Check The Rhyme: Semiotics

Check it!

I keep a blue flag hangin' out my backside 

But only on the left side, yeah, that's the Crip side

?

There are a lot of quotables in this song “Drop It Like It’s Hot” from Snoop Dogg (a.k.a. Snoop D.O. Double G.). I love this line, in particular, because it’s filled with marketing implications as it pertains to signs.  

Signs are objects or entities whose presence or occurrence indicates the presence or occurrence of something else. That is to say, signs stand in for something else. Take for instance a traffic light. The red light signals “stop.” So “red" stands in for the cognition “stop." This phenomenon only happens when there is meaning associated to the objects. Red means stop. Green means go.

There are signs all around us and their meanings have been constructed by society at large. The study of signs and their respective meanings is referred to as semiotics. Semioticians analyze signs through a cultural lens to get a sense of how these things are interpreted and what they mean to a particular group of people. 

Which begs the question for marketers, what does your brand mean? What does the brand iconography signal? What is the cultural interpretation of your brand mark? For instance,

-    Wearing Toms signals altruism 

-    At one time, listening to music through Beats headphones signaled, "I'm cool" 

-    Driving a Prius signaled going green 

These brand marks act as signs that stand in for something else because of the meaning associated with it. If you see someone with a MAGA hat on, that hat stands in for what you perceived to be their beliefs and how they see the world. The meaning associated with the hat depends on your disposition, of course, and your cultural subscription which mediates the lens by which you see the world. This brings us back to Snoop.

I keep a blue flag hangin' out my backside 

But only on the left side, yeah, that's the Crip side

When Snoop wears this seemingly meaningless blue flag on his backside, only on the left side, he signals his affiliation with an organization. People who understand the cultural meaning frames of Snoop will understand the meaning of that object. This is super powerful. If marketers don't understand the cultural lens by which their brands are being negotiated and constructed, then they run the risk of being out of sync with consumer behavior. Marketers need to think not about what the brand means to you, but what does it mean to the culture.

Thank you Snoop Dogg… Professor Snoop Dog.