5. What does 'doing' semiotics actually entail?

Back in 2016 my process involved the following steps.

But as a result of experience I've since refined it for teaching and dissemination.

It is now distilled down to an Eight Stage process that involves these steps:

Let’s go point by point:

1. Interpreting the Brief

Interpreting the brief is usually the process of translating what the client needs to what you can deliver. Of course, this being semiotics, it's always worth digging deeper and seeing what might be left implicit in the brief and what the client might really need.

Some detective work can often yield an even sharper proposal.

It can also be helping clarify for the client where semiotics can be most useful and add most value. Sometimes this is about qualifying the appropriacy of the method. Does the client really need semiotics, or do they need another methodology first, for instance?

This is much less common now than it used to be as people become much more au fait with the methodology. I don’t have to refer client prospects over to behavioural scientists or to ethnographers any more. The market for semiotics now seems to be much more literate, better educated and to know what it is good at and how it might best add value.

2. Immersion in Context

For semioticians context is not just important but indispensable.

When I was starting out doing semiotics at Flamingo people always used to think semiotics was a great wheeze. The semiotics team they thought were on 'easy street' as they didn’t need to get involved in the palaver of recruiting focus groups or of actually speaking to difficult respondents – all we did was read books and pore over advertising.

We were just 'weird quallies who don't do groups' as someone once said.

Until they actually tried to do it themselves and they realised how much toil it entailed.

It can seem like quite a static activity – actually that is a misconception.

It is extremely labour intensive – psychically draining – when a big semiotics project is on you are literally living and breathing the topic. This might mean watching hours of streamed content, glued to the TikTok carousel or surreptitiously taking photos of whole product aisles. Trying to cram the breadth of knowledge of a PHD topic into only a matter of weeks is not unheard of at all when doing a semiotics project.

Rachel Lawes writes about this, here:

Obviously AI can concertina some of this grunt work and in the future will no doubt do more and more of it, but you still need to crunch through loads of content.

3. Gathering the Corpus

Semiotics is always the semiotics of SOMETHING, it is not abstract philosophizing.

Interpreting a single billboard ad on a tube is doing semiotics but of course 'one swallow does not a summer make'. Identifying patterns is our mainstay of semiotic analysis and so this is where gathering a 'corpus' of a number of similar ads or category brands is required.

As I’ve shared previously, how much work you need to do also depends on the client and the nature of the project. On the one end of the scale, you have a client that knows exactly what they want you to look at and even gives you a list of stimulus and potentially even a hard drive with said stimulus uploaded .

On the other hand, a client might give you a really open brief like “what is the meaning and the semiotic codes of serendipity today?”

This is clearly going to involve a lot more detective work and a lot more hustling and discernment in acquisition of stimulus. It will also mean that you will be in charge of determining when enough is enough. This is also a key skill to develop for all semioticians.

4. Descriptive Inventory

Semiotics is partly a way of seeing.

It is a way of seeing beyond the surface and looking at the structures underneath that gives meaning to something.

I often think about poetry, the way we can hear a poem and it emotionally affects us, but we cannot say in the moment exactly why. However, if we look at it again, we can see a clever structure, shrewd word choice, a euphonious sound and a compelling metaphor and account for why it brings such power.

Semiotics is about reverse engineering visual and other stimulus to understand ‘why’ they have the effect they have. It is about making explicit what can otherwise remain implicit and about making the invisible visible. An inventory is a stock taking and when we do Brand Semiotics we need to be unsparing in accounting for what we see.

This is especially so for example in an expert witness case of which I have done two but it’s also important in any project. The devil is in the details.

5. Pattern Recognition

When done at scale, we are looking at correlations and clusters of meaning which have great significance for brands culture in category – which leads us to patterns.

Cayce Pollard is the heroine of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition and in this classic cyberpunk novel she is A cool Hunter with a difference? she is able to read the patterns in culture and determine unerringly which logos are going to succeed.

She also has a pathological fear of the Michelin Bibendum logo to which she is highly allergic. To see the patterns in brands, categories and cultures.

Most semioticians may have pathologies, neurodiversity is probably higher amongst semioticians than the general ?popularion , but we aren’t allergic to logos, so much as to blanding; cliché and lack of cultural nuance and intelligence. It is this that makes us valuable partners for brands and their agencies in doing creative strategy.

6. Mapping Codes and Brands

Meaning works through difference - this is something that both pioneers of semiotics Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure put the heart of their thinking.

This both works in culture – black is not white can help create singularity in fashion but also has difficult implications for hierarchal classification in areas like race and identity.

Brands also work through difference and often those differences are about the values they espouse - what they stand for - so as semioticians we spend a lot of time working with Maps and other diagrams that help interrelate brands with their competitors and cultural values. This involves nuanced perceptual judgements. the semantic differential, some trial and error and usually teamwork. ?But once you have got it right, it is powerful.

Diagrammatic reasoning is a powerful form of semiotics in and of itself – diagrams help us see the inter-relationships between entities more clearly than text. They are a great way of us learning about semiotics, which is why I have based my book on them.

7. Narrative Structuring

Storytelling is an unacknowledged and perhaps undervalued aspect of semiotics.

Ultimately, you have to sum up the story in some way. This might mean telling Napolina pasta to move away from generic notions of Italianicity because the genericity equals commodification and cheapens the product perceptions and erodes the value proposition and to embrace the darkness and mystery of Naples as regional food is an emergent code.

It might mean telling BMW Mini that they shouldn’t use British symbols because that’s too obvious but should instead use the class and attitudinal paradoxes and contradictions of British identity to infuse their communication with Britishness.

Or it might involve showing an insurance company WHY their communication and use of brand colours communicated something out of step with the aesthetics of a new breed of small business people with side hustles redefining ‘entrepreneurship’.

We know that stories make ideas ‘stickier’ and easier to retain and this is what we need to do in the final stage when we tell the story, build the brand codes on the cultural context and the opportunity areas on the mapping we’ve previously done.

In a sense, this is no different than any consultant only that it is made perhaps more important by the fact that we are dealing with the complexity of culture and we need to make abstract ideas both tangible and impactful for brand teams working with them.

8. Recommendations

The recommendations are not really that different from what you might expect.

Except that this is when you should have already pivoted into brand consultant mode.

The one thing about semiotics is that it provides both divergent and convergent thinking and goes both broad and imaginative and does super ‘neeky’ and detailed.

For instance, for a BBC radio station our final recommendations were divided into a mapping of their brand, a key cultural property, a report on brand integrity, on cultural authenticity, tiers of programming innovation as well as 20 concrete new feature ideas.

Some recommendations might be only in Powerpoint, some might inhabit a 3 dimensions map - others might exist in immersive spaces depending on client needs.

So that’s it – that’s some information per stage in the process. Thanks for reading my fifth (very imperfect) newsletter and let me know what you think of it.

If you follow my feed on LinkedIn, you will see many educational pieces of content.

Also dig through my articles.

If you want to go deep into the actual application, then I can really do no better than to recommend my twice a year CPD accredited course How To Do Semiotics in Seven Weeks.

https://www.howsemiotics.com/2025-courses

Or you can e-mail course co-ordinator Pavla: [email protected]

If you want to discuss a potential project or have an enquiry about brand semiotics in your business you can book into my OnceHub here:?https://go.oncehub.com/ChrisArning