Viewpoint: Semiotics: a winning formula?

Chris Arning
Associate Director and Head of Semiotics at Flamingo.

Commercial semiotics is one of the most powerful tools in the marketer’s arsenal. It provides a depth of insight into categories and culture, often – as in design and packaging studies – where qualitative research has run out of answers. This is starting to be recognised in the more imaginative quarters of the market research community. Those who have commissioned semiotics and seen its value first hand need no convincing as to its merits. But for a discipline whose metier is communication and representation, semiotics is invariably direly misrepresented and thus dismally misconstrued. Part of the problem is the fact that semiotics is sometimes perceived as haphazard. Frequently, this is a matter of poor packaging – on the part of the agency concerned – but is more usually the result of the fact that as an atomised bunch, we have no common representation or common voice.

What commercial semiotics lacks is a convincing means of assuring quality and guarantees of consistent performance. At present semiotics within market research and consumer insight can be seen as an ad hoc opinion piece that inspires thinking but with techniques shrouded in secrecy, and can appear to owe much to the subjectivity of the individual. While semiotics findings are erudite, sensible and reasoned, there is often a suspicion that another supplier might yield quite different results and even recommendations. What, then, guarantees the quality and consistency of results for research buyers? As semiotics is often called in to be an outside arbiter for contested opinion or support desired to lend added rationale to a particular course of client action, this is important. Semiotics may never be empirically provable in the positivist sense, except perhaps through the success of concepts generated through its good offices, but we need to do more to put it on a robust footing.

My argument in this Viewpoint is that we in the industry need to create industry standards for semiotics. I think that, in the long term, this would ideally take the form of institutional development, the creation of tutored courses and training establishments, a comprehensive curriculum and accredited qualifications for semiotics practitioners. This is too lofty a vision to subscribe to in the short term. In the meantime, however, one way of both forging more cohesion among practitioners and enshrining more consistency of approach would be to create and adopt an industry benchmarking system. I think at the core of this system, because most straightforward, should be a quotient of symbolic investment in brands.

For argument’s sake I have dubbed this a ‘semiotic value index’, or SVI for short. ‘Semiotic’ because it attempts to measure units of symbolic investment;‘value’ because it would quantify this figure; ‘index’ both because this has resonances of a reference system and because it gives any interested parties themeans to compare and contrast brands both with their counterparts and to track their symbolic values over time.

I am not suggesting that semiotics practitioners purport to be purveyors of a date-based hard science that is verifiable, falsifiable, but surely some movement in that direction would be no bad thing? Consultants in market research have cottoned on to the fact that proprietary models work well as a selling tool. For instance, Packs@work is Nielsen’s branded proprietary pack research system. TDLinx® is its channel database system. ACNielsen runs BuzzMetrics, a global measurement standard in consumer-generated media. BrandZ™ is the Millward Brown proprietary process, which uses a matrix of variables determined by a given brand’s performance on measures such as Brand Voltage, Signature and Pyramid. Not to be left out, Synovate has its Brand Value Creator model. Clients may never care to interrogate the formulas and calculus that give substance to these models, but these cute neologisms and the smug trademarks that go with them carry powerful connotations of endeavour that go beyond legal writ.

Product innovation streams often yield technological nuggets that can enhance the standing of a brand. Dyson’s
Cyclone technology would be one example of this; the Honda VTEC engine would be another. This halo effect for semiotics would be more akin to the Six Sigma benchmark that gives the likes of Motorola, General Electric
and American Express a perceived advantage over their rivals. Appropriating the language of martial arts and iconography from Greek academia, Six Sigma is described as ‘a statistical measure that expresses how close
a service process comes to its quality goal’. Promising only one defect per 3.4 million transactions, Six Sigma is the sort of positivist spin that has Harvard MBAs rubbing their hands with glee.

It is difficult not to think that an industry-accredited ‘sign quotient’ would help to mollify the more stringent procurement policies and would help market research commissioners part with more significant portions of research budget. So, how to arrive at this sanctifying holy grail? A working committee of all semiotics practitioners should be convened to discuss best practice, and how to approach measurement and quantification. Concepts such as the connotative index (measuring the chains of subtle meanings associated with various words, colours and motifs) and semantic density (the amount of qualia or data contained in a visual or sonic unit) should be useful as a starting-point in this sort of analysis. Once the committee quorum has decided what to look at and through what perspective, and indeed what aspects of signifying practice to focus on, it would make sense to open the sessions to economists, financial model makers and others whose job it is to make standardisation out of messy contingencies. Through this sort of inter-disciplinary working party it would be possible to devise a formula.

Ideally, once the source data and gathering mechanism have been set, the SVI ought then to be calculated
using a sequence of arithmetic steps. The NFL (National Football League in the US) uses a formula to determine a quarterback’s passer rating, based on a menu of variables including the player’s completion percentage (successful passes divided by attempts multiplied by a hundred), passing yardage, touchdowns and interceptions. How this could work in practice can be seen in the Interbrand organisation and its industry-recognised Brand Valuation Model. The Interbrand brand valuation formula is endorsed by academics,
auditors, accountancy firms, analysts, advertising agencies, banks, government bodies, high courts, management consultants, stock exchanges and tax authorities. Interbrand claims that, ‘using our methodology it has been proven that companies with a strong brand reputation outperform the market with respect to shareholder return and risk’. Coming up with the model was motivated by an incentive to find some means by which the intangible
assets of a brand are measured. The SVI can take this a step further.

The Interbrand method is both sophisticated and measured in the way it takes into account several factors. It
considers how brands create and secure demand, as well as the net present value calculated on expected future brand earnings. In my opinion, however, it neglects to fathom the purely sensory equities of brands and the meanings they encode.

I believe that a robustly conceived SVI could provide a modifying value to Interbrand’s Brand Valuation Model
as well as becoming a respected metric in its own right. I don’t claim to know how to do this, but a collective ‘we think’ mild meld would be a good start. I welcome feedback on this piece from both clients and fellow semioticians.

International Journal of Market Research 51(3), 2009

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