene. The main char-
acter is not a fictional character or an artful narrator, it’s about you, the
reader. It is incumbent upon you to accept the invitation extended by the
author to take the offered seat within this scene and agree to be emotionally
stimulated. It’s a very explicit way to tell readers what is expected of them.
Fluff is not pornography, although of course every genre in the arts has
its ‘adult’ equivalent or derivative. Fluff is often, but need not be, romantic.
It is wholesome and, more importantly, it is tender. Fluff concerns interac-
tions between (usually) two characters which are heart-warming, sweet and
precious. People hold hands, kiss each other on the forehead and nervously
declare their love.
What I want you to take from this is that ‘fluff’ is an ironic name, mask-
ing a deeper truth (you can see how metamodern this is, first presenting a
silly or frivolous appearance, then revealing a sincere core). The fluff genre
contains a message, which is that consumers in metamodern culture place a
high value on these sentiments and tender little rituals. Despite the mislead-
ing name, they are not empty or foolish. They are, in fact, fulfilling and
brave. It seems to me that this is a take on sentiment that marketers can
benefit from knowing how to use, of course with the utmost attention to
sensitivity and inclusion. It seems more powerful and more subtle than our
usual ways of appraising ‘sentiment’ in consumers.

20. REMIND PEOPLE OF THEIR INNER CHILD

If you’re an experienced marketer, you may feel that you are already well
acquainted with the customer’s inner child. The inner child regularly appears
in TV ads for Christmas gifts and wedding jewellery, pulling at the h
­ eartstrings.
312 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

I wrote in Using Semiotics in Retail about the feeling of being ‘a kid in a

sweet shop’ (Chapter 3, ‘Desire’). Confectioners, toymakers and also design-
ers of retail spaces know that there is value in helping adults reconnect with
their inner child. This is fairly easy to design into marketing communications
of all kinds. You can use simple nostalgia by awakening childhood memories.
You can use scale to make adults feel that they are the size of children. You
can also blend this with other feel-good values such as local pride (ibid.). I
bring up the subject here because there’s an additional aspect that might be
useful, which metamodernism reveals.
Jia Tolentino is a Canadian-American writer, presently a staff writer for
The New Yorker. Her 2019 book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion,
was a best-seller. It is creative yet earnest, both critical and sensitive, willing
to take responsibility for any shortcomings. It’s a reflection on the state of
contemporary Western culture while at the same time largely complying
with metamodern expectations. The whole book is worth reading, thought-
ful yet confident enough to make moves like pinpointing ‘the curdling of the
social internet’, when everything went bad, at around 2012. I bring it up
here because she says useful things about children in literature. It offers a
new take on the inner child that I think you will like.
In her chapter, ‘Pure Heroines’, Tolentino offers the brilliant insight that
little girls, in their childhood, may briefly experience a heightened state of
consciousness. Full of the joys of being a kid, this is a state of glee, unswerv-
ing optimism, resourcefulness, a sense of adventure, physical or artistic
confidence, and unlimited ambition. The evidence for this is in children’s
literature, both historical and contemporary. Later on, says Tolentino, these
images of the female human simply disappear. She reappears as an adult,
subdued. A wife, a mother, a worker. The life has been squashed out of her.
But it was there and persists residually in buried memories.
Tolentino is specifically discussing girls and girlhood, but one could say
that boys endure a process that’s similar if not exactly equivalent. Boyhood
and the literature of boyhood has always been full of mischief, resourceful-
ness and confidence in one’s own likeability (for example, consider William,
the creation of English writer Richmal Crompton in the 1920s and 30s).
Then we make boys grow up and attempt to support themselves by deliver-
ing pizza or working in an office cubicle, robbing them of time and energy
that could have been used to save the world.
If we hope to evoke childhood through marketing, this is a deeper, more
timely way to look at it than simply offering people over-sized sweets, as
wonderful as that is.
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 313

21. HAPPINESS AND HUMOUR: HOW TO BE LIGHT-HEARTED

All marketers want to generate and evoke happiness at one time or another.
Happiness is not optimism, which is a long-term commitment. Happiness is
fleeting, it is in the moment and of the moment. So that’s why I want to
pause here and look at what makes people laugh. Metamodern culture is
not entirely or solely about earnestness. It has its share of frivolity. As with
fluff and the notion of the inner child, there’s more going on with this frivol-
ity than one might perceive at first glance.
In the last couple of years, a lot of people have compared the humour of
Generation Z to Dadaism (e.g., see Lange, Muñoz, Sanders, all 2020).
Dadaism was an art movement in Europe which followed World War I and
tried to answer the difficult question of how one makes art after a war. War
always represents a crisis for art, not just at the time but afterwards. When
the atrocities of war are still fresh in everyone’s minds, you can’t immedi-
ately go back to making paintings of middle-class families having a nice time
in the park. Art is forced to rethink its purpose. In the late 1910s and the 20s,
when people were reeling from the Great War, the short-lived but memora-
ble movement of Dada was the artists’ response. Dadaism is politically
left-wing and its hallmark, across multiple media, is absurd humour. It is not
the same as surrealism but laid the foundations for it.
If you’re not a member of Gen Z and you don’t use TikTok, you may be
wondering where you can see examples of neo-Dadaist humour: the answer
is memes. We explored quite a few memes in Chapter 6 of this book. Those
memes are familiar, even traditional, formats and we could say that they are
quite Millennial. The jokes often centre on small failures of ‘adulting’, a
characteristic theme of a generation that likes wine and is unready for
responsibility. Gen Z is evolving new memes with a very different flavour
and plenty of the ‘bad design’ aesthetic that we met in Tip 14. There’s an
excellent article on Medium by author Adina L., called ‘Modern Dadaism:
The Gen Z internet culture’ (29 December 2020).11 She provides pairs of
Millennial and Gen Z, Dadaist memes and points out their key differences.
If a Millennial meme looks like the ones in Chapter 6, a Gen Z meme is very
different. To take one example:

●● The meme is, or was, a photo, but has been ‘deep fried’. That is, it has
been made to resemble an image that has been degraded by being posted
and reposted on the internet.
●● The image is so distorted and low res that you can barely tell what it was
once a photograph of.
314 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● In fact, it is or was a photograph of a dog, standing atop four cans of

soda, with one paw on each can.

The image is considered to be funny on its own – it is certainly absurd, very

unexpected, awkward and in some respects cute. The visual joke is enhanced
with text (Adina L., ibid.).

Nobody:
Swedish dog: Bjark

The joke is that this is what a Swedish dog might sound like. It’s an absurd
but not unintelligible conclusion, applied to an absurd situation.
Before leaving this section, I want to draw your attention to a very educa-
tional video called ‘Memes that Make Society Better’, posted by Memevas,
a small YouTube account.12 The video is also available to view on the site
Know Your Meme. It is a film of nearly ten minutes which presents a large
number of Dadaist Gen Z memes, read aloud in a deadpan tone and deliv-
ered without comment. Jokes frequently revolve around pets, misadventures
at school and everyday problems such as getting enough sleep. The deadpan
tone and element of surprise (a dog balancing on cans) are what imbue
everyday matters with hilarity.

22. OPTIMISM: HOW TO CONVEY IT

In 2019, TIME magazine published a special issue on optimism,13 edited by
film-maker Ava DuVernay. DuVernay introduces it by remarking that art is
an antidote for dark times and that its job is ‘to invite us in – to think, to feel,
to wonder, to dream […]’. The content of the special issue is billed as ‘34
people changing how we see our world’ and includes essays by Laverne
Cox, Bill Gates and Guillermo del Toro (‘Why the most radical and rebel-
lious choice you can make is to be optimistic’).
I encourage you to read all of these essays, because they are full of practi-
cal insights. It’s also good to know that DuVernay and TIME ran a parallel
project that invited members of the public to submit videos, explaining how
they feel optimistic. Around 30–40 videos are available to view at time.com/
optimists-videos.
In the space available here, let me summarize the shape of metamodern
optimism. The central tenets of this optimism which are useful for you as a
marketer or researcher are these:

●● Technology can be tamed. We can have the enhanced digital future we’ve
been hoping for without incurring terrible costs.
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 315

●● Inspiring role models transform lives and make for a more equitable
world.
●● Optimism is courage. Courage feels good and is rewarded.
●● It’s a time to have faith in our fellow humans. We have to trust each other
and give people an opportunity to show up for each other.
●● Art nurtures hope. (All marketing communications are implied in ‘art’ –
it’s your job to make hopeful and socially worthwhile campaigns.)
●● Age is just a state of mind.
●● When a person speaks their truth, that’s a way of helping each other.
Everyone benefits when storytellers, artists and cultural producers are
more diverse.

We’ve once again delved into some big topics in this section. At first glance,
there’s something simple, like the conscious decision to get up on a cold,
fresh Saturday morning, practice tennis and experience sensations of hope
and optimism (says James H. Williams of Washington, who submitted a
video). On closer inspection, it has an underlying structure of belief that
embodies big ideas. If feeling is what makes us human, separating us from
machines, then choosing to feel hopeful and optimistic is to be ultimately
human. It is to be vibrantly and vigorously alive, to have a soul, to be some-
thing precious and unique that cannot be rendered obsolete by its own
technologies.

23. VALIDATION
In Tips 17–22 I’ve highlighted a number of specific feelings. In this final
entry, I want to return you to the idea that, in metamodern culture, all feel-
ings are ‘valid’. You may have seen consumers on social media reassuring
each other along these lines. Not only is it ‘OK to not be OK’, but all feel-
ings, even angry or negative feelings, are legitimate and deserving of
recognition. This legitimacy and recognition is ‘validation’.
Here’s why validation is so important. The answers I’m about to give you
come from the deepest, most personal and visceral aspects of the human
experience in a time of metamodernism. If you didn’t grow up with meta-
modern culture, this way of appreciating the human condition might not
seem obvious or natural to you; nonetheless, it is very real. The core princi-
ples are these:

●● Feelings are what separates people from machines, a relevant concern in

the context of the fourth industrial revolution.
316 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

●● Feelings are not coterminous with identity but are among the supporting
pillars of identity and may be the place where identity is experienced.
●● Identity is what ‘distinguishes you from a corpse’, to quote an unnamed
author on social media. This is a graphic turn of phrase that conveys feel-
ings of possession of one’s own unique identity, as well as binding identity
to the very idea of life.

I reach into these large topics because they are essential if we are to under-
stand why the validation of feelings is so important to consumers. If you
invalidate someone’s feelings, by ignoring, dismissing or disagreeing with
the point of view they embody, that can be perceived as:

●● If not quite condemning someone to death, then certainly exiling them to

the land of the dead. It’s like being excommunicated; one’s existence is
denied. Indeed, a common refrain in ‘culture war’ debates is ‘I exist!’
●● Dehumanizing a person. Reducing them to the status of a machine or a
piece of furniture. Could be seen as taking a rather instrumental view of
the person, who is an object or, at best, a system, there to be used.

All of this is why ‘being seen’ is so valued right now. Being seen, having your
existence acknowledged, being recognized, is a form of validation. Let’s
anchor this to some real-world marketing communications. Queer Britain,
the first LGBTQ+ museum, opened in the UK in 2022.14 There’s an accom-
panying ad campaign by M&C Saatchi London, featuring portraits of
LGBTQ+ influencers and thought leaders. Each portrait is a statement about
how it feels to be seen. ‘It’s joyous to be seen’. ‘It’s powerful to be seen’. There
are about eight variations on this theme. The overall effect is enthusiasm and
energy. Observe that all the statements strongly convey that it is great to be
seen, but why it is great to be seen is treated as requiring no explanation.
This is insight that you can use. It’s not that people are extra-sensitive and
need their feelings to be coddled. The point is that to validate someone’s
feelings and to validate their existence is not hard to do and is tremendously
valuable to them, getting to the heart of what it means to be human.

Activity: Fluff flash fiction

As you know by now, especially if you looked at Chapter 8, where I encour-
aged you to go on field trips, and Chapter 12 where I related my adventures
with rollercoasters and encounters with people who were not The Blues
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 317

Brothers, I’m a fan of having experiences. In principle, you can do semiotics

by reading a lot and looking at photos, but in practice, understanding things
remotely will not sustain you forever. There comes a point where you have
to be willing to try things, even if they seem silly or are not what you would
normally choose. If enough people like something, that’s why we should be
interested in showing up to experience it.
All of this is a pre-amble to challenging you to write your own short-
form, flash fiction in the category of fluff. You don’t have to show anyone
your finished work and can burn it if you want to. The point is simply to
have first-hand experience of a type of cultural output that defines meta-
modern culture. If you do a good job, you’ll be able to awaken some of your
own feelings while writing. When it happens, observe the sensation, because
that’s what some of your customers are searching for, and it’s something you
can design into your marketing communications.
Here’s the brief:

●● This is flash fiction, so you don’t have to do any preparation. Grab a

keyboard or pen and start writing.
●● Think of a particularly happy encounter that you’ve had with another
person, or imagine an ideal. Fluff may be but is not always romantic. You
can write about any interaction where people are happy in each other’s
company and expressing tender feelings. It could be a fond memory of a
parent, a childhood friend or similar.
●● You don’t need a plot, just a situation. Maybe someone is unwrapping a
birthday present, or needs to be comforted, or takes a risk that pays off
in revealing their affection.
●● Write no more than a couple of paragraphs about one key moment in this
encounter where positive feelings are free-flowing. Describe it to the
reader so that they can feel just how it was to sense a comforting hand at
your back or to feel a crackle of electricity upon brushing the fingers of
someone you’re falling in love with. If you can make yourself feel it, you
can make other people feel it.

If you’re a very serious person whose feelings are well under control and
your schedule doesn’t permit a lot of frivolity, this exercise is especially for
you; I promise you will find it eye-opening.
318 USING SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

Going forward: What to read next

As ever, I wish you the very best of times as you develop your semiotics
practice. As there are a couple of books now in print with my name on them,
I will quickly repeat the whole story so far so that you know where we’re up
to and what to read next.

●● Using Semiotics in Marketing, first edition, 2020. The first edition of this
book contained only Chapters 1–12 of the edition you are reading now.
It is a self-contained course and instructional handbook of semiotics. It
focuses on timeless techniques and their practical applications in market-
ing and market research.
●● Using Semiotics in Retail, 2022. This book breaks new ground in two
ways. To begin with, it’s the only book on semiotics which is wholly dedi-
cated to retail and shopper insight. It benefits from considerable partici-
pation by Unilever. What’s more, it’s the first book where I write
extensively about the future. You can future-proof your brand or even
become a futurologist by joining me as I break down the future of work,
money, shopping, relationships and much more.
●● Using Semiotics in Marketing, second edition, 2023. This current version
reprints Chapters 1–12 from the original, with slight modifications, and
adds three new and substantially larger chapters. In these new chapters, I
return from the more long-term future to the present day and the imme-
diate future. Key social trends which are affecting younger Millennials
and Gen Z are brought to the reader’s attention.

Thank you very much indeed for reading. If you liked this book, please post
a review on Amazon, LinkedIn or your usual social media. You can also
follow @drrachellawes on LinkedIn and Instagram for regular announce-
ments of events and new writing.

Endnotes
1 See https://droga5.com/work/the-new-york-times-truth-is-worth-it/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/LG83-2UTZ)
2 See https://wfanet.org/knowledge/diversity-and-inclusion/item/2021/10/20/
Insight--Strategy--Chanel-4-Super-Human (archived at https://perma.cc/
AJ6G-6UV3)
 MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 319

3 Unstereotype Alliance (2021) Beyond Gender 2: The Impact of Intersectionality

in Advertising, Unstereotype Alliance, www.unstereotypealliance.org/en/
resources/diversity-and-inclusion/2021/10/beyond-gender-2 (archived at https://
perma.cc/SJ79-8H5V)
4 MullenLowe (2022) Queens on the Edge, www.mullenlowegroup.com/news/
queens-on-the-edge/ (archived at https://perma.cc/Z45Q-SS7F)
5 For example, see the one-minute film “Nike: Play New” on the YouTube
account Ads of Brands, https://youtu.be/ZPi7C3MND2o (archived at https://
perma.cc/Q37K-NREQ)
6 See https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/guardian-celebrates-200th-
anniversary-work-progress-campaign/1714470 (archived at https://perma.
cc/2NXN-A755)
7 See www.timeout.com/about/latest-news/time-out-partners-with-maybelline-
new-york-to-encourage-people-to-date-in-real-life-again-072522 (archived at
https://perma.cc/6MAF-N696)
8 Bloomberg (2022) The Rise of Adorkables, www.bloomberg.com/news/
videos/2022-07-07/the-rise-of-adorkables-video (archived at https://perma.cc/
N8PE-HCJZ)
9 Watch the CTEL/BMB film ‘Be More Us’ at www.adsoftheworld.com/
campaigns/be-more-us (archived at https://perma.cc/625L-NA49)
10 Leighton Gray’s presentation can be viewed on the GDC YouTube channel,
here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov78c0Kek84 (archived at https://perma.cc/
LK8X-KUCA). A short introduction to fluff is here: https://fanlore.org/wiki/
Fluff (archived at https://perma.cc/FB2Z-KCGV)
11 See https://goblincore420.medium.com/modern-dadaism-4e3b7461b3f0
(archived at https://perma.cc/R5KC-BBV8)
12 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATit_W3gQc4 (archived at https://perma.cc/
N9CT-9G7S)
13 DuVernay, Ava (2019) The Art of Optimism, Time, https://time.com/
optimists-2019/ (archived at https://perma.cc/6JQ5-3F9W)
14 You can read about the ‘Queer Britain’ campaign at www.campaignlive.co.uk/
article/queer-britain-opens-uks-first-lgbt+-museum-campaign-m-c-saatchi-
london/1793518 (archived at https://perma.cc/EQT8-T2VF)
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 321

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to all of the people who helped to bring about this second
edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing.
Publishers Kogan Page are starting to feel like family. Thank you, Stephen
Dunnell and Nick Mould for commissioning this new edition and helping
me bring it to fruition.
Thanks to Lawes Consulting staff, particularly Joe Lawes, ever loyal and
patient.
Thanks to my partner Denny Marcus who lovingly meets all the chal-
lenges of living with a writer.
Finally, a million thanks to everyone who bought, reviewed and endorsed
the first edition of this book – this new edition has happened because of
your enthusiasm and kindness. THANK YOU.
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 323

GLOSSARY

binary opposition A habit of language, in which speakers reduce complex matters

to pairs of contrasting ideas, each of which gains its meaning from the half of
the pair which it excludes. Examples: weekdays versus weekends; Republican
versus Democrat; East versus West; efficacy versus safety; qualitative versus
quantitative research.
bottom-up analysis A stage or phase of semiotic analysis that begins at the smallest
unit of granularity in semiotics such as single words and symbols. It figures out
what they mean and works up to conclusions about the culture that produced
them.
code A sum of semiotic signs which are regularly found clustering in the same
places, at the same time. The signs, each of which is meaningful in its own right,
co-operate to build a larger and more complex meaning and they do this
reliably on every occasion when they are used together. The word ‘code’
describes a powerful set of co-operative signs.
deconstruction An activity of analysis or interpretation. When seeking to analyse a
text, the semiologist may deconstruct it by identifying the built-in assumptions
on which it depends for its meaning and testing their limits. This is helpful in
exposing the ways in which texts produce and uphold certain versions of reality,
including certain moral values, which the researcher may wish to challenge
critically or exploit commercially in marketing.
diachronic analysis An activity in top-down analysis that tracks the evolution of
cultural products and phenomena over time. Learning about the history of ideas
and representations helps us to see their trajectory and helps brands ride the
wave of emerging trends.
discourse analysis A research method which has roots in social psychology and
semiotics. Closely linked to conversation analysis, it offers a precise focus on the
mechanics of live discourse: language as it is used in real situations, in speech
and writing. It has particularly distinguished itself as the principal research
method of discursive psychology, a branch of psychology which re-imagines
psychological states as linguistic and cultural constructs.
ethnography A research method which was imported into market research from
anthropology. It investigates culture by means of observing the live behaviour of
people, as individuals or in groups. Commonly used in market research to probe
routine behaviours such as meal preparation, laundry and shopping, often
capturing them on video.
324 GLOSSARY

icon A semiotic sign which could be construed as a literal depiction of something

which exists, or could exist, in the material world. Often an image which is
recognizable as ‘a picture of something’. The brand marks of Apple Inc,
Starbucks and Puma all include iconic signs.
ideological analysis An activity in top-down analysis that asks critical questions
about taste, social class, power relations and similar aspects of consumer
culture. It is especially helpful to brands that want to break rules, get behind
social causes or engage with popular moral values.
inside-out An approach to market research which uses tools and concepts from
human psychology to excavate attitudes, beliefs and preferences from within the
minds of individual consumers and make them externally visible.
outside-in An approach to market research which focuses on consumer culture
rather than the internal psychology of the consumer. It uses tools and concepts
from linguistics, anthropology and social psychology to discover the social and
cultural forces that shape attitudes and behaviour.
semiologist A person who practises semiotics; an alternative to semiotician. May
denote a person who was trained in the French style of semiotics, also called
semiology: a form of semiotics that pays special attention to linguistics. It is
used in this book to reflect the author’s heritage and also because it emphasizes
practitioners as people who study and build up knowledge and theory
(‘-ologist’) rather than people who are purely technicians (‘-ician’).
semiology A word which may refer generally to all varieties of semiotics or which
may specifically denote a school of thought of semiotics which originated in
French and Swiss linguistics and literary theory.
semiotician A person who practises semiotics. A commonly used term in marketing
and market research circles. May denote a person who was trained in the
American style of semiotics, which pays special attention to formal logic.
semiotics A research method which is often defined as the study of signs and
symbols. It investigates culture by examining the ways that humans
communicate with each other, creating shared meanings and versions of reality.
Commercial semiotics is especially interested in the shared meanings which are
created between brands and consumers. In the present day, semiotics has
become a catch-all term that embraces its diverse American, French and other
origins.
sign A semiotic sign is a small unit of communication that carries meaning. Signs
include objects and visual images, words, sounds and sound effects, design
elements and physical gestures. The meaning of signs is culturally and
historically specific. The meaning of any sign is decided by the culture and
context within which it is used.
symbol A semiotic sign which is abstract and appears to have only an arbitrary
connection to objects in the material world. Letters, numbers and graphic
 GLOSSARY 325

devices such as circles and straight lines are all common elements of symbols.
The brand marks of Google, L’Oréal and IBM are all symbols.
synchronic analysis An activity in top-down analysis that takes a snapshot of
cultural products and phenomena at a specific point in time, in different regions
of the world. It helps us to understand the specificities and needs of local
markets.
text TV ads, restaurant menus, the web pages of retailers, songs, movies, video
games, paintings, the last email you sent and the last photo you posted on
Instagram, as well as this book, are all examples of texts. A text is a piece of
communication that conveys meaning and that is composed of multiple semiotic
signs. A simple text might use only one semiotic code; alternatively, texts often
combine codes to create complex messages.
top-down analysis A stage or phase of semiotic analysis that begins at the largest
unit of granularity in semiotics such as matters of ideology, public morality,
popular belief and social change. It tracks the historical and cultural specificity
of ideas and gradually narrows down to conclusions about the individual
semiotic signs of which brands and their communications are composed.
326

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334

INDEX

NB: page numbers in italic indicate figures or tables

99 Cent 237–38 further reading on 228–29

303 MullenLowe 299 ‘anti-rebels’ 263
anxiety displacement mechanisms 41, 42
Aaker, Jennifer 281–82 Apple 21–22, 191
activities iPhone 6, 254
brief for semiotic research, write a 47–51 architecture 154, 234–35
challenge, find your 36 PricewaterhouseCoopers 145,
code, find a 93 145–48, 149
core purpose and values, review your ARK: Survival Evolved 276–77
brand’s 292–93 art, lessons from 99, 180–81, 235–38
field trip, your own semiotic 156–57 Art of Game Design, The 289
fluff flash fiction 316 Asher-Smith, Dina 299
grow it or shrink it 182 Audition 238
image, decode a 82 augmented reality 220, 225–26
language, decode 86 authenticity 258
LEGO, learn from 293 and influencer marketing 17–18, 23
meme, build a 131 vs sincerity 259–60, 260, 280
metamodern needs and your brand 271
multi-method research 172–74 Baby Boomers
proposal, write a 69–71 ‘Boomer brands’ 306
report or debrief, prepare a 205–06 cultural values of 261
semiotic square, identify a brand and modernism 6, 254, 279
opportunity using a 123 technology use 221
strategic recommendations, weddings, spend on 10
make 192–93 ‘bad design’ 305–06, 309, 313
taken-for-granted, challenge the 179–80 Baloo (Jungle Book) 41
technology and your next project in Barbot de Villeneuve, Gabrielle-
semiotics 226 Suzanne 133
top-down analysis 111–12 Barthes, Roland 98, 99, 104
truisms, find your 117–18 Batman Slaps Robin 125
twig-to-branch 136 Baudrillard, Jean 98, 99, 104, 105,
work, quality-check your 212–13 106, 247
‘adorkability’ 305–06, 308–09 Beauty and The Beast 120, 121, 133
Affect Theory Reader, The 265 Belfast Tea 191
Against Empathy 115 big data 217
Airbnb 279 Biggie Smalls (Christopher Wallace) 236
Alessi 254 ‘big semiotics’ see top-down analysis
Alice in Wonderland 181 binary oppositions 64, 165, 169, 185
Amazon 296 biotechnology 231
AMC 296, 300–01 Blair, Tony 167
Amélie 263 Bloodworth, James 243
American TV drama 239–40 Bloom, Paul 115
Andrex 37 Blues Brothers, The 246
anthropology 42, 45, 64–65, 119–20, 139, body language 169, 224
163, 219, 243 Bonner, Nicholas 236
 INDEX 335

bottom-up analysis 47, 96 competitors, beating 186–88

brand appearance, changing 190 Confessions 108
common problems 176, 208 Consumer Society, The 104
findings, communicating 203 content marketing 17, 18, 23, 252
and project design 54, 55, 69 Convergence Culture 300
reporting on 205 conversation analysis (CA) 83, 161–62
research questions 96 Cosmopolitan 188
top-down findings, confirmation Covid-19 pandemic 1, 265, 278, 304
of 110, 112 Nike 299
see also Chapter 4 and positivity 269
Bourdieu, Pierre 106 Cox, Laverne 314
Boyd, Serlina 285 Crompton, Richmal 312
brainstorming, with your client 58–59 crowd-funding 292
brand appearance, changing 189–92 cultures, foreign 30–31, 226–29
Breaking Bad 239, 300 insights into semiotic method 226–29
Brides magazine 10 research in 30–31
briefs, sample 49–51 Cushelle see Charmin, rebranding of
brief, understanding your 53–55 Cybertwee movement 284
British Museum, the 300
Brooks, Larry 308 Dadaism 313
bullying, online 261 Dales Toffee Shop 141–45, 142, 146, 149
Burger King 303–04 Craven Herald headline 142–45, 143
business objectives, client 65–66, 67 data, collecting 97–98
Butlins 235 digital data 221–22
But That’s None of My Business 125, sample size 60–61
128, 128 sources 59–60
data science 217
Campaign to End Loneliness De Beers 103–04
(CTEL) 309–10 ‘deconstruct’, definition of 32
Capcom 239 Degun, Gurjit 296
challenges, marketing 36–37 del Toro, Guillermo 314
change Demir, George 153
adapting to 45–46, 185–86 Dentsu Creative 300
likely future change 230–31 de Saussure, Ferdinand 83
Channel 4 297–98 diachronic analysis 101, 102–04
Charmin, rebranding of 26–27, 37–44, 48 ‘digital natives’ 221
Chaudhuri, Anirban 227, 228 Dinner, The 240–41
China, design in 91 Discord 60
Chinese Semiotic Studies 228 discourse analysis (DA) 20, 25, 83, 140,
Christian Louboutin 12 161–62, 170
Citadelle 187 further reading on 171
Clearasil 306 imprecision in 160–61
climate change 265 sample analysis using 166–69
Coca Cola 103, 104 Discourse and Social Psychology 171
Cocoa 285, 292 discursive psychology 161, 162
codes 32, 74–75, 88–93, 177 disinformation 261
from art/design 90–92 Disney
from brands 89–90 Walt Disney World Resort 246–47
from consumers 92–93 and weddings 12
emerging 229–30, 230 Distracted Boyfriend 124, 126, 129,
normative nature of 63 129, 134
cognitive dissonance 244 Dollar Shave Club 286
Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, Dove 121–22, 124, 133, 189
A 229 Dragons’ Den 184
336 INDEX

Dream Daddy 310 destinations 152–54

Dr Martens 7 itinerary, your 154
Droga5 296, 297 people to work with 151–52
Dubin, Michael 286 when to use 150–51
DuVernay, Ava 314 why use 137–40
see also Dales Toffee Shop;
EA Games 225 PricewaterhouseCoopers
Egan, Jennifer 307 Fifty Shades of Grey 241, 310
Ehrenreich, Barbara 242–43 Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades 241
Elizabeth II, Queen of England 2 findings, writing up 66–69
emotion, adding to your brand 46 audiences, different 197–98
England women’s football team 291–92 bias 212
entertainment media 238–40 claims, making 207–08
equity 257 consumer impact, the 208–09
Esherman, Raoul 278, 279 critical thinking, showing 209
ethnography 20, 25, 46, 163–64, 169 engagement, improving 197–98, 200
digitization of 218, 220 evidence, showing 68, 206–07
further reading on 171, 228–29 executive summary, your 198
sample analysis using 165 explaining vs describing 64, 208
skills needed for 164 language, use of 68, 198–200
vs semiotics 111, 138–39, 140, 160 quality control 209–10
Ethnography: Principles in Practice 171 reflexivity 212
Evian 278 reliability of results 211–12
stakeholder needs, responding to
Facebook 9, 18, 93, 125, 133 196–98
Cambridge Analytica scandal 219 storytelling 204
and discourse analysis 162, 168 top-down vs bottom-up 205
and power 108 validity, talking about 210–11
and simulations 106 visual examples, using 67, 199, 200–04,
facial recognition technology 219 201, 202, 203
‘fake crying’ 270 First World Problems 125
Far Cry 225 Fitch 235
feelings 265–70 flash mobs 284
affect, defining 266 Floch, Jean-Marie 118
for brands/businesses 287–92 fluff 310–11
crying 269–70 Fluide 277
and empathy 309–10 focus groups 26–27
Gen X cynicism 266 Foucault, Michel 98, 108
and marketing communications 308–16 Freeman, Nate 237
and mental health 267–68, 308–09 From Me to You 289
neurodiversity 287–88 Frosted Flakes 124
and optimism 314–15 Frozen 190
and positivity 268–69 Futurama 125
safety, importance of 267
and social change 291–92 Game Developers Conference 310
transcendence 289–91 Game Grumps 310
validation of 315–16 Gates, Bill 314
Fenty Beauty 191 Gehrig, Kim 108
Festinger, Leon, Riecken, Henry Riecken and gender-neutral retail 277–78
Schachter, Stanley 244 Generation X
fiction writing 240–41 cultural values of 253, 262, 266
field trips, semiotic 46, 59–60, 170 and postmodernism 7, 254, 279,
data 286, 306
analysing 155–56 and retirement 179
capturing 154–55 technology use 221
 INDEX 337

Generation Z 2–3, 24, 36, 186, 243 and New Sincerity 264
cultural values of 253, 254–55, 262, and The Sims 263–64
266, 267 and truisms 114
and ‘dream jobs’ 276 and weddings 11
and gender 278 International Association for Semiotic
and memes 313–14 Studies (IASS) 228
and metamodernism 7, 254, 306 internet of things 219
and ‘neo-dadaism’ 308, 313–14 intersectionality 253, 298–99
overwork in 209 Ionescu, Sabrina 299
technology use 221 irony 223
weddings, spend on 10 and sincerity 286–87, 305–08
see also ‘adorkability’
Gillette 108–09, 286 Jackson, Gita 263
glamping 279 Jafa, Arthur 236–37, 269
glitches 305 James, E L 241, 310
gonzo journalism 242–43 Japanese horror 238–39
Google 220, 221 Jefferson, Gail 166
Google Expeditions 225–26 Jenkins, Henry 300
Google Trends 256, 269 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 263
Grand Theft Auto 290 Jobs to Be Done 274
graphic design 236 journalism 242–43
Gray, Leighton 310 Journal of African Cultural Studies 229
‘green-washing’ 257 Jung, Carl 282
Greer, Germaine 130 just-world hypothesis 120
Greimas, Algirdas 118
Guardian, The 303 Kardashian, Kim 19
Guevara, Che 106, 209 Kaur, Rupi 263
Guinness 123 Kelley, Lora 288
Gursky, Andreas 237–38 Kellogg’s 124
Kellogg’s Corn Flakes 91
Hard Work 243 Kelly, Adam 263, 307
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice 107 Kermit the Frog 125
Hepburn, Audrey 115 Kidzania 290
Hernandez, Eddie 302 King Jr, Martin Luther 236
Herridge, Jessica 102 Koch, Herman 240
hesitations 168–69, 170 Koons, Jeff 99
Hired 243 Kozerski, Julia 99
Holzer, Jenny 117
Hopper, Edward 99 LEGO 288–89, 293, 304
Leith, Sam 242
ideological analysis 104–09, 186 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 120
class and taste 104–06, 138 Levitt, Theodore 274
power 108–09 LGBTQ+ rights 22, 277–78, 316
simulations 106–07, 138, 223 Liberty 91
Illouz, Eva 245 linguistics 42, 45, 64, 99, 119, 139, 163,
Il-sung, Kim 236 219, 243
influencer marketing 17–18 linguistic mechanisms 170
inner child, the 311–12 LinkedIn 108, 114, 132,
innovation 188–89, 189 255, 269
insights 177–79 locations, advertising 46–47
Instagram 18, 23, 74, 93, 125, 133, 190, Lovato, Demi 268
212, 255, 269 Love is the Message, The Message is
and food photography 135 Death 236–37
and holiday photography 181 Luminary Bakery 285, 292
and Millennials 221 Lyst 10
338 INDEX

Made in North Korea 236 Nestlé 191

Mad Men 144 Netflix 60
Magritte, Rene 75, 83 Newcastle Brown Ale 191
Market Research Society 51, 220 New York Times, The 296, 297
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 267 Nickel and Dimed 242
Masons Beans 183–84, 184 Nicky 44
Matrix, The 124 Nighthawks 99
Maybelline New York 304–05 Nike 91, 278–79, 296, 299
Mayor of London 250 Ninja Theory 107
McLaughlin, Eoin 297 Nitterhouse, Denise 274
memes 18 non-fiction writing 242–43
building a 123–31, 127, 128, Not Sure If 125, 130, 131
129, 130, 131 null hypothesis, the 209
Dadaist / Gen Z memes 313–14 Nurse Jackie 240
Memevas 314
metamodernism 7–8, 250–58, 274–80 Obama, Barack 236
for brands/businesses 274–80 Office, The 263
consumer wants/needs 250, 257–58 Oldenburg, Claes 180–81, 199
distance, collapsing 252, 257, 276–77, online communities 222
299, 301 Ordinary, The 6
hallmarks of 251–55 ‘outside-in approach’ 19
and identity 250, 253, 157, 277–78,
298–99 Paddington Bear 41, 42
Jobs-to-Be-Done Theory 274–75 Padman, Monica 303
and kindness 250, 257, 281 Paralympics 296, 297–98
and marketing communications 296–301 Parr, Martin 104
and optimism 250, 254–55, 257, 269, 301 Party Cat 202, 203
oscillation 253, 258, 279–80 Pedi, Rick 274
transmedia storytelling 300–01 Peppa Pig 190
see also feelings; sincerity Perkins, Lori 241
Metamodernism 278 Perry, Mike 279, 289
metaphors, use of 199–200 Persil 189
Meyers, Stephanie 310 Perspectives on Africa 229
Miike, Takashi 238 Persson, Markus (Notch) 225
Mikami, Shinji and Fujiwara, Tokuro 239 Pinterest 11, 12, 60, 114, 115, 132
Millennials 24, 36, 186 Plague Inc. 180
cultural values of 262, 266, 267 Playmatics 300
and memes 313 postmodernism 7, 254, 262, 279
and metamodernism 7, 254, 286, 306 PowerPoint 67
‘Millennial bland’ 306 Presley, Elvis 104
overwork in 209 PricewaterhouseCoopers 145, 145–48, 149
and postmodernism 7, 306 Procter & Gamble 35, 37, 42, 43,
technology use 221 45, 51, 109
weddings, spend on 10–11 product design 234–35
Millward Brown 38, 43 purpose
Minecraft 225 of codes 74, 89, 177
minimalism 6, 91 of ethnography 164
modernism 6–7, 91, 235, 254, 279 of myths 120
Moesta, Bob 274 of objects 32–33
Mojang 225 of semiotic research 23, 35, 45–47,
Monroe, Marilyn 104, 106, 209 163, 176
Mumsnet 19, 78, 221
Murdoch, Rupert 303 qualitative research 24, 27, 61, 220
Mythologies 98, 104 digitization of 220, 222
 INDEX 339

‘quantification rhetoric’ 28 and meaning 62, 74, 177

quantitative research 27–29, 217 signs-codes-territories formula 54
Queer Britain 316 Simpson, Homer 41
‘quirkiness’ 307–08 Sims, The 225, 263–64
Simulacra and Simulation 106
radical optimism 254–55, 278–79, 301 sincerity 253–54, 258–65, 261
Radway, Janice 241 for brands/businesses 280–87
Rael Beauty 306 and brand personalities 281–82
rainbows 21–22 and consumer scepticism 282–83
‘rainbow-washing’ 257 eye contact 302–03
Rattinger, Andy 288–89, 293 and irony 286–87, 305–08
Reach plc 281 and kindness 260
Reading the Romance 241 and marketing communications 301–08
Reagan, Ronald 265–66 New Sincerity 258–59, 261, 264–65,
Reddit 19, 134, 303 283, 307
Regina 44 and power 304
relationship marketing 17, 23, 252 real people, using 301–02, 303–04
representation 75–76, 99, 169, 224, 255–56 and trust 283–84, 304
Representing Reality 171 and values 285–86
research questions, setting 55–58 vs authenticity 259–60, 260, 280
Resident Evil 239 and warmth 306–07
Ridiculously Photogenic Guy 124 Sincerity and Authenticity 260
Rihanna 191 size, conventions of 180–82
‘ring-shaming’ 11 smartphones 219
Rituals 103 Smile or Die 243
Rockstar 290 Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus) 303–04
Rodney, Seph 237 Snow White 120
Roe vs Wade 267 social justice 250, 257, 301
Rohingya genocide 297 social psychology 244
Rousseau 108 social structures 64–65
Rupert Bear 41 sociology, vs semiotics 111
Russo-Ukrainian War 1, 265 Sopranos, The 240
Starface 309
Sainsbury’s 191 Steel, Danielle 241
SCA 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45 Stewart, Kathleen 265
Schell, Jesse 289–90 Stillwhite 10
School of Oriental and African Studies 229 Story Engineering 308
Schott, Ben 305 storytelling 164, 183–85, 204
science, semiotics as a 216–18 Japanese 239
scientific method, the 31–32 transmedia storytelling 300–01
Scotland 74–75 Strategyzer 274
Scott, Michael 263 Studio Wildcard 276–77
Semiofest 51, 227 Supreme 88
Semiotics: The Basics 171 synchronic analysis 101–02
semiotics, defining 20, 25–26, 163 System of Objects, The 104
semiotics, market for 51
semiotic square, the 118–23, 119, 122, technology, and semiotics 219–26
188–89, 189 augmented reality 220, 225–26
sensitive audiences 46 machine learning 222–23
sentiment analysis 220, 266 social media 219, 221–22
Sephora 103 Tenzer, Andrew 281
Sheehy, Gail 130 territories 54
shopper behaviour 59 Tesla 254
signs 32, 75, 177 texts 61, 74, 75
340 INDEX

form vs content 76 and power 108

images 25, 78–82, 80 and simulations 106
language 82–86, 84 and sincerity 302
live situation 87–88
physical objects 87, 88 Ubisoft 225
researchable data vs explanatory Ulnick, Anthony 274
resource 77–78, 139–40 Unilever 51, 121, 124, 286, 318
time-based media 86–87 Universal Studios 246
Thatcher, Margaret 265 Unstereotype Alliance, The 298
Thiebaud, Wayne 181 Using Semiotics in Retail 1, 36, 106,
Thompson, Nicholas 270 231, 252, 255, 268, 309,
three-part lists 166–67, 185 312, 318
Thunberg, Greta 262
TikTok 221, 255, 269, 306, 313 Valentine, Virginia 118
Time Out 304–05 Value Proposition Design 274
Tinder 219, 245 Velvet 37, 44
Today I Learned 134 Vice Media 296, 300
toilet paper see Charmin, rebranding of virtual reality (VR) 225–26, 231
Tolentino, Jia 312 Visit from the Goon Squad, A 307
top-down analysis 23, 40, 48, 64–65,
216, 230 Walking Dead, The 300
bottom-up findings, confirmation Wallace, David Foster 263, 264, 309
of 110, 112 warc.com 51
and change 186, 231 Warhol, Andy 9, 181, 199
common problems 176, 208 weddings, spend on 9–12
defining 88 ‘wellness’ 268
findings, communicating 202 Western Australia 296, 299
and project design 54, 55, 69 What If I Told You 124–25, 127, 129,
reporting on 205 130, 134
research questions 96, 112 WhatsApp 220, 255
and truisms 117 When Prophecy Fails 244
see also Chapter 5; twig-to-branch Wholesome Games 255
method Why Love Hurts 245
Toynbee, Polly 243 Wicker Man, The 144
transhumanism 231 Williams, James H 316
Transport for London 250 Winnie the Pooh 41, 42
travel 246–47 women’s football 291–92
Trick Mirror 312 Word documents 67
Trilling, Lionel 260 World Congress of Semiotics 228
truisms 113–18, 116
Tumblr 108 YOLO 202, 203
twig-to-branch method 131–36, 134, Yorkie 191
135, 256 YouTube 18, 19, 45, 86, 255
Twilight 310 Youzheng, Li 228
Twitch 60, 86
Twitter 9, 18, 93, 125, 255, 269 Zewa 38, 43
and discourse analysis 162, 168 Zippo 7
and K-pop 284 Zoom 288, 304
and online communities 221 Zoomers see Generation Z