The Hidden Potential of Symbol Meaning – How Semiotic Analysis Works

Cultural symbols – images, gestures, words – have rich, often inconsistent internal meanings. These internal variations make them seem more interesting, deeper, more engaging. The richness of meanings affects us, but generally, it is difficult to analyse them.

The author of the text is Krzysztof Najder, P.hD. The article appeared in 2009 in the magazine Media & Marketing Polska.

How Does Semiotics Work In Marketing?

And what is difficult to analyse is also difficult to use in a planned, systematic way. Because marketing communication aims to be precisely such a planned, systematic way of using cultural symbolism, it increasingly incorporates the analysis of meanings, mostly referred to today as semiotics.

Two in one. Why a new method? Why not use consumer research to analyse meanings, for instance? Two intertwined reasons stand in the way.

The first is that the meanings currently prevailing in culture are analysed by us solely in an interpretive way. This means they are analysed unconsciously, as verbal, conscious processes are too slow.

As a result, meanings steer our behaviour, but they are not easily accessible to introspection, and precise research cannot handle this.

Consumer Research Versus Semiotic Analysis

Why does a new song move us? Why does a joke make us laugh? Usually, the more effective the effect, the harder it is to explain. Only cultural products whose symbolic codes have fallen out of use no longer steer our behaviour and are easy to analyse.

How easily can we see the “naïve” tricks of old painters or composers that made their contemporaries moved or laugh!

The second reason for the difficulty in uncovering cultural meanings through consumer research is that we all have a strongly internalised norm according to which only consistent and easily expressible meanings are socially acceptable.

As a result, we look for logical consistency and coherence where there is none. This is how we behave when, as respondents, we participate in a survey. Asked what a cultural stimulus means to us, we try to say something sensible and coherent, rather than what the stimulus actually makes us think of.

Colleagues, bubbles, and a can. Cultural symbolic images are analysed by specialists, usually anthropologists or cultural scholars trained in specialised semiotic centres. Thanks to these analyses, we understand how we can use a given concept, code, or symbol in marketing communication – particularly in brand building, advertising, and branding.

Semiotic Analysis – An Example From The Beer Industry

To illustrate semiotic analysis, we present an example from the beer industry. It was conducted in the Stratosfera Semiotics workshop using the Dekryptor methodology. The meaning areas and their components are primarily intended to provide informational value, telling us which features are currently associated with the analysed concept and are likely to co-occur in natural conditions.

For example, “colleagues”, “bubbles”, and “can” are strictly unrelated, but bringing them together in this way makes sense in the minds of consumers. Paradoxes, on the other hand, provide suggestions about what, for example, in our communication might be a particularly effective theme, potentially distinguishing and appropriating, as by definition the paradox is not yet fully occupied.

For example, such a thing might be the simultaneous use of the codes of innocence and alcohol-induced relaxation in beer communication.

Structural analysis of meanings is an essential, but not the only, application of semiotics in marketing. Another critical application is the study of the dynamics of cultural codes, which arrange themselves into trends typically described in three stages – declining (or residual) codes, dominant codes, and emerging codes.

By determining the dynamics of codes, we better predict the future of the market and product categories. However, this is a topic for a separate article.