SEMIOTICS TUTORIAL: TRUISMS

Good morning, LinkedIn! Nothing makes me happier than when I see people using my books, taking notes & making infographics. Since I'm permanently on a quest to help people get more out of semiotics, here's the first of some quick & handy guides. This one is about Truisms, a technique for helping you innovate and think more creatively. Thank you very much to .Jane Hales. for putting this on the agenda and being an avid reader of my books.

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WHAT IS IT? "Truisms" is a technique for helping you think differently about things which we think we know well. It helps you innovate, better understand consumers and generate ideas for marketing.

WHY? Because we - clients, marketers - get stuck on ideas which we accept as true without exploring the alternatives.

WHEN TO USE IT? You have a practical marketing or market research problem at hand. There's a particular consumer culture or subculture that you need to understand, or a particular product category.

HOW TO DO IT? Identify your subculture or category of interest. Let's say it's LinkedIn, which has its own culture, or veganism or hotels & resorts, or beauty products. Identify truisms. Find statements which are commonly or standardly accepted as true within that subculture or category. Put them in a table - see the left-hand column, above. Generate as many as you can.

HOW DO I KNOW WHAT TO INCLUDE? There's a qualifying criterion. If something is a truism you will find it repeated throughout your subculture or category. Semiotics is about evidence so you want to find evidence of people saying and sharing this truism on a regular basis.

- Example: Is "trees have leaves" a truism? It might be but in order to qualify, you want to find examples of people saying that exact thing and treating it as important. If no-one but you is saying it, you might have found something that is true but no-one in your target consumer group particularly cares about. So what do people say about trees that they agree is both true and important? A quick glance at r/arborists on Reddit suggests that pruning is a big concern. You can't do it yourself, professional pruning is expensive, and so on. We have here the beginnings of some truisms that really matter to people who want to look after the trees in their gardens. Don't stop, though. You can't work with one truism, you need as many as you can find.

NOW WHAT? Make a second column like the one on the right side of the table at the top of this page. For each of your truisms, find a reasonable statement that expresses the opposite of the truism. The key word is "reasonable". Again, you want some evidence of the oppositional statement or reversal ALSO being true and being accepted by at least some other people, even though it may seem controversial to your core customers.

- Example: Is "leaves have trees" a reasonable opposition? I just Googled it and there aren't many examples of people saying this, which is a concern. Do you want to include it in your table? Depends on the application of your project. What are we trying to accomplish? Is it that we want more members of the public to be interested in trees? It could work. But we'd have to find some evidence of "leaves have trees" being true, and it would need to be reasonable in the sense of not giving anyone a headache. If "leaves have trees" is true (let's ask some arborists), it could be a way of getting people to think differently about trees if that's what we're trying to achieve.

WHAT DO I DO WITH THE COMPLETED TABLE? When you've generated a set of widely agreed truisms and a matching set of reasonable oppositions that don't give people a headache, now the final step begins. Comparing your whole set of reversals against your whole set of truisms, show how the reversals reveal something about the truisms.

In the above table, the truisms in the left column are often-repeated and look important but uncontroversial to the people from whom they were sampled. In this case, LinkedIn (a subculture, religiously subscribes to the idea that determination and ambition yield success), also Instagram (a platform where, like LinkedIn, people are encouraged to believe that they are the masters of their own destiny).

When we compare the two columns side by side, the truisms on the left don't look quite as certain, obvious or unchallengeable any more. Taken as a set, we can now see that that they express individualism and are even rather self-absorbed. Collectively, they encourage people to be preoccupied with themselves, to bullishly stampede towards objects of interest, to look within themselves for solutions to social problems, and to award themselves privileges such as "going large" and behaving badly when it suits one's purposes.

NOW RETURN TO YOUR PROJECT OBJECTIVES. WHAT ARE YOU SELLING?

If your truisms and reversals concern trees, your project objectives should have something to do with trees. What are we selling or trying to achieve? Do we want people to look after the trees in their gardens instead of digging them up and covering the grass in astroturf, concrete or decking? Do we want people to have days out in the countryside, appreciating nature? Do we think there is something stopping them? Is it is a truism among city dwellers that "the countryside is boring"?

In the above table, the examples imply that we might be trying to sell or promote a number of things. Maybe the point is to get people to be more healthy and take better care of themselves - physically, mentally or financially. Maybe we have a product or service that tries to save people from stress or burnout. Maybe we want them to be more involved with their communities or start voting.

BEGIN AND END WITH YOUR PROJECT OBJECTIVES IN MIND.

You can read even more detailed instructions on how to use truisms in chapter 6 of "Using Semiotics in Marketing" (2nd ed. 2023). Available worldwide from Amazon, publisher koganpage.com and all good bookstores.

Thanks again to .Jane Hales. for prompting this article. More coming soon.

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