Archive for May, 2011

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Semiotics 101

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

 

Having led a two day training programme last week for the UK Market Research Society in London  I’m currently (31 May 2011) at Vaal River near Johannesburg with a similar professional training workshop for the international market research/consumer insight organisation ESOMAR.  At these occasions people often ask for a wiiki-type proper (but not too exhaustive) explanation of semiotics. Likewise academic specialists like to know how applied commercial semiotics works (and is evolving). Below the two birds with one stone – kissed, that is, for “He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise” as William Blake says. And you can’t do better than that.  Except help improve this starter definition by filling a feedback box with essential points overlooked below or things you can express in much better ways.


Delegates at the ESOMAR advanced semiotics training workshop, Vaal River, South Africa, 31st May 2011

Semiotics, from the Greek semeion (‘sign’) is the study of semiosis, or systems and activities involving signs that exist in human culture and in nature – from spoken or written language to visual representation, music, taste and smell cues, signaling between animals (‘zoosemiotics’), medical symptoms, hormonal messaging, and the coding of the genome and microbiome. Semiotics embraces all processes of expression, communication and significant interaction at all levels throughout the universe which in the words of C.S. Peirce, early twentieth-century American philosopher and one of the founders of the modern discipline of semiotics, “is perfused with signs”.

The history of semiotics extends back to ancient Greece, where semiotike, alongside ethics and natural philosophy, was one of the three great pillars of human knowledge. There are similar processes of interpretation and decoding signs in all other human civilisations. The other great founding figure of today’s version of the discipline, operating like Peirce around the turn of the twentieth century, was Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure the father of modern linguistics, who formalised the systematic description of languages and posited beyond linguistics a larger, inclusive “science of the life of signs in society” which he called semiology. This field of study identified by Saussure and inspired by the methods of structural linguistics was to become, in the second half of the twentieth century, a driving force in the development of anthropology and ethnography (Claude Lévi-Strauss), philosophy, psychoanalysis and historical inquiry into discourse and the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault) and analysis of any form of cultural expression – narrative, literature, art iconography, film and popular culture generally (e.g. Propp, Greimas, Metz, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco).

Semiotics (or semiology) applied to consumer insight and marketing has drawn on the traditions of both Peirce and Saussure. As befits a practical approach in which accessibility and client actionability override any niceties of academic definition or territoriality, commercial semiotics has looked more like an eclectic toolbox than a philosophically uniform or consistent discipline. Adjacent academic areas, like cultural studies for example, have been raided to enrich this applied methodology – through for example the application of Residual, Dominant and Emergent code mapping to understanding (and helping create) cultural trends and to developing a brand’s cultural equities and communication strategy. 
 
Commercial semiotics in this broad sense, focusing on cultural and communication codes to help enhance client brand communications in competitive and cultural context, has experienced a sharp rise in influence with the growth of brand strategy and management since the 1990s, and particularly with the rise of megabrands requiring cross-cultural and global communication platforms. Current trends see this cultural (strictly speaking semiological) emphasis increasingly complemented by perspectives developed from the work of Peirce and his disciple Thomas Sebeok who saw human culture as part of a larger natural ‘semiosphere’ and refused to elevate it, via a false nature-culture dichotomy, into the sole area of inquiry. With a new convergence of the cultural and nature + culture (biosemiotic) perspective commercial semiotics will engage not only with brand imagery in the context of national and global cultures but also more and more with innovation in product forms and features (taste, smell), ecology and sustainability, and the interplay of ‘rational’ and’ emotional’ behaviours – interfacing increasingly with other emerging disciplines like cognitive psychology & neuroscience, ethnography/webnography and behavioural economics.

© Malcolm Evans  2011

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Not so innocent

Monday, May 30th, 2011

The on-going trend for Hollywood fairy-tale adaptations is unmistakable. After Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, versions of Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast and Jack and the Beanstalk are all in the offing.

The rediscovery of fairy tales clearly draws much of its lifeblood from the recent vampirecraze. But the fairy tale is as much about nature as it is about the supernatural: woodlands as well as witches play a starring role. And its revival reflects, not just an on-going taste for the otherworldly, but a change in the way we symbolise nature itself.

Film adaptations such as Red Riding Hood draw out the darker and more disturbing facets of the fairy-tale genre, moving away from Disney childishness and schmaltz into a sexualised and sinister register. In doing so, they echo the darker ‘naturalness’ coming to the fore in the wider cultural context.

When the idea of naturalness first became big in branding and marketing, it was very much about being clean and pure – no evil toxins or hidden nasties. Here, nature is sweet and childlike: an escape from the moral and physical pollution of urban life. The brand name ‘Innocent Drinks’ says it all, as does the stream of naturalness advertising that uses childish fonts and a faux-naïf copy style.

But emerging naturalness brings out a darker and more powerful vision of nature – akin to the sinister woods of Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood.

For instance, natural beauty products no longer have to be about pretty, attractive sensorials or pure, innocent symbolic framing. Extreme, challenging or even toxic ingredients are coming to the fore: snail gel, mushrooms, snake poison and bee sting venom all feature in recently-acclaimed products.

As with film’s current interest in the not-so-innocent fairytale, naturalness may well be returning to darker sources in northern European magic and shamanism. And this in turn reflects an environmental politics which asks people to rediscover their own natural environment: to stay at home, walk in their own woods, and look to their own local and seasonal traditions.

Of course, the escapist faux-exotica of brands like Herbal Essences is still around. But it now sits alongside an idea that the rotting mushroom or potent berry may be more effective and transformative still than the imported tropical fantasy or regressive Edenism.  

It’s clear that the cultural view of naturalness has taken on a darker edge, no longer just pretty and pure, but powerful and morally ambiguous. Like the fairytale, it walks a tightrope between the toxic and the therapeutic, rather than offering simplistic ‘cleansing’ from urban dirt.

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Local Alternatives

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Spring is at its height and the beer brands’ battle for the consumer mind and throat is becoming ferocious in Bulgaria. Here I’d like to look at two much discussed advertising campaigns. One is based on a clever idea realised by the Shumensko brand, part of the Carlsberg company portfolio, The other is a more problematic ad – for Zagorka, owned by leading Dutch brand Heineken. What the two campaigns have in common is a global-local axis of interest, but explored through very different signifiers. 

Nowadays neither of these brands remains exactly Bulgarian in terms of ownership but both still play to a local image and values included in it.  The flagship brands of the two owner companies – Heineken, on the one hand, Carlsberg (and Tuborg) on the other, feature ads that are recognizably international rather than local, deploying global codes of cosmopolitan lifestyle, football, music etc.

The plot of the current Zagorka ad demonstrates that almost everything that surrounds us in our everyday life in Bulgaria comes from different parts of the globe – the jeans are American, the boss is a Spaniard, the car is German.  And you actually interact with the whole world from morning till evening but at the end of the day you can enjoy the ‘Bulgarian’ beer. The slogan tells us that Zagorka is “a Bulgarian beer of world-class quality”.  Here we can see the direction of meaning creation moving from the global towards the local. The key signifier (see the picture, above) is an ordinary guy of today, who lives his life participating in a globalized world. Whether globalisation is right or wrong, if we accept it or disapproved of it , is not at issue here. It exists and the ad reflects that.

But something has clearly gone wrong in the attempt to communicate this message positively. Some forum and blog comments online have been scathing in their criticism of Zagorka’s approach to spreading the ‘local’ message.  It is well known that this is an old Bulgarian brand but now under foreign ownership and a local exemplar of globalisation. Zagorka has struggled in recent years and changed it campaigns, having prior to that deployed forceful (implicitly nationalistic) signifiers of Bulgarian identity and pride (see for example this execution from around 2006). There seems to be something at once half-hearted and intriusively exploitative about the current attempt to get the best of both worlds in relation to the global-local dichotomy. It doesn’t ring true. The protagonist doesn’t even look Bulgarian.

It was no surprise then, and very much in keeping with the drift of the online discussion, when an alleged forerunner of this ad was recently spotted on YouTube – using the same plot for another Heineken brand in the Slovakian market some years ago. Of course, the average consumer is not so anxious about the origin or the originality of the ad but undoubtedly any remaining engagingness the campaign might have had has been further compromised by the publicity around this. Here apparently is a potential formula for mechanically reproducing ‘localness’ globally wherever you go – and with its disclosure in Bulgaria a sense of anything authentically ‘local’ about the communication may have left the stage altogether.

The case of the Shumensko spot demonstrates the reverse direction of meaning creation – from local towards global. Drawing on the great success of Facebook in Bulgaria this ad connects the idea of people’s togetherness implemented in this virtual context with the social life in which a beer has played its part for many years now. So using black-and-white visual codes of the silent movie, Shumensko communicates tradition through a series of scenes from Bulgarian social life in the early 20th century – making humorous comparisons between these and Facebook activities such as ‘changing profiles’ (5 or 6 men are in serious fight), ‘joining an interest group’ (men plotting a rebellion), ‘writing on someone’s wall’ (two guys relieving themselves against Petrov’s factory wall). And so on. In relation to this last detail, there is something about a beer ad which shows two men outdoors pissing against a wall which, in defiance of all bland lowest common denominator global communication codes, triumphantly signals time, place, authenticity, comradeship, down to earth humour and a sense of the local which feels at the same time universal in its comic scope.

The spot finishes presenting people with thumbs up and the slogan: “Shumensko – The Bulgarian social network since 1882”. This hits the bull’s eye. Where Zagoska’s falters while attempting something similar, Sumensko achieves consistency, cohesion and texture in combining the global with the local – using local history, the brand’s tradition and presence in the local market and the Bulgarian success of Facebook to assert a localness which is confident and at ease with itself. All held together by a humour which is straightforward, locally sensitive and nuanced – and a dominant code everywhere communicating a relaxation and friendship for which beer is one of the best-loved universal signifiers.

© Dimitar Trendafilov 2011

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Chapter 100

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

While Elton John has described Lady Gaga’s single ‘Born This Way’ as the ‘gayest song ever’, others aren’t so happy with it.

Ben Trott and Arturo Garcia, writing on the UK news site www.guardian.co.uk, accused the pop diva of betraying her commitment to the construction of gender and sexual orientation with a song that’s all about nature and authenticity – the way you’re born, rather than the performative choices you make.

It’s easy to see why the writers should feel this way. Lady Gaga represents many postmodern tropes that, for many, make her the inheritor of the Madonna-Kylie lineage. Her focus on costume, theatrics and self-creation seem to shout ‘postmodernism’ loud and clear. And if she’s a postmodern diva, all about identity play and self-construction, what’s she doing singing about being ‘born this way’?

But another look at her work shows that, in fact, she’s making a radical break with postmodernism.

First and foremost, she’s breaking with postmodern irony. Like Madonna and Kylie, she’s all about theatre and performance. But unlike them, she’s not interested in ironic role play and cultural citation. While Madonna ‘did everything with a wink’ (to quote her own phrase), Lady Gaga returns art to life-and-death seriousness.

When things go wrong on the Lady Gaga stage, they’re not hidden away or ushered back stage. If her feet bleed from dancing in high heels, or she falls off a grand piano, we hear about it. These failures and sufferings are integrated into her act, and into her myth, rather than glossed over as accidental misfortunes.

For Madonna and Kylie, performance is about professionalism: slick, perfect, ironic and managed. In contrast, for Lady Gaga, it’s about blood and guts, stumbles and falls, life and death. It’s become a well-known Gaga commonplace that, for the singer, there’s no such thing as ‘off stage’. She’s ‘always on’, living her art, grafting it into the visceral immediacy of life rather than playing with ironic citation and distance.

Another example is the performer’s Rilke tattoo, which reads: ‘in the deepest hour of the night, confess that you would die if you were forbidden to write’. Unsurprisingly, it’s been ridiculed as one of the most pretentious celebrity tattoos ever.

But the tattoo is significant in the light of her post-postmodernist performance mission, fitting in with her quest to return art to the life-and-death matter it was for 19th-century absolutists of the aesthetic (such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Wilde).

Returning now to ‘Born this Way’, it all makes much more sense. The psychedelic horror code of the video shows alien entities being born from slimy pulsating vaginal forms – indicating there’s nothing ‘natural’ about birth in Lady Gaga’s world. Instead, for her, birth is about artistic creation: the revelation of the radically new, and the emergence of unprecedented and unconstrained representational forms.

The same idea comes through in her mission statement, ‘The Manifesto of Little Monsters’. Here, she claims: ‘We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become, in the future.’

In the manifesto, as throughout her work, Lady Gaga invites fans into a limitless field of representational possibility, which she messianically terms ‘the kingdom’. And as part of this process, she’s constructed a new relationship to image that’s about futurity and birthing (moving away from the citationality and ‘retro fixation’ typical of postmodernism).

So Lady Gaga is significant today for bringing back an absolutist relationship to art, image and representation – moving these concepts away from retro irony, and towards futurity and revolution.

© Louise Jolly 2011

Link

Read the full text of Lady Gaga’s fan manifesto at
http://ladygaga.wikia.com/wiki/Manifesto_of_Little_Monsters

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Semiotic Square – Brazil

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

Saussurean linguistics, from which European semiology derived, takes as a start point “oppositions without positive terms”.  So languages and cultural meanings tend to divide along the lines of this and not that: black/ white, female/ male, nature/ culture, emotion/ reason, subjective/ objective, people who think the world neatly divides into oppositions like these – and perhaps people who don’t.

President Bush’s post 9/11 pronouncement “You’re either with us or against us” is a convenient handle for explaining the Semiotic Square. Here’s an opposition which became too limiting almost immediately, black and white leading inevitably to shades of grey. President Chirac stepped up – NOT ‘with us’ but not ‘against us’ either. Not that this was going to wash with the 2001 equivalent of the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Meanwhile a different shade of grey (NOT against us, as might have been expected) was represented by President Musharraf of Pakistan for whom, as he later explained in his autobiography, the alternative offer from the US was to be bombed back to the Stone Age.

That in essence is the Semiotic Square. A straightforward opposition (technically characterised by a relationship of contrariety), then a more complex and comprehensive mapping of the larger conceptual terrain around this based on discovering in the quadrants juxtaposed diagonally to the original two terms the ‘NOT-‘ for, or contradiction of, each of these original terms. An exercise which sets up a relationship of complementarity between the two quadrants on the left and the two on the right of the model. And you end up with something much richer and more nuanced than a simple opposition. (Our featured image on the home page, representing these relationships diagrammatically, is taken from Daniel Chandler‘s invaluable online explanation of key concepts in semiotics including the Semiotic Square – a health warning here, however, in that Non-Assertion and Non-Negation are in the wrong positions on the diagram and need to be switched).

In commercial semiotics this is a powerful technique for mapping the conceptual space of any category, consumer benefit (e.g. ‘value’, ‘freshness’ etc) or other theme (e.g. ‘sustainability’, ‘fairness’) viewed in cultural context. The Semiotic Square can be used for brand stretch or portfolio mapping, for example – e.g. differentiating positionings and communication strategies for a number of laundry or shampoo brands owned by the same company. There are very few brand communication or product innovation projects, in fact, that would not benefit from the kind of terrain mapping and dimensionalising this technique offers.

And so to Saõ Paolo, where we fed the contributions from our international Semionaut Brazil mash-up (reported here earlier in 2011) into a workshop where they were merged with outputs of a year-long not-for-profit research programme with young Brazilians run by Box 1824. Some overall project findings will be shared next month with contributors to the mash-up. Meanwhile some headlines on our Semiotic Square (in progress) covering Brazilianness.

Quadrant 2 (as marked on the illustration below) contains the things that come most readily to mind for foreigners in relation to Brazil – physical ease, grace, beauty, spontaneity and sensuality. Samba, traditional Brazilian football, Copacabana and Carnival, recreation and pleasure. This can be condescending – sentimentalised and exoticised as a kind of child-like innocence. But behind it there is a positive ethic of pleasure, cultivating the body, physical grace and sensuality. An alternative set of life values to a Protestant 24/7 work ethic. Something in line with social and political discourses now also emerging in developed markets on happiness and social connectedness as higher values than individual acquisition or national GDP growth alone.

Quadrant 1, in contrast, represents the Brazil of Lula who must be the prime candidate in terms of succession to a global Mandela slot for statesmen who represent peace, reconciliation and harmony rather than international posturing or aggression.  This is the Brazil which, unique in the major economies in recent years, has actually closed rather than further widening, as has happened elsewhere, the gap between rich and poor.  This is also the Brazil of enlightened modernist architecture and planning – as represented, for example, by the work of the country’s centenarian national treasure Oscar Niemeyer.

Quadrant 3, in continuity with 2, is the space of Brazilian music, film, design, fashion, vibrant cultural creation.  Analogous to African-American and Caribbean cultures this is an area where a history of struggle and suffering – nowhere more graphically represented than in familiar images of favela life – are alchemised into the cultural gold of a Seu Jorge or a Cidade de Deus (City of God), the grounding for cultural creativity and authenticity.

Quadrant 4 finally, connecting with 1, focuses on wisdom, learning, discovery, spirituality.  Historically this was about, among other things, a celebration in Brazil of racial and cultural mixing which, from the years of the Nazis in Germany through to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the US, stood in sharp contrast to supremacist thinking, segregation and fear of miscegenation elsewhere.  What proved to be a prophetic cultural vision in Brazil anticipated something that only evolved much later elsewhere. Stewardship of the biodiversity of the Amazon and emerging codes of sustainability become an emergent part of this Quadrant 4 mix today.  Here too is Brazil’s rich syncretistic spiritual and cultural heritage – mixing the indigenous South American with the African and the European, the worlds of candomblé, for example, and capoeira.

A documentary account would, of course, focus more critically on the negatives. Favelas are still there, especially in Rio.  In spite of progress in other areas in the Lula years, political corruption and infrastructural problems remain.  A Semiotic Square applied to marketing will focus inevitably on good news and positive opportunities (for Brazil, for local brands projecting outwards, and for international brands seeking to understand codes of Brazilianness today). Through the period up to the next World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics we will continue to monitor emergent codes and opportunities on this map.

In July 2010 Carlos Jereissati, a leading figure in Brazilian retail, was quoted thus – “Everyone is looking at us and saying ‘Wow, these people are really growing – they have the economy, they have the oil, they have the Olympics and the World Cup, we need to pay attention!'”  From my few days talking to friends and colleagues at Box 1824 and academic semioticians in Saõ Paolo I believe we will also learn from Brazil in relation to two other challenges David Harvey, in a compelling analysis for today 1st May 2011, identifies as the most urgent tasks facing our economies and societies going forward – making the changes that are needed to redress global poverty and environmental degradation. Or at the risk of diluting that with compromised buzz-words: getting really serious about fairness and sustainability.

© Malcolm Evans  2011

Posted in Americas, Culture, Europe, Global Vectors, Making Sense, Semiotics, Socioeconomics | 1 Comment »