BRAND STRATEGY & CULTURAL SEMIOTICS
Stylograph’s unique method for improving your brand or business’s relevance within the larger cultural context is Cultural Semiotics.
Semiotics is concerned with how meaning is made and communicated through signs and sign systems. The most fundamental concept in semiotics is the sign. The second most important concept is the human being as a sign-making, sign-using and sign-interpreting creature.
Language itself is a sign system.
So are road signs, menus, films noir, graffiti, scout badges, national holidays, Silicon Valley catch phrases, clowns, ceremonial dress, flowers, academic degrees, colors, religions, detective fiction. And brands, of course.
Cultural semiotics in marketing is the practice of identifying and interpreting various cultural meanings that are relevant to a brand or business, product, category or consumer group.
Some of these meanings are obvious and attach themselves readily to the brand or category, thanks to successful brand positioning and marketing communications, or literal connections between the brand and human beliefs and behaviors (a bookstore chain, for instance, is connected to the pastime of reading).
Other meanings are available to the brand but the semiotic connection has not yet been made; it hasn’t been championed, visualized, ”performed” as a brand behavior, or communicated to enough people to cement the brand/meaning association. A shaving razor wants to be associated with female empowerment but hasn’t aligned the brand’s sign system (identity, packaging, messaging, CSR, etc.) with prevailing icons and metaphors.
Some meanings are powerful due to their fixity; guns in western movies (themselves a fairly stable sign system) have a relatively persistent meaning. Others, in fact, most are more dynamic, evolving with the world’s larger ideological and phenomenological currents.
Evolving or contested meanings generally have more zeitgeist energy around them—more memes, media coverage, influencers, stories, practices, artifacts, zealous interpretations and stout repudiations. What does socialism mean today, for instance? What does yogawear signify? What do the new claims about “clean food” aim to suggest?
These emergent, contested meanings reveal human beings’ messy yet earnest and constant quest to make sense of their lives, to attach conscious and unconscious meanings to events, artifacts, institutions, practices, and people.
Explore a complex concept relevant to your business like “back to school” or “new luxury” as part of campaign ideation, brand positioning strategy or editorial planning.
Decipher the key ideologies and binaries of product categories or industries to solidify your brand’s competitive differentiation for brand planning, new product development, new corporate initiatives.
Understand and claim promising new market space for new product development and launch or brand repositioning.
Strengthen the connection between strategy, creative design and execution by adding “thick” data, descriptions and cultural interpretations to creative briefs and collaborative work sessions.
Create smarter hypotheses for primary research surveys, interviews, focus groups, and ethnography guides and in turn prompt more revealing answers.
Apply an interpretive frame of reference to data analytics’ processes of hypothesis formulation and inference.
Highlight or uncover emergent meanings relevant to the product or brand category that will soon become mainstream enough to create advantage or disadvantage for a brand’s positioning, value, communications, packaging, events, and leadership.
Investigate and articulate the cultural role of a brand, product or service.
Evaluate and optimize the communications effectiveness of advertising, packaging, websites, social media.
Sensitize brand communications to local beliefs, values and practices in a foreign market.
Anticipate changes in consumption patterns, consumer needs and desires, and lifestyle shifts that can propel a brand ahead of its competitors, and power continuous innovation.