Semiotics explores how meaning is created by looking at constituent parts (layers) of any message and breaking them down into the contexts of consumer resonance or experience. It then anticipates and reveals how to adjust ‘meaning’ to predict ‘take-out’. For example, a print ad, a piece of packaging, a TV ad, a brand message, a set of transcripts, a collage, a campaign leaflet, a product, a piece of furniture, a film – in fact, anything that leaves a trace on our society is fair game for the semioticians sharp eye, keen ear and delving brain.
Everything we experience is something semiotics can decode, including the culture that surrounds us - be it high, low, pop, digital, youth, mash-ups etc. Semiotics understands how to unpick culture in a way that is infinitely flexible for marketing and communications.
Marketing semiotics
But let’s define semiotics in a way which should make more sense in marketing terms. Marketing is an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities discover that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others. I can equally say semiotics is an integrated communications-based process through which marketers can discover how best to intersect with newly identified needs, wants and desires, which may be satisfied by products and services.
Conventionally, when you want to ask questions about what people want or think, it is assumed we just need to get into people's heads – inside is where all those attitudes, beliefs and assumptions live. If we can get at them, then we’ll understand.
Semiotics takes a different view, it asks ‘how’ did all those attitudes, beliefs and assumptions get in there in the first place? The answer is the culture that surrounds us: you, me, your products, your branding and your friend down the street, or even that market segment in Asia you have been so keen to pursue. It’s an outside-in perspective, not inside-out.
Desk-based clients often say to semioticians: "you don’t speak to people!" But we do. In the course of examining all the messages, impressions and artefacts around us we listen to far more people than could ever be reached in a normal qualitative project. Semioticians analyse thousands of thoughts and opinions. Who hasn’t been confounded by consumers saying one thing in a group, then going out and doing something different in the marketplace? It’s not that they lie, often they just can’t articulate things in a way which is useful for marketing purposes. Semiotics reaches deeper, beyond conscious articulation.
When semioticians look at anything, they break down impressions into codes and signs - the fonts, the sounds, the words, the colours, shapes, lines, and how they represent together in a particular combination the overall message - understanding how meaning can be made in any number of contexts to keep brand communications fresh, new and relevant.
Semiotics in practice
Let me share a real client example. A few years ago, insurance company AXA changed its branding. They produced a range of posters in their new corporate colours and sent the ads out for consumer testing. The testing was bad. Consumers didn’t like the posters but, as is often the case, they couldn’t really explain why they didn’t. They just didn’t.
The posters were red and blue, with an AXA advisor on the red side of the picture and the consumer on the other, blue side. The client was adamant; they had spent a great deal of money on their branding and they weren’t about to change the colours now! But the answer was clear when you just looked at the communication differently – what and how it was communicating the AXA experience.
I could reel off chapter and verse about binary oppositions of colour associations in our culture and how certain sectors talk, but it was as simple as the colour and consumer vs. advisor associations were the wrong way round. AXA retested the ad with the AXA advisor in blue and the consumer in red. Guess what? Consumers said they liked it. Again, they didn’t know why they liked it but they did. And the rest, as they say, is history.
There are other examples. The BT It’s Good to Talk campaign, which reinvigorated a saturated market in the early 90s, was based on semiotics. The idea was to get people to use the telephone more when BT realised that as everyone in the country now had a telephone, the only way forward was to get them to use it more!
Halifax's positioning and the 'Howard' campaigns were similarly based on semiotic work – love him or hate him, at his height Howard was helping the bank to accumulate more than 100,000 new customers a year.
Semiotics can drive quality insights into just about anything and can strategically re-frame an entire category or map a new one. It’s flexible, commercially honed, naturally creative and innovative. It also evens out your communications, ensuring your product and brand is talking the right language, to the right people, moving swiftly to intersect opportunities.
