I’m going to describe commercial market research semiotics rather than the academic variety, which requires its own dictionary.
”Semiotically, semiotics does itself no favours.” (Guy Browning)
Every qualitative market researcher has come across and even used aspects of semiotics – for example, in packaging research. In kitchen cleaners, bold typefaces, bright colours and a lot of energy in the design signify something strong, and probably aimed at someone who has no qualms about using chemicals – while softer colours and typefaces, and symbols based on plants indicate more environmentally friendly products. Consumers can recognise these signals without even reading the words because they are part of the cultural rules, and are affected by what goes on in society elsewhere.
Consumers know what is dated, what looks cheap, what is cool, but they can rarely tell you where these judgments come from, because they are not generally aware of being immersed in a cultural language that includes words, images and music. These cultural rules or codes are normally unspoken, taken for granted, and it is part of the role of semiotics to make them explicit.
As Rachel Lawes brilliantly puts it:
Interviews and groups are geared to getting psychological phenomena such as perceptions, attitudes and beliefs out of people’s heads. Semiotics takes an outside-in approach. It asks how these things get into people’s heads in the first place. Where do they come from? The answer is that they come from the surrounding culture in which respondents (and semioticians!) participate. Demystifying Semiotics
Semiotics discovers and analyses the linguistic, aural and visual signs that apply to a particular communication situation. To do semiotics a large number of relevant ‘texts’ are collected (objects, artefacts, images, stories, jokes, newspaper articles, narratives, internet) and often there is no need to interview people. It is the culture that is being interrogated. The analysis is done using a semiotic toolkit and is quite rigorous. Guinness famously developed a Competitor Advertising Decoding Kit for their own internal planning and marketing teams but on the whole semiotics is best done by trained semioticians, who have expertise across a number of categories, and experience of paradigmatic thinking, deconstructing cultures, working with mythologies and so on.
What’s it useful for?
- Clearly, cross cultural work
- Understanding categories, brand positionings and communications; your own and competitors.
- Analysing communications – ensuring they are relevant and up to date
- Preceding qual to create hypotheses and following qual, to explain findings
- Visioning the future, looking at what is emergent and finding territories a brand can own
- Deep dives into popular culture
“I was immediately fascinated by semiotics. My biggest insight is its ability to break down walls that we create for ourselves. Often we do a lot of consumer research and end up asking ourselves the same questions over and over again. What I’ve found amazing with semiotics is to look at a situation or business question from a different angle, a different perspective. It always seems to open up many new doors and it has allowed us to start thinking a lot differently about our businesses.” (Marc Vandeneijnde, P&G Western Europe)
