Semiotically Speaking (Edition 1)

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This newsletter serves up nuggets of concentrated wisdom each month on various aspects of semiotics. Over time I aim to give you an exposé on the work of commercial semiotics and what it is like to work with a consultant in the field.

If you're up for that let's dive in.

What is semiotics? The $6 million dollar question.

Well in essence, it is a communication problem solving technique. The easiest way for me to explain it is to show you examples of problems that I've worked on.

In the next newsletter, I'll be going more into why it is important, but let's dive into three short examples first...I'm going to ration here you rather than overdose you!

1. A NEW PERCEPTION OF EFFICACY

A global pharmaceutical company wanted to create a visual brand language on pack for a Nicotine Replacement Therapy product that demonstrated they addressed the difficulties of giving up smoking. Several previous rounds of qualitative research had not solved the issue so they turned to semiotics.

This was a category where the codes were uninspiring full of blue, silver and tracer lines like the personal pain relief category. We believed that a new Visual Brand Language needed to convey unique benefits through on pack graphics.

We interviewed addiction specialists and the wellness category as well as analysing Snus, Vaping and other products and came to a startling insight.

INSIGHT: efficacy when it comes to addicts who are ambivalent about giving up smoking don't respond to aggression, but rather to relief and empathy coding

This enabled us to generate some visualised options which broke the stale loop and created fresh graphics and the beginnings of a visual brand language. The client commissioners were able to attest of the results that "the findings of this research were so powerful that inspired very powerful design routes".

2. TAKING HUMOUR SERIOUSLY

A major UK broadcaster wanted to compete with online brands such as Buzzfeed, and YouTube etc by serving up humour that would appeal to younger generations by closing the gap between classic sitcoms and humour found on social media.

E. B. White of The New Yorker advised: “Analyzing humour?is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested.?And?the frog?dies?of it.” The whole point of semiotics thinking though, lateral thinking often challenging conventional wisdom. As General Patton once said, "if everyone is thinking the same, then someone isn't thinking" . We interviewed stand ups, did a content analysis of memes and viral videos, and a literature review of humour psychology which led us to create a code map of humour types and their emotional effects, plus a powerful insight:

INSIGHT: different types of humour are created in different parts of the brain. And these different parts appeal to different demographics for predictable reasons...

This enabled us to craft a strategy for the client which enabled them to know which types of humour to integrate to appeal to a younger audiences, how to flex their humour muscles on programming, how to use metadata more effectively and has led to a bunch of new podcast commissions, and to push the boundaries

For more on this pls request the International Journal of Market Research paper.

3. ILLUSTRATING HUMANS IN TECH

A company wanted to better understand the use of animated figures across their products / brand communication fearing that it might be outmoded. They wanted the figures appearing on their website and across product interfaces to both differentiate themselves and to be 'on brand'. So they commissioned semiotics.

Our analysis of graphical styles across mostly tech and social media brands showed that there were some common themes Ambience of Levity, Muted Individuality and a Gendered Feminization to the representation - one which risked veering into a code convergence (which means essentially that everything looks the same). Animated figures, were used as a visual rhetoric designed to ingratiate tech companies to users but this style risked becoming inauthentic over time. We noticed a shift to humorous contorted shapes as emergent aesthetics.

The insight:

INSIGHT: animated figures are a proxy for our relationship between humanity and technology and the style / aesthetic can either reassure people or repel them

The brand concluded that on reflection they would struggle to better differentiate themselves and that using humour in the way nimbler competitors were doing was 'off brand' and so they took the decision to discontinue these figures.

The semiotics sometimes tell you what you don't want to hear but need to hear!

SEMIOTICS AND CULTURE: THE COMMON DENOMINATOR

So, 1. pharma packaging, 2. broadcasting content and 3. illustration styles.

Three very different challenges, but semiotics added value was common to all. In each case these were insights that ONLY semiotics could yield. It acted as a vital circuit breaker that enabled the brand in question to overcome a deep quandary.

The semiotics added value was:

1. Offering a rich context to give the brands more cultural intelligence
2. Creating a code map of the market place to give them strategic options
3. Ensuring all decisions around creativity were justified and non-arbitrary

APPLIED SEMIOTICS: DECODING BRAND MEANING

Applied has found a niche in the consumer insight industry and is thriving because it chimes in with long term changes within brands and marketing.

Traditional marketing and business school approaches to brands treat them as if they're a military operation in a vacuum whereby media spend and operational efficiency seem to be the only criteria with no consideration for the cultural milieu.

Brands have been seen as weapons to be deployed or assets to be sweated, rather than as being a cluster of ideas, concepts and associations that live, first and foremost in culture and the minds of customers, consumers, sub cultures.

This, however, has been gradually changing. We see marketing orthodoxy bending slowly, like the arc of history, towards taking culture more seriously. This has dovetailed with thinking around System 1 thinking and how it is the long term brand associations that drive preferences as shown in the diagram below.

Peter Field and Les Binet, authors of The Long and the Short Of It, urge brands to invest in long term brand building. "Maintaining memory structures that have a lasting influence on human behaviour". This is where you think about the deep meanings claimed by brands like Apple - but also by scrappy challenger brands.

Of all methodologies semiotics is the one most dedicated to understanding the tricky topic of brand meaning and how to manage it (including ) over time. If you want to ensure you get into those memory structures by building up the right associations around your brand over time, then you should trial semiotics.

I hope that in this, my first ever newsletter I have given you some idea of what Semiotics is used for and how it can solve brand problems. Next month (and it's almost written!) we will have a more in depth look at why semiotics is needed before moving into detailing how it works in practise month by month. If you are curious then here is a Sixty Seconds of Semiotics to whet your appetite for that.

The risk with small, founder-led businesses, which I am is that the leaders can become so close to the product they believe it to be more magical than it is…so If I have missed something or even begged questions in what I have written, or you have no idea what I'm on about then let me know in the comment section below.

Thanks for reading and see you next month!

Semiotically Yours,

Chris

Semiotics is generally applied by senior marketers in large organisations as part of a research suite but it can also be deployed as a path finding methodology for start-ups and solopreneurs. To find out more about commissioning a project book in to my OnceHub on https://go.oncehub.com/ChrisArning or for more on the sort of case studies that I featured in this piece above you can go my website:

To find out more about learning how to do semiotics you can join my quarterly critically acclaimed CPD accredited course How to Do Semiotics in Seven Weeks for more details email course co-ordinator Pavla: [email protected]