Semionaut, Signifying Everything
Signifying Everything
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|How Brands Protect Us
Monday, July 3rd, 2017
Preface
The level of anxiety is becoming higher in the world today. It was traditionally high in Russia. It looks as if 20th century Russia lived under the motto “may you live in interesting times”. The country has gone through several wars, bold social experiments, dramatic changes and crises[1].
How did all this influence the lives of average Russian citizen and Russian culture overall? It became habitual to anticipate that unexpected disaster might happen. That families might lose all their savings. That social status might change from high to low and vice versa in several months. That results of planning and strategic thinking might turn into a joke. That it is important to value the current moment, to live here and now. It also brought a kind of tolerance of stress. Strength to overcome difficulties, durability and fortitude. Inventiveness and resourcefulness. Low trust in relation to state and government, the habit of relying on oneself.
After a relatively calm period between 2000 and 2013, negative events started again in 2014: the annexation of Crimea and economic sanctions from the West that followed; the collapse of the rouble in late 2014 (real incomes halved); the decrease in oil prices (the Russian economy being built on oil); two wars (Ukraine and Syria) – these have all had an impact on social mood and contributed to increasing anxiety.
On Сhart 1 we can see represented the dynamics of social mood from 2010 to 2017[2]. The level of anxiety is very high during all periods: it ranges from 36% to 49% of respondents, with the lowest average degree in 2013 and 2014 (after a calm decade), reaching the highest levels in the 1st quarter of 2015 (after the events of 2014) and the 1st quarter of 2016. In 2017 the crisis is still here, however, the social mood has become calmer. Citizens have adapted to the situation. Still 40% of people believe that in their environment anxiety prevails over tranquility.
The cultural peculiarities related to such high levels of social anxiety are manifested in several tendencies in consumer behaviour:
• Russian consumers prefer to spend rather than save. In the good times, they are very receptive to novelties and brands communication in general;
• Risky consumption is popular. Adventures, speed of life, self-indulgence – everything that helps take the most from the current moment.
• External signs of status and strength are very important in the dominant culture – rich and powerful are less vulnerable.
• Controlled consumption, attention to brands, reading packs before purchase. The belief that it is impossible to control external factors, but possible to control what one eats and buys.
In this article, we will analyze how the last two tendencies are represented in marketing communication and branding. We will show how brands in Russia help consumers in building personal strategies of safety. We will also provide some examples from the cultural and media fields.
Semiotic Codes of Protection in Branding
There are various ways in which brands in Russia are connecting with meanings of protection and safety:
One way is through a literal interpretation of the theme in the form of protecting borders, or products that provide strength and may help even in a physical sense (numbered below 1.1.-1.3.).
Another type of code utilizes topics that are not directly related to protection, but can decrease consumer anxiety in a subtler way: associations with kind nature, trusted traditions, or wise technology (see codes 2.1-2.3). Such codes describe sources of protection that exist in the outside world.
The third type of interpretation goes deeper to the understanding of safety and what it means to consumers. Such codes refer to signs of comfort, care, support of the community and control over personal choices (3.1-3.3). This group of codes speaks about human input in creating the sense of security: relationships and personal responsibility.
Some of the brand examples we provide for the second and the third group of codes probably were not aimed by their designers to communicate protection (or only protection). But they do so on the connotative level. They also show possible indirect ways of presenting safety, that may be used by other marketers.
On the Chart 2. we have summarized the main semiotic codes of protection observed in communication materials representing brands in Russia in the recent years. This chart describes the dominant semiotic field, the signs that are common and universally understood in Russian culture. Although the codes were derived from Russian material, we believe that some of them could be successfully integrated in marketing communication in other cultures or in global campaigns. Below is a description of the main codes.
• Protecting Barrier
This is one of the most popular codes in communication of safety and protection. “The barrier” speaks more about prevention of a problem, rather than relief. By using the code a brand becomes associated with a reliable partner. The border prevents a problem from intervening in the consumer’s life, be it insects, infection, dirt, or computer viruses. Very important here is the dichotomy “me-others”, or “a person – an outer world”, “friends – enemies”.
Symbols of barriers are often combined with the signifiers of efficacy and power: red, bright intense colors, images of heroes, strong animals. That is a kind of militant protection and it is usually used in communication of products which serve “against” something: medical remedies, insecticides, cleaning products, information security and such. Sometimes the product itself is portrayed as a barrier: for example, an SUV car or an IKEA home which hides its owners from the disasters of the world outside.
The code is almost never used in communication of “peaceful” products, which do not fight with the problem, but protect the consumer from it in other ways (vitamins, ecological food, gadgets).
Signs: shield, protecting circle, wall, shell, black color, thick and hard substances, etc. Also, metaphors of safety belt, lifebuoy.
Image 1.1. 
• Handy tool
This code is close in meaning to the previous one. It also speaks about fighting the problem. The “me-others” dichotomy is strong in this code too. Here, however, consumers are portrayed in a more independent and powerful position. They do not hide behind a shield; they take an active role in dealing with the situation. The product in the hands of a user adds strength, power and reliability. This is a predominantly masculine theme. Even in communication of unisex products, when a human character appears in the context of the code it is usually a man.
This theme is frequently used by companieswho associate their products or services with provision of safety: insurance, banking, pharma, food (security from hunger and lack of energy), household cleaning, personal hygiene.
Signs: firm and solid shapes, convenient to hold in the hand; a fist; dark colors, non-transparent surfaces; seriousness.
Image 1.2.
• The Hero
Personification of a protecting figure. This appears in the three different forms: “Real man”, “Magic Helper” and “Strong Animal”.
“Real Man” – physically strong, big, usually serious. Patriarchal dream. He can be presented as a portrait of the consumer, or a man who protects the consumer. In the latter case, consumers are usually women, children, and more rarely other men (not as strong as the Hero).
“Magic Helper” – popular characters of superheroes (Spider Man, Super Man, Russian bogatyrs (knights)); animated characters, usually masculine; the product itself as a magic helper. The difference from “The Tool” is that in this code, the product acts itself. It is not a tool in a hand of a user, it is an independent character.
“Strong Animal” – lions, tigers, bears, horses and others. Brands are associated with the power, energy and aggression of these animals. The consumer is usually described as a handler. Sometimes animal energy is attributed to the consumer. Connotations of paganism.
Signs: powerful actions and actions above human abilities (flying, breaking walls); loud sounds, roaring; big muscles. The consumer is behind the hero, under protection of it. When the product is shown alone: camera angle down-up, light on the “hero”, central position in a shot, big size.
Image 1.3. 
• Calming Nature
Nature is a powerful resource for lowering anxiety. Green fields, blue sky and still water are well-known signs of calm. Calmness in its initial, clear form. These signs are widely used in marketing communication, especially in the food category, cosmetics and hygiene. The code connotes that the product protects consumers from threats associated with modern technologies (including chemical poisoning).
This code exists in the two main forms. The first is about the origin of a product: an ecologically clean region of Russia, a farm with eco-style production and so on. The second form speaks about one or more natural ingredients within a product.
Both versions are mainly used in branding for female audiences. Within this code, women are portrayed as tender, fragile and beautiful in a classic way.
Signs: green, beige, light-blues and other neutral clean colors; images of plants (flowers, herbs, berries, spices); little cute animals (sheeps, rabbits, birds); slow pace; static images. Text: “bio-…”, “eco-…”, “chemical-free”, “no additives / preservatives / GMO” and etc.
Image 2.1.
• Authority of Science
Although “Science” is not necessarily about protection, the associations with it are often used to communicate safety (“Rexona men – maximum defense”). Science provides safety from failure. It guarantees quality. The choice is supported by data and expert opinion. Scientific protection is advanced, precise and proved.
The code is mainly masculine, as it is based on the rational perception of the world (in the dominant cultural field in Russia rationalism is associated with masculinity – irrationalism and intuition with femininity).
One of the interpretations of the code is futurism – faith in a better, smarter future and new ways to provide security.
Signs: metal colors, smooth surfaces, formulas, figures and charts, micro-elements, scientists and experts, computers and robots, industrial images, futuristic factories and machines. Text: scientific terminology, abbreviations, names of chemical ingredients (Zn).
Image 2.2.
• Safety in Traditions
Safety sometimes lies in things proved by experience over several generations, well-known and habitual. Childhood memories, fairy tales, common food and recipes.
The popularity of symbols related to national traditions in culture and in branding has been growing in the recent years. The Russian Federation has a long history, although in its modern form, as a capitalist republic, the country is just about 30 years old. Russia is in search of its national identity.
There are several types of codes within this theme. Each of them idealizes a certain period of Russian history:
• Old Slavic traditions. Living in harmony with nature, brave souls, beautiful people
• Russia of the 19th Classic literature and music, aristocratic life-style
• Early USSR. Despite all the terrible events of the early decades, for many people it was a romantic period which provided several great stories in art – architecture, design, cinema, poetry
• Heroism of USSR in WW2. The nation that defeated fascism is strong and can protect itself in the future
• USSR of 1960s. First man in Space. Rock-n-roll. Retro style. “Thaw” in political system
• Late USSR. Good quality of some products, protected by government standards of production (GOSTs). Order and safety. Taste of childhood
• Present time. Russian soul. Local products.
Sometimes all these types are combined in the same communication campaign, showing the rich history of the country.
Signs: historical elements, documentary style, stylizations, national symbols (such as birch).
Image 2.3.
• Supportive Community
Protection may come from those who surround us. In the Russian collectivist culture, it is normal to expect support from family, friends and even from a stranger on the street (but citizens rarely expect help from the state and government).
The code is often used in marketing. Brands are trying to get the role of a friend or create an image of a supporting circle. For example, in the IKEA ad below, a group of strangers came to the NY party. The hosts invited them in friendship and did not show their surprise. Slogan: “Make yourself at home!”
Signs: holding hands, parties or family gatherings, domestic atmosphere (calm light, relaxed poses), friendly smiles and actions of help, support. Text: “always here”, “friends recommend”, “one of us”.
Image 3.1.
• Tender Care
This code is about soft and caring protection, which in Russian culture usually comes from women. Women feature in the majority of ads in pharma, food and household products categories. They are presented as experienced consumers, who know the available options and make the best choice for their families.
It is interesting that women are both the most frequent subjects of care and recipients of it. When brands communicate safety from anxiety through care, they usually show women as the consumer. In the second place – children and older people. Men are represented as recipients of care in the family environment, with children, at home. Very rarely are men shown receiving care in other circumstances.
Signs of caregiver: confident smiles, important, authoritative position in the shot, hugs and kisses. Signs of care receiver: relaxation, happy smile, images of enjoying (product, service). Serenity and calmness.
Image 3.2
• Informed Control All the previous codes contained the idea of controlled consumption and personal responsibility. However, there are branding concepts in which this idea becomes central. The code is rational and it is based on informing consumers about possible threats and giving instructions on how to avoid them (or life hacks).
The theme also concerns the accessibility of information. Constant access to mobile and internet connection is the necessary attribute of safety today. Knowing the sources of trusted information is the way to feel protected in a world when media are full of lies and propaganda. Consumer online forums, recommending services, independent check-ups of products (RosControl company).
Signs: instructions, rules, schemes, long texts, explanations, information about details.
Image 3.3
Conclusions
In the article we described the most visible dominant codes of Protection in Russian marketing communication. These are often used in combination with each other, providing a complex image of safe and reliable brand.
We can see that the prevailing safety and protection themes in Russia tend to be rather patriarchal. Protection usually comes from masculine characters, or products that have masculine elements (the codes “Barrier”, “Tool”, “Hero”, “Science”). However women too can be protective figures (through “Care” or “Nature”) but most of the codes portray women as the recipients of protection.
The source of protection can be in the future or in the past. References to the past are more often used in brand communication in Russia. It seems that Russian marketers perceive technologies and futuristic dreams as great, but as the future is uncertain, they choose the symbols of past achievements and local traditions.
The analysis shown that there are many possible ways for a brand to communicate the meaning of safety, both direct and connotative, and thus help reduce anxiety in Russian society.
Footnotes
[1] The revolution of 1905; World War I; the Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of USSR; Civil War, hunger of 20-s; Stalin’s repressions of 1930-s; World War II, during which USSR lost from 20 to 40 million citizens (by different estimates). Pavlov’s money reform of 1960-s, war in Afghanistan in 1980-s. Gorbachev’s Perestroika, leading to the breakdown of USSR in 1991. Economic collapse of the 1990-s.
[2] FOM, Omnibus survey. Sample: 207 cities and villages, 73 regions of Russia, 3000 respondents. http://bd.fom.ru/pdf/d05no2017.pdf
© Maria Papanthymou 2017
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Creme Eggs
Saturday, June 18th, 2016
Creme Eggs and the Subjectivity of Childishness
Winner of Semionaut New Writers Award 2016
Crème Egg wrappers dissolve luxury codes – the sparkle of foil, the personalisation of variable wrapping, the red and purple power colours – into luxury chocolate’s traditional liquidity paradigm. Crème Eggs are the only popular adults’ single-serving chocolate, available casually and as an individual product in a way that luxury boxed chocolates aren’t, and differing from bars because they can’t be shared, divided or saved for later. Through looking at Crème Eggs’ technique for making adults choose this single luxury serving of chocolate each year, we can find out about the liquidity paradigm’s modern applicability to the subjectivity of childhood, rather than that of female sexuality.
Nostalgia is culturally treacherous, due to its easy slipping point into twee and the difficulty of cross-generational appeal, but childishness in its free-flowing subjectivity is always appealing. Crème Egg’s erratically folded foil and the yellow ‘splat’ – looking, as it flows over the egg’s curves, more like a spill – invites adults to assume the vision of a child who doesn’t know it is an object. In millennial terms, this is a break from ‘adulting’, a verb which openly opposes the performance of adulthood to the real, subjective self of childhood.
Culturally, the freedom of childhood is closely linked to Easter feelings of renewal. The three-month period of Crème Egg availability, like the Lenten period, mimics the pregnancy preceding the springtime rebirth of the year: a dynamic acknowledged by both Christianity and the pagan religions whose springtime rebirth celebrations it assimilated. So it’s fitting that the Crème Egg prompts associations with childhood and interiority, linking it in British minds not just with childhood Easter celebrations and holiday, but with these older, more primal senses of the rebirth of the year.
Subjectivity
Women are often encouraged to dissolve their everyday selves into melting chocolate imagery, entering a Cixous-inspired world of liquid, sensual subjectivity. Taste is more subjective and so more private than sight or hearing, which can be reproduced and shared by machines such as cameras or sound recorders. The privacy of taste is the secondary connotation of the typical closing of a woman’s eyes as she tastes the chocolate (with the first connotation being, of course, orgasm).
This sensuality is coded as sexual, but even as the ad presents the woman to external gaze, it insists by focussing on taste that the chocolate is allowing subjectivity. The female sexuality in chocolate adverts, though displayed, isn’t purchasable by men as many brand portrayals of female sexuality are. Rather, its transcendence is so focussed on women’s subjective experience that any chocolate brand wishing to target men must explicitly and aggressively position itself as male: in the simplest form, Yorkie is declared ‘Not for girls!’
Crème Egg’s invitation to transcendence extends to both sexes, but otherwise follows the subjectivity model. Minimal packaging reiterates the egg shape, which acts as a pointer towards a single person’s mouth (it’s impossible to eat a Crème Egg broad end first). Easily cupped in the hand, this shape gives a sense of almost weaponised purpose, borrowing from bullets and grenades. The invitation to the subjective is deepened by the variability in packaging which comes from wrapping an asymmetric egg in a rectangle of foil: it’s possible to select your egg with mostly yellow, red, purple or logo showing, according to your preference. And the non-uniform folds make the eater shy away from the ritualised process of (for example) untwisting a Lindor twist, in favour of a personalised process according to the trajectory of the wrapper of the specific Crème Egg chosen. The wavering line of the wrapper signifies the messy, fluid boundary between egg and world, or egg and mouth.
Fluid identity and pre-digital childhood
Crème Eggs offer a childish space valorised by luxury codes, not a luxury space with childish accents. This order of associations is reinforced by the anchoring logo, whose position across the lower, broader curve of the egg pushes the modern, lower-case, printed crème egg logo out further than the more traditionally luxurious handwritten Cadbury’s logo. But Cadbury’s 19th century associations are nonetheless an important part of Crème Egg’s childishness offer.
The 21st century exchange of purple for blue quirked the childish primary triumvirate on the Crème Egg packaging. It also emphasised retro luxury. Cadbury has never reacted to the post-industrial-dye devaluation of purple, which is a bold, traditional luxury signifier (as is red, to a lesser extent). These colours are pre-postmodern and non-ironic, from a time before one-note elegance became desirable. This retro flamboyance also calls on a strong, particularly millennial, association of bold childishness with freedom from the single objective self.
In an act of cultural mimesis echoing recapitulation theory, the pre-digital self often represents the childish self – gloriously subjective and fluid. Steampunk is the clearest expression of this cultural association, but it’s also seen in the adoption of over-the-top hipster disguises (most obviously Victorian-style beards) among millennials.
For a certain generation which includes myself, the pre-digital world and childhood are literally the same era, but that isn’t the only reason why subjective freedom, pre-digital culture, and childhood are allied for us. Childish games of disguise and dissolution are the target of cultural hunger for a pre-internet world in the minds of people whose digital personas are fixed and tracked by everyone from school friends to advertisers. In Crème Egg packaging we see how childhood fluid subjectivity mingles with the hunger for pre-digital subjectivity, using bold colour codes which are at once retro and toddler-like.
The wrapper’s white line, dividing the 19th century red and purple, suggests the separations and enforced categorisations of everyday life. But Crème Egg eaters aren’t encouraged to think about the quirkiness or ‘wackiness’ lying in this liminal line, as they are in many products promoting childishness in adults. Rather, the liquid freedom of childhood obliterates categories and liminality at the same time (as the yellow splat and logo override the white line on the egg wrapper), inviting the eater to ride roughshod over the entirety of the objective world. This letting-go, coded as childish by other signifiers, makes the Crème Egg a space of release – pre-digital, pre-adult, and fluid – for all.
© Colette Sensier 2016
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Sound & Music Semiotics
Monday, July 6th, 2015
I am embarking on a large project on the semiotics of sound and music. I have been commissioned by the Radio Advertising Bureau in a project ran by Push Research to create an audio mood board of brand words. As I do so, something has occurred to me about the way music and sound is packaged. Sampling culture in electronic music has enabled packets of affective scripting to be condensed into breaks – this is arguably why hip-hop production has had such an influence, because the crunching beats, moody baselines and scathing guitar riffs are salient but they are also deftly combined with richly daubed musical leitmotifs often conveying exultant triumphalism or a sort of hectoring anguish.
“Maximalism” is vague and capacious enough to contain a whole bunch of ideas and associations. In terms of design, it is the opposite of minimalism and the famous Bauhaus Manifesto that pronounced ornamentation a crime and that exalted pared back parsimony. Maximalism in interior design is associated with unusual juxtapositions, opulent shapes, and a greater association with the baroque than with the classical. The irony now of course is that musically we live in a time of both minimalism and maximalism. Philip Glass and his ilk having had a huge influence on ambient music and on advertising too. But what is maximalism? A good example would be the TRON Legacy soundtrack composed by Daft Punk composed in 2009 which combines a full orchestra with synth and drone samples for a hybrid classical trance house soundscape.
Is the definition given by this reviewer in Pitchfork magazine: “the general slant of these verdicts is that there are a hell of a lot of inputs here, in terms of influences and sources, and a hell of a lot of outputs, in terms of density, scale, structural convolution, and sheer majesty.” For me, the exemplars would include artists such as Rustie and Hudson Mohawke and potentially artists such as Black Moth Rainbow and Genghis Tron in its more thrash metal iterations. In classical or romantic music you would associate it with Mahler and Beethoven, lush, bombastic, majestic symphonies. And perhaps even a Richard Strauss.
Synths and the potential for layering music in production means that lushness of music can be continually added to, like thickening the fibrousness of palms in a jungle by continually adding new threads to the fibre. Music production software packages like Logic allows us to create a new track at whim.
In hip-hop too, much production favours the use of heavy strings, synths and a wall of sound, designed to heighten the tension, sense of alienation or odds. Certainly when we compare it to the stripped down beats of the mid 1980s.
This surfeit of semiotic resources, may not be a bad thing; not an accursed share but I do think it’s popularity and catchiness to the ear does owe something to the notion of Supernormal Stimuli. This is the theory stemming from the work of ethnologist Tingerben as developed by cognitive scientists.
Maximalism is the musical equivalent of a sherbet fountain, a mouthful of Cheesy Wotsits (that’s a rather arcane UK reference) or a vast arcade of instantly viewable porn MPGs or a chromophiliac colour monkey on LSD.
Maximalism has also been called Purple to describe just these synaesthesic qualities of the music – the music is so luscious you can almost cuddle it.
Physiologically, we are easily habituated to get accustomed to a threshold of stimulation and pleasure and the threshold can be permanently recalibrated by continued over stimulation our pleasure centres can be easily overwhelmed and this is arguably what much music does. Our dopamine, serotonin and opioids.
What culturally does it mean? Is this just about the human predilection for both possibility and excess in music production (simply because we CAN do it, we SHOULD), is it just a function of the UK’s fecund underground urban music scene, or is it somehow connected to a deeper chord of ideological note? Well, Slavoj Zizek indicated in Living in the End Times the notion of neo-liberalist capitalism built on eradicating the superego. So totalitarian injunctions against transgression have been replaced by a tyranny of permissiveness, the injunction to enjoy, consume, acquire become normative. To be hedonistic with a hedge fund spunking money created in a casino and to blow it on cocaine, crystal meth or prostitutes; go on a spree, a binge, a bender is encouraged. Frugality in consumption and to renounce is to be a pariah or at least enemy of consumerist capitalism. Isn’t Maximalism in music then an anthem for a mythical ideology? In prodigal times celebrated by those who have and craved by those who don’t.
For me the apotheosis of maximalism is Hudson Mohawke’s Fuse. Listen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkWmB9NIg4U
For more on Maximalism and Purple music see:
http://www.dummymag.com/features/the-dummy-guide-to-purple
© Chris Arning 2015
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Linguistic localization of cross cultural foods
Sunday, November 2nd, 2014
In an October 10th BBC article about the artist Alex Chinneck, the writer refers to an art piece as being located in a “London Piazza”. The sentence gave me some pause, largely because I agree with the sentiment of the American author Alfred Bester when he said “for me, there are no synonyms”. What was it about the place mentioned in the BBC article that makes it a piazza, and not a square? In turn, how would one differentiate a square from a plaza? That word was so long ago reappropriated into the English language that it appears all but divorced from its original Spanish roots..
But this isn’t mere nit-picking of writers and their euphemistic language. Over the past decade or so the United States has inserted two other words into its collective lexicon; Paninis and Gelato. Here there is room for even larger reflection; for these two words do have rough equivalents (or perhaps we can simply say synonyms) in the English language. Namely, Gelato had for many years prior been called Ice Cream, while Panini had for likely as long been called sandwiches. But ask anyone on the street and they will passionately proselytize that the one thing is not like the other. Gelato, people will claim, is as separate a product from Ice Cream as Paninis are from sandwiches, and thus a distinction is necessary. The inverse does not always occur. Italian tourists visiting the US, speaking among themselves in Italian, would feel no need to code-switch into English if they stopped off for some ice cream. For them, the product they purchased in the US is merely a regional variant of what they know from back in Italy, and no real distinction needs to be made. And this begs the questions of where such distinctions, if necessary at all, come from.
One of these things is not like the others: tramezzini (top), porchetta panini (middle), American Panini (bottom).
The biggest problem with this seems to be from confusing a very generic term for a very specific one. In Italian the noun gelato takes its name from the adjective for frozen, from the past participle of the verb gelare, and refers to any variety or the snack anglophones would call ice cream. To say, as certain proselytizers in other parts of the world might, that to be considered gelato the product must stand to the rigor of being organic, or made with whole milk, or churned at a certain speed or at certain temperatures, is in a respect denying the monumental variation of the product you find in Italy itself.
Most products do not going under the incredible rigor of control that pharmaceuticals suffer from, where if something is to be called Aspirin it must have certain properties in certain quantities, or you will not be allowed to market it as such. Instead, as with any other product going under any other generic label, you find a massive variety from seller to seller. Were one to go from place to place in Italy, stopping for gelato at every occasion (recalling that the term not only refers to the gelato of the gelaterie, but as well the prepackaged ones sold in bars and super-markets ), one could create a periodic table of sorts from the varieties encountered; some places would sell creamier products while others might sell a more watery product (which works better for certain fruit flavors). Some would strive for the use of fresh ingredients while other would use chemical flavorings (the often taught trick is to look at the color of banana ice cream – bright yellow if made artificially and dull grey if made fresh), and some would experiment with flavors and combinations while others would rest with the tried and true.
On completion of this trail of type two diabetes, one would come to see just how far this umbrella term can stretch. But a last point to consider with the ice cream/gelato distinction is that this said same distinction exists in other places as well. A walk down the frozen aisle of a US supermarket will yield a cornucopia of products, no two exactly alike. A look to the packaging alone will illustrate many of the same distinctions mentioned previously; here one makes mention of being creamier than the cousin it shares a shelf with, there another makes mention of how this one is slow-churned, elsewhere the product made from fair trade and organic cocoa beans stands proudly along with its exorbitant price tag.
Gelato then, is something of a paradox. While the name seems not to refer to anything that needs to be differentiated from ice cream, applying the label is not in any way false, it is simply replacing one vague signifier for another. Certainly, the makers and marketers of gelato all over the US do much to add certain signifiers of Italianness, and many of the already ingrained preconceived notions of what ‘gelato is’, to the product – but as far as claims of legitimacy are concerned they could just as well not.
The term Panini[i] is the plural of the Italian word panino, being itself the diminutive form of the word pane, meaning bread. Even in Italy the terms panino and panini have come to mean refer to sandwich and sandwiches, though both the Italian words have retained their residual meaning of ‘small bread’. And just as we found with Ice Cream/Gelato, both sandwich and panino are rather vast umbrella terms. The hiccup comes when considering the new word Panini, which does not function as an umbrella term in the English language but refers specifically to a determined variety of sandwich heated with a sandwich press, and filled with certain meat (usually salami, ham and mortadella) as well as cheese and vegetables. This distinction is of course non-existent with the Italian counterpart; panini may be heated or not, pressed or not, and can in fact be plain pieces of small bread.
There is then a distinction between the ice cream/gelato case and the sandwich/panino/Panini case; and that is that the Panini is more rigidly defined. The confusion here can be immense, though with the right mindset playful; a Rueben, a Cuban, a burger and a BLT are all sandwiches by American classification, panini by Italian classifications, but not ever Panini (and no one has any idea where a hotdog would fit into any of this). Not everything that would be called a panino in Italy would be called a Panini in the United States, though everything called a Panini in the United States would be called a panino in Italy.
Gelato, as sold in the US, as well as Panini, exists mostly as marketing terms. An ambitious and industrious individual, nostalgically fuelled by positive experience overseas, attempted to recreate what he considered to be the superior products he experienced there. But to survive in an already competitive market of sandwiches and ice cream, a powerful distinction had to be made. If one considers just how many places now sell gelato and Panini, it becomes clear just how successful this campaign has been.
[i] The appropriation of the term Panino into the English language has unfortunately created a lexical confusion that makes it difficult to discuss without a certain uncluttering of terms first. The Italian terms are panino (singular diminutive of bread) and panini (plural diminutive of bread), while the English terms are Panini (singular) and paninis (plural). For the purposes of distinguishing the plural Italian term from the singular English, in the above paragraph the English term is always capitalized.
© Matthew Campanella 2014
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Three Levels of Seeing
Tuesday, March 25th, 2014
‘TRINARY VISION’ & EVERYDAY BUSINESS ETHICS AMONG INDIAN RETAILERS
I recently had occasion to interact closely with a number of wholesalers and retailers in textiles, a very old and established trade with business relationships going back three generations between textile mills and retailers. I then used a semiotic perspective to analyse some of the discussions that had taken place with them on the phenomenon of knowingly selling fakes from their stores to their customers.
I started by looking into the context of everyday business operations in India. While there are laws, rules and regulations, actual business practice and everyday business ethics are more governed by social regulation. By social regulation, I refer to the voice of social and community authority, viz, elders and the collective consensus on an issue as to its ethical rightness or virtue. Social regulation works through evoking three kinds of fears – divine retribution when the Gods are displeased, offending and hurting elders and thus inviting their wrath/ punishment and finally, offending the community, resulting in expulsion and exile.
Working every day within the context of social regulation, every businessman sees three levels of behaviors and practices in any given moment as being available to him. These may alternatively be seen as three paths on which he can walk. At the top one path is the path of virtue – virtue is also strongly linked to ideas of purity of intent/motive and non-self interested action taken vis-à-vis the other party involved in the deal. While this is the zone typically assigned to saints and mystics, even business people are capable of acting at this level. Those who do so command a huge level of spiritual power and moral authority over their fellow business-people. For the sake of alliterative labeling, we can call this the zone or path of purity.
At the next level or second path is the zone/path of pragmatism and permission. This route evolves through a collective consensus among the members of the local community and it refers to the extent of permissible deviation from the path of virtue. In the case of fakes, it could be the extent of stock that retailers would carry of fabrics with a fake ‘Made in Italy’ label that are actually manufactured in China or elsewhere. When they sell this stock, they knowingly mislead the customer that they are selling them fabric that they present as being genuinely made in Italy, when it is not. Or it could be to do with the extent of dilution of a quality standard in manufacture. As long as they stay within the ‘permissible’ range as understood through collective consensus, they have safety in numbers and they know their fellow business people will not lose respect for them. Also, they are not compromising their longer term agenda or reputation as good people to do business with – either among customers or among the business community.
At the bottom the third path is the zone of villainy. Acting from this zone or walking on this path will surely invite curses (gaalis in colloquial Hindi) and calumny from fellow business people. Actions in this zone would include resorting to out and out cheating, violence, threats, treachery, blackmail, reneging on agreements (not necessarily the contract in its legal details) as well as reneging on financial dues and settlements. When a business man acts from this zone, he has either compromised his ethics beyond repair or is risking doing so.
Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik in his book, “Business Sutra – a Very Indian Approach to Management” also makes reference to this simultaneous seeing of three levels of action choices. He describes the three levels as Bhagawan, Deva and Asura. Asura (which loosely translates as a demon) signifies actions that arise from the zone of villainy. Deva (which loosely translates as a B-level God) indicates actions arise from the zone of awareness. Bhagawan (which loosely translates as a truly Divine being) signifies actions that arise from the zone of a higher spiritual being. Bhagawan actions are those that are worthy of emulation and worship.
The Indian Eye often sees presence and absence in objects, entities and phenomena not just in terms of dualities or binaries but as ‘trinaries’. They could be three columns (parallel vertical paths to walk on) or three levels (parallel horizontal paths to climb up from level to level). The eye spots the co-existence of A, B and C as three distinct possibilities in the same realm. So, in the realm of ethics, there is the co-existence of God-like, Human and Demonic behaviors. In other cases, the hybrid of A & B is seen as a distinct path in itself. For example people may be solo Christians, solo Hindus and hybrids – also worship in Churches while following a specific Hindu God or a Sufi Saint. They can be strict vegetarians, strict non-vegetarians and hybrids – vegetarians at home while being meat-eating outside the home. There are combinations that are valued as a valid third element e.g. sweet-sour, bitter-sweet. There is a valid space for ambiguity, the grey zone, the ‘third-way’, the ‘nuances and shades’. The eye sees all three as valid vs. seeing the third as a negotiated compromise or a dialectic synthesis of hard oppositions, viz operating from a binary vision?
Does this simultaneous ‘trinary’ vision call for the development of additional tools of semiotic analysis specifically applicable to some forms of categorization in Indian culture? Looking beyond Indian culture to global culture, the growth of the internet, social media, gaming and digital interfaces are blurring the lines between real and virtual and creating a third zone that exists simultaneously. The development of robotics and artificial intelligence is doing something similar to the human and machine binary. Has the time then come for a new semiotics of the ‘trinary’?
© Hamsini Shivakumar 2014
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Word Pairs
Saturday, March 1st, 2014
WORD PAIRS – CONCEPTS OF CONNECTION VS. CONCEPTS OF DIFFERENCE
Effective cross-cultural semiotic analysis ought to reflect the diversity of cultures. It is now accepted even among psychologists that there is no universal and standardized human psychology, rather individual and group psychology is itself hugely influenced by culture. The American psycho-analyst Alan Roland wrote about his experiences and theorized a different model of the self for his Indian and Japanese patients vis-à-vis his American patients. Richard Nisbett in his book, the Geography of Thought provides ‘research study-based’ evidence of the differences in perception between Americans and Chinese. And Devdutt Pattanaik, Indian mythologist draws attention to the differences between the core belief systems underpinning Western, Chinese and Indian thought.
How might this perspective be applied to developing new semiotic tools for India/other Asian cultures?
One of the key principles of the semiotic analysis of meaning is the idea of difference and how that difference is dealt with, to create meaning. The distinctions of ‘is” vs. “is not” and “oppositions and contradictions” is a key part of the way semioticians analyze concepts and ideas to arrive at territories of meaning.
However, there is another way to look at binaries and that is through the lens of presence-absence for a sense of completion of meaning. The central idea here is of “completion” that goes with pairs of inter-twined entities. One cannot exist without the other. Both must be viewed together for the meaning to result. The separation of one from the other, distorts the meaning. To understand the essence, they must be viewed and understood in the pair, so deeply are the concepts inter-woven and inter-twined. The underlying cultural code here is not that of individuality or autonomy but of essential dependence and co-existence. It arises from a relational definition of society and culture vs. a transactional and contractual definition of society and culture. Separation would create a feeling of tremendous loss and desolation, not a celebration of individuality.
For e.g. in Hindi, there is a central idea of a “Jodi” or pair. Jodis would be concepts such as husband-wife, father-mother, brother-sister, hero-villain, sidekick-hero, master-servant, politician-media (recent), food-drink (khana-peena), hardware-software etc. The central premise can be extended to a range of entities. Is a city possible without citizens? Can a movie Star be a Star without a multitude of fans? Hindi pairs: pati-patni, mata-pita, bhai-behen, raja-praja, guru-shishya.
Applying this thinking to defining category meanings would imply that even though the product categories that are bought and sold are objects, they should be viewed and understood by combining them inextricably with the users who have the closest relationship with the object. To illustrate, cars are not cars without drivers (though new driverless high-tech cars are on the design table) and medicines are meaningless without doctors/healers/medicine men. A semiotic study on the category meaning of cancer treatments would start by looking at cancer drugs and oncologists together or at doctor-cancer sufferer as the single and complete entity rather than separating the patient, the cancer, the doctor and the medicine into separate entities that are placed in varying individual positions with respect to one another.
Could the consideration of inter-twined pairs be a new tool added to the semiotic tool box for Indian and Asian markets?
© Hamsini Shivakumar 2014
Posted in Asia, Categories, Consumer Culture, Culture, Fuzzy Sets, Global Vectors, Global/Local, Making Sense, Semiotics | No Comments »
Short List – Troy
Monday, February 17th, 2014
Editor’s note: In the version of this article originally submitted the two campaigns analysed were identified as being for the same environmental organisation, which was using the contrasting paradigms identified here. A request for permission to reproduce illustrations from the campaigns was declined by that organisation on the basis that these were off-brand and/or ghost campaigns. Another organisation now owns the copyright of one of the campaigns mentioned, which we reproduce here with permission. This updated version of the article replaces the specific organisation named in the original with the generic ‘environmental and wildlife organisations’. Our links, at the time of publication, still give access to the images on which the detailed analysis is based. The two paradigms identified are, of course, valid in spite of these editorial change which inevitably brings about some loss of precision. These paradigms are coincidentally also the focus of debate among academic biosemioticians currently. The Semionaut Award judging panel will base their final decision on the merits of all the short listed papers and will take the original fully illustrated version as their reference point for this one.
ENVIRONMENTAL ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS, HUMAN HUBRIS AND GLOBAL ETHICS
Humankind is currently confronted by global warming and mass species extinction, both of which are arguably exacerbated, if not directly caused, by human action. While humans may be the cause, all species, including humans, are at risk, and, in this way, all species are equal. Yet the way that environmental and wildlife organisations represent this issue in their various campaigns does not always suggest this is so. In some campaigns, the victim is a nonhuman species, while in others the victim is human. At the same time, the campaigns juxtapose the natural against the artificial or technological. Analysis of the semiotics employed by environmental organisations in their various advertising campaigns reveals there are two dualisms at work, namely human/nonhuman and natural/technological. These dualisms can operate to see humankind as the culprit of global warming and species extinction, such that they maintain human hubris as beyond nature. Alternatively, the dualisms can position humans as victims, knocking us off the branches of our evolutionary tree to bring us back down to earth.
Humankind as beyond nature
Several advertising campaigns represent humankind as both the cause and means of prevention of species extinction. Such campaigns include “Help protect the future of endangered species” and “Before it’s too late” . These two campaigns allude to an imagined future in which natural animals have been replaced by artificial simulacra – cyborgs in one, origami in the other. While these campaigns suggest that technological replacements are inferior to the natural or real thing, these campaigns reaffirm the natural/technological dualism. Another campaign, “Our life at the cost of theirs?”, makes explicit this alignment of human and technology. Human interests are diametrically opposed to the wellbeing of nonhuman species, and the provocative campaign title is supported by artwork of metropolises that have the shape of animals.
In such advertising campaigns, it seems that technology and nature cannot exist in symbiosis and humankind’s alignment with the technological works to sever us from the natural world. Not only this, but the consequences of global warming and species extinction are kept at our arm’s length – it is not we who are at risk of extinction, but them. Thus, such campaigns also reaffirm the human/nonhuman dualism. In doing so, both the natural and nonhuman are represented as passive victims of humans and technology, and the call for action in these campaigns in dependent on seeing the nonhuman as objects to be valued, thus maintaining human hubris as above and beyond nature.
Humankind as part of nature
A second group of campaigns represent humankind as being part of nature and, thus, at risk from global warming and species extinction. One such campaign is “Preserve your world. Preserve yourself” which uses optical illusions to give a human face to forest scenes. While this face could be read as belonging to Mother Nature, the campaign slogan encourages the viewer to consider themselves, and thus humankind, within the natural setting. Another campaign, “Their extinction is ours as well,” further embeds humankind within nature. For this series of advertisements, naked humans pose in animal-like stances within a jungle setting. Yet a third campaign, “Stop climate change before it changes you” blends the human and the animal; the subject of the advertisement is a man whose head has morphed into that of a fish . Such campaigns challenge the human/animal dualism and reaffirm humankind’s animality and dependence on the natural world. Because of this, humans are positioned as the subject and belonging to nature. We are thus victims of global warming and at risk of extinction ourselves.
Unlike those campaigns that set humans apart from nature, these campaigns that embed humankind within nature move towards a more inclusive global ethics. While arguably the call for action appeals to humankind’s self-preservation, that these campaigns challenge the human/nonhuman dualism invites the viewer to reconsider humankind’s animality and our place within nature. Such campaigns encourage us to view nonhuman species as our kin, not objects of our affection that we should preserve for our own pleasure.
© Troy Potter 2014
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Short List – Taras
Sunday, February 16th, 2014
Every day millions of people all around the world use railway transport. For many passengers taking a train is an everyday routine, since some simply commute day to day to/from work, others must travel as a part of their job etc. However at the same time for many of us taking a train is perhaps not such an ordinary experience. Imagine a student on a train finally returning home after a semester of study abroad, or maybe grandparents paying a visit to their (grand)children in a far away megalopolis, or just a tourist who had to save money for a number of years in order to travel around Europe with hop-on hop-off rail pass. For all of them taking a train becomes THE travel experience – in some sense unusual & promising, for some perhaps even a bit nostalgic.
On the other side of the fence – in the world of rail companies – it is all about constant, sometimes even aggressive, competition for passengers. And such state of affairs is not surprising, because the rail operator success formula is relatively easy (and obviously not very unique) – bigger passenger flow brings higher profits. That is the reason why each and every rail company tries to search for the best ways and channels to communicate with their potential passengers, to persuade you and me to use their services.
Language and Codes of Argumentation
If only a few decades ago railways had more or less monopolistic position in a niche of passenger logistics, nowadays they have to fight with aviation (especially low-cost airlines), bus companies and private auto transport which all, just like mushrooms after the rain, became widely spread over recent decades. As result the first line of combat is about the fight between trains and other modes of transportation. In this battlefield rail companies usually fight together, on a sort of joint front, while sharing a common discourse. Their language of argumentation gets constantly perfected and as of nowadays usually includes:
a) An argument of eco-friendliness. Trains being presented as more energy-efficient (per passenger) and polluting far less compared to airplanes and cars. The slogan “go green – take a train” (or such like) can be found in the arsenal of almost all rail companies. Probably one of the best examples here is the EuroStar Group (running high-speed trains from London to Paris & Brussels), among the first heavily relying on environmental efficiency topics.
b) City-to-city easy access with no hassle. Historically train stations tend to be located in city centers, thus taking a train promises passenger departure and arrival to the city center, no need to travel to the distant airport, spend time for check-in, security checks and other air travel related nuisances. The overall practicality of choosing rail transport is widely stressed.
c) The promise of comfort. Traditionally train seats (and especially berths) tend to be more spacious and comfortable compared to bus or airplane seating. Train passengers also can always easily stroll around the carriage, stretch, visit the dining car etc.
d) Beyond just transportation. Rail companies tend to advertise scenic views from the train window as something totally different than clouds seen through plane windows or highways with cars passing by. Train passengers are often promised to expect spectacular scenery. Probably the most successful examples of such branding of train trip can be seen from Swiss private railways running touristic trains (Glacier Express, Bernina Express and the like). Rail journeys just for the sake of enjoying picturesque natural beauty.
e) Old-fashioned charm. The globalized world is usually about speed and air travel, so rail operators came up with a sort of contrasting idea to sell – the train journey portrayed as something refreshingly traditional. The passenger is offered not just a ticket from destination A to destination B, but the experience of the journey. An experience like a trip taken from a movie script of the old film or a diary of someone who travelled on the late 19th century Orient Express.
Branding Unique Experience
The general argumentation behind taking a train is obviously only a tip of an iceberg, basically a shared visible ‘flag’. While at the end it inevitably comes to promoting only your company or your train, and here examples and possibilities are definitely much more diverse.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/trenoitalo/6652720499/sizes/m/in/photostream/
For instance just last year Italy witnessed an arrival to the domestic market of the new private rail company Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori (NTV). One of the main shareholders in the company was well-known Luca di Montezemolo (Chairman of the Ferrari Company). NTV’s initial project was to introduce totally novel high-speed train service (brand ITALO) between major Italian cities and, obviously owing to the persona of di Montezemolo, the new trains received the nickname ‘Ferrari of the Railyards’. Keywords like ‘Ferrari train’ appeared in the reports of all the major media (CNN, Spiegel, The Guardian, Forbes etc.) describing the new rail service. Italo trains were almost instantly praised for the level of comfort and service never seen in Italy before. As result nowadays even ordinary passengers, and especially visitors from abroad, would refer to the NTV rail service as being associated with the Ferrari brand. And definitely in this case the reference to Ferrari is rather symbolic and brings along quite obvious connotations and meanings favorable for the company exploiting such branding. However the funniest thing in this story is that NTV-Italo trains actually have almost nothing to do with Ferrari (maybe besides the choice of color and the persona of di Montezemolo). They were produced by French transport corporation Alstom. But does it really matter if NTV managers can maintain the Ferrari connotations?
http://periskop.livejournal.com/464165.html
Another case concerns a train from the other side of the European continent – USSR/Russia. Probably almost everybody who lived or traveled by rail in USSR/Russia will know about the famous Red Arrow train from Moscow to Leningrad/St.Petersburg. It is a case where one particular train became a brand and an easily recognizable symbol. For a start, all the carriages of the train historically were painted in a unique dark-red livery, plus every carriage has the name of the train written on the side, so that anybody who sees this train even from a distance will be able to recognize it (a sort of Jakobson’s visual sign denoting a particular train). Secondly, the Red Arrow train has a rather symbolic train number – 001/002, in a way symbolizing importance (i.e. being the first) of rail connections between two Russian capitals. Thirdly, during the departure of the train a special song is played throughout the station, so it is not just about livery, color or number, but also about auditory signification – letting everybody know that it’s time for the departure of train #1.
There are dozens of examples from all over the world illustrating rail companies’ deliberate branding of some of their products (like a particular train or high-speed service), branding which in a way creates a recognizable symbol, a sort of assurance of the very special travel experience a passenger will get the minute he or she boards the train. So next time you plan to travel by train make sure you pay attention not just to your ticket and departure time, but to a ‘story behind your train.
© Taras Boyko
Posted in Categories, Consumer Culture, Culture, Europe, Making Sense, Semiotics, Technology | No Comments »
Short List – Matthew
Saturday, February 15th, 2014
PLACES, COGNITION AND ADVERTS
If advertising were a singularly effective form of communication, opinions about products and services would be homogenous across the audiences that viewed the advert. This does not seem to be the case; likely because there are forces (in the form of opinions) working outside/against those very adverts. Advertising must constantly work to combat these outside forces in order to homogenize the opinions of the audiences it works on. The place where we can vividly see this at work is in tourism advertising. This is because it is in consideration of places that people, for better or worse, tend to have and hold a largely monotone opinion – a sort of synthesis of various opinions and stereotypes that one collects when exposed to information of that place.
Very often advertisers of place must combat this barrage of negative opinions. We can imagine that in light of the recent knot of political circumstances the country has been in, it would be very hard for any marketer of place to create an effective campaign for Afghanistan, despite the fact that (surely!) the country must have a certain degree of natural beauty and charm to it. Such a person would have to create an advertising campaign that in some respect could combat all the negative associations of that place; near ten years of war, a link to terrorism, a key component of the opium trade, internal strife, and very oppressive members of their society. This extreme example very clearly illustrates the problem in marketing place, but what about a potential solution?
Italy has not in the recent years held the countries that formed Yugoslavia in highest regards. It might be that the proximity allowed Italians to witness the worst of the eastern bloc without being in it, or it might be that the very same proximity brought many Yugoslavian immigrants to Italian shores. How this came about is not terribly relevant; what is to the point is that Italians still associate some of the countries with that rather bleak period of their history. It is sad to say, but to a certain extent the rather vivid memory of Tito and ethnic tension still lingers in the memory of many Italians. Such opinions disregard how very much those countries have changed since 1991. It is the responsibility of these countries and more specifically of the marketers of place responsible for the tourism therein, to attempt to change the opinions therein.
Carnival at Rijeka, Croatia, spectators included
Let us for a moment consider just a few opening shots of a video that, although not geared specifically towards Italians, is still used to promote Croatia to an Italian audience. The video is in fact a part of Croatia’s official Italian language tourism page. The video begins in a rather straightforward manner; a few opening shots of the sea by which many tourists will arrive; the very same sea, we are shown through the images of people in seemingly traditional dresses working on boats, that seems important to a Croatian identity. It is interesting to note the presence of a white and black stripped shirt; an object often associated with Venetian gondoliers. We are soon shown the eagle’s eye view of the city, and from their we know we have arrived. The next shot show a gate, presumably a city gate, opening to release a group of tourists. It is at this scene where the video becomes rather interesting, for it continues to follow this group of tourists around as they explore Croatia. This is a splitting from a normal stylistic point of tourism advertising. Normally in tourism adverts tourists are expunged completely; in that people consider tour groups to be a nuisance in real life, in most brochures and commercials they are either removed or kept to a minimum as not to detract attention from the monuments which are meant to be exhibited. In fact, much of the rest of this commercial has the figures of tourists expunged in a similar manner. As an occasional alternative, certain tourism commercial will prominently feature one tourist from whom the viewer can, for those few seconds, live a brief vicarious vacation meant to form an appetite for that place. This, however, is different; the next few shots are littered with dozens of tourists engaging in what are very obviously tourist activities. For the most part, they herd around in groups and take pictures of monuments. So if the conventional wisdom argues that the opposite should be done, why has Croatia chosen to do this?
The answer would appear to be to convince the viewer that Croatia is indeed a place where a multitude of tourists visit. Showing the city devoid of people would perhaps showcase the beauty of the city and its monuments in a certain light, but it would as well make it seem abandoned and thus somewhat eerie. This of course would not be a very good marketing point. Doing it instead in this manner showcases the liveliness – and at the same time showcases the safety – of tourism in Croatia. When a person cognizes a place it is difficult for them to do such in any form that resembles a totality. Places, complex as they are, do not sum up easily; thus a person is obliged to think through the catalogue of opinions she or he may have of a place. For this reason, it becomes rather beneficial for the marketers of place to constantly insert new and fresh opinions into a cultural understanding. This both widens the catalogue of impressions a person may have of a place while perhaps diluting away the negative understandings that have been unfortunately maintained throughout the years. What the advertisers of Croatia have done in the commercial done is beneficial; in a country that still tends to bear the burden of an unpleasant recently history, such a demonstration seems absolutely necessary. The effort is certainly laudable.
© Matthew Campanella
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Beauty Serums
Saturday, July 6th, 2013
Serums have become the new elixir of beauty. Almost every brand has a serum product and they seem to be the staple of many a beauty regime. The semiotics of serums reveals a very skilful blend of semantic, packaging and product formulation codes. Serums tend to retail for over £30 for a tiny bottle, so how do the manufacturers justify the high price point? I would argue that it is a combination of factors.
First the semantics of the word serum itself is replete with positive connotations. It is a word that sounds smooth, it is onomatopoeic in the way that vindicates Jacobson’s critique of Saussure’s contention that all language is arbitrary. The sibilant ‘se’ leads into the cossetting cosiness of the ‘rum’, sumptuous to pronounce and to countenance.
Secondly, serums play upon the two sides to the beauty industry. On the one hand there is the perpetuation, and petrification of good looks. On the other side there is the fight against the onslaught of attrition, derma-abrasion and of course anno domini too.
So the positioning of the serum is essentially Janus faced. It promises to immortalize your beauty via the alchemy of the mythical elixir on the one hand. The clues are in the brand names of Elixir, Immortelle, Forever Young and Ageless. The truth of this proposition is reinforced by the idea of a truth serum, something that forces us to be sincere and the connotative links between beauty and truth traced back to Platonism and notions of Platonic forms – serums, it is insinuated help you access this deep ontology of truth.
On the other hand, serums are also a form of vaccine, or an anti-serum used for inoculation. In the case of serums on the market they are inoculating against the disease of decay and entropy. These underlying discourses are reinforced by the packaging codes in the sector. Serum packs tend to emphasize the preciousness and daintiness of the products as beauty unguents but also stress the concentrated nature of the contents, as if nutritional value had been crammed in with geological force. Serums are the royal jelly or caviar of the beauty world and packaging cues this in spades.
Analysis of serums packaging is as indebted to design thinking as to semiotic thinking. Serum packs draw upon such tricks as symmetry, golden ratio, contour bias and emotional design in order to attract customers and to buttress the high price point. There is also a subliminal link between miniaturization and premium technological efficiency that is coded through designs. As research pioneer Louis Cheskin discovered, customers tend to transfer the forms and meanings they encounter in packs to expectations of the contents. This is more important as ever more time poor consumers ruthlessly scan shelves for brands that catch their attention.
There is much to admire in serum packaging Just in terms of outward sculptural form serum product packs brands inflect category codes in a plethora of ways, some borrow from the perfume, food or technology categories or mimic objets d’arts. If you are a ‘pack rat’ (as they say in the US) or just fetishize packaging, then you’ll want to feast your eyes on some of these examples above. These packs are not prototypical of the category norm but I think do represent the variety and the imagination placed within this category. They are also a good showcase of why the siren call of beauty serums has been answered to such lucrative effect.©
Chris Arning 2013
Posted in Art & Design, Categories, Consumer Culture, Europe, Making Sense, Socioeconomics | No Comments »
Waffle
Friday, June 7th, 2013
Posted in Categories, Clients & Brands, Culture, Europe, Global/Local, Making Sense | No Comments »
Vodka’s Enfant Terrible
Saturday, April 13th, 2013
A new interpretation
For a long time, Absolut Vodka dominated the vodka category. Eventually Grey Goose found a gap for innovation. Analysis of the vodka category enables definition of the following Residual, Dominant, and Emergent visual codes:
To keep this analysis concise only the leader of each category is shown below:
Originally, the vodka category drew on Russian and East European dynastic aesthetics and cultural cues to convey tradition and massivity/bulkiness (the Residual codes of vodka). There was then a period where Absolut focused on purity, which was symbolically prominent (the Dominant code). Grey Goose signalled a rupture by opening up the vodka category to a characterful interpretation (the Emergent code).
Tradition versus Character
Sobiesky (Residual) and Absolut (Dominant) packaging can be organised according to their signs into two main poles. On one side is the pole of tradition, which claims vodka as a national treasure, and on the other side is the pole of purity, which stresses vodka freshness and transparency.
Whilst textual codes, the Slavic writing on the Sobiesky bottle and the long text of Absolut, characterise the traditional category, Grey Goose subverted this by using image-based signification: a vivid interpretation of Frenchness communicated through the Tricolor colour coding and a drawn illustration of flying geese above a moving sea (the grey geese of foie gras and the nationally typical coastal/ maritime associations).
As such, the move from emphasis on textual to more arresting visual codes enables Grey Goose to keep the codes of purity – the use of the blue, the fresh air of the sea – whilst freeing it from the traditional cultural cues in order to create a characterful interpretation. Relieved from vodka’s historic heritage, the bottle shape moves from the established sense of the massive and substantial to a more refined wine bottle shape.
Purity versus Craftsmanship
Purity is a current cliché of the vodka category and the key feature of Absolut’s brand differentiation. Yet Absolut’s purity is of a particular type, an intrinsic one. The bottle’s connotations of chemistry symbolize the concentration of an extremely sanitary liquid. In contrasting with this intrinsic purity, Grey Goose cues an extrinsic, ‘crafted’ purity. Drawing on a sophisticated version of the codes of purity, Grey Goose displays a refined artistic graphic, a delicate alliance of blue and grey tones, and the aforementioned elegance of the wine bottle.
As a result, Grey Goose brand differentiation could be summed up by the semiotic square below:
Some thoughts on further innovation…
The theme of purity could be revisited through the use of raw material culturally encoded as ‘noble and pure’, such as organic white roses, to create an ‘ultra pure’ vodka and step even further away from the Absolut chemical purity.
Cueing on the precedent of Lady Gaga’s first-ever black perfume, the purity of vodka could also be distorted into innovative dark vodka.
Powerful, the theme of craftsmanship is opening the way for more global interpretations. One might imagine a Brazilian vodka made from Amazonian fruit.
© Sophie Gomez 2013
Posted in Art & Design, Categories, Consumer Culture, Emergence, Europe, Semiotics | 1 Comment »
Rediscovering Old Age
Sunday, March 31st, 2013
Whenever you meet clients in India, it seems that every brand is striving to be youthful and wants to target 18-25 year olds. The rest of us on the wrong side of this age divide might as well make ourselves scarce. Any ad review over the last ten years will only showcase young people and older people, if they exist, will at best be middle-aged parental figures, representing irritant authority against whom the youth kick off to make a point. They were either judgmental mother in law like figures, inspecting the home of young couples to see whether their kitchens and bathrooms were being kept up well or simply uncomprehending of the ways of the young generation.
In the past couple of years, there has been an interesting shift. Old people have made an appearance, first in advertising for financial products such as pension plans and now making inroads into sectors such as telecom which were bastions of youth. The old people are emphatically old – very wrinkled and proceeding towards being bent as well. The physicality is where the archetype parts way with the character. They mostly do not conform to the archetype of the wise old man/woman and nor to the covert social take of being strange and cranky.
This is a significant shift in a culture that is beginning to idealize youth. The balance of power has tipped in their favour of young people as they are more economically empowered, making more money than their parents ever saw and also being inherently tech savvy and therefore better able to negotiate the world today. Traditionally, moving towards maturity and old age was revered and somewhat eagerly awaited. With advancing age came all the privileges of enhanced status and authority reflected in being consulted by the young on every decision and putting the seal of approval on every purchase. Advancing old age meant that it was pay back time for the young, where any good kid was going to dutifully serve and put the elder’s wish before his while the old cultivated a detachment from worldly affairs and a move towards spirituality.
Against the backdrop of this shift, advertising’s sudden engagement with the old and this moving into the foreground of collective consciousness is intriguing. Post tipping of balance of power, what codes govern old age? Perhaps when there is an ambiguous space the imagination runs free. Collectively there is a need to re imagine old age. The contours this reimagining has taken are interesting.
In this imagination, as reflected in advertising, the old are not moving towards either detachment or spirituality. The mood is light, marked with merriment. While the physicality is exaggeratedly old the behavior is emphatically like that of a teenager.
Portrayal of the old as carefree and a tiny bit irresponsible is reflected in a health insurance ad where the son is evaluating a policy and wants his father’s opinion but the father is too busy listening to rap on his iPod and would rather talk about the music than insurance. Or in a bunch of oldies giggling like school girls, cheating at cards and planning a birthday surprise for their brother; again from an insurance ad.
Another theme that gets repeated is that of romance between the old, which is particularly interesting as old couples in India are expected to be done with overt expressions of romance by the time the children come along. Buying diamond rings for your wife in your old age especially when it is preceded by a lifetime of restrained consumption is intriguing; as is an awkward old man giving his dour wife a rose on Valentine’s day when the cultural norm is one of functional choices and practical transactions between couples.
Reimagining old age is fertile creative territory for the agencies in India and perhaps it is media validation and way forward for those living in changed times. Or maybe an acknowledgement of those who have the big bucks and a history of being consumption deprived.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqg8pVOTooY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N2PRuuYVsA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lb6Ky4PdHw
© Sraboni Bhaduri 2013
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Chocolate Vietnam
Friday, November 9th, 2012
This Vietnamese chocolate pack is a perfect juxtaposition of globalized visual culture and the extraction of semiotic cues of local influence. As ethnographer Arjun Appadurai wrote: “The central problem of today's global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization… What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way…” (p. 6; Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy, Public Culture). This dialectic drives branding and design codes.
The excellent paper by Thurlow and Aiello (National pride, global capital: a social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry Crispin Thurlow and Georgia Aiello, Journal of Visual Communication, 2007) on aircraft tailfins showed how global kinetic motion vector motifs can be hybridized with local avian mythology to create national airline brands that also successfully conform to an international design idiom. A similar thing is happening here. Chocolate has for a while been becoming much less a sweet confectionary and being seen as a gourmet foodstuff. The cocoa bean usually rendered in faux naïf illustrator (as if straight off a Linaeus etching) style has become a staple image in the brave new world of bean to bar new chocolatiers. The Marou pack cleverly combines this with subtle cultural cues. The brand descriptor and historicist font used for the title is a contrivance of Gallic savoir faire. The title Faiseurs de Chocolat – is ‘made up’ French (it should be fabricants) and the square cartouche reference vaguely fin de siècle France luxury goods.
To the uneducated observer (which I still consider myself to be after only a two week stint), the main design influences in Vietnam are Vietnamese re-creations of broadly Chinese design and a re-imagined colonial France. This stunning chocolate packaging from Marou subtly references both of these traditions whilst arguably forging a delightfully charming Vietnamese confection. The building that houses the Museum of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Minh City would probably be a good example of this type of hybrid form. It is a pleasing mix of Chinese and French influences with the splayed eaves and roofing characteristic of pagodas, engraved calligraphic panels, and the cloud and transom patterns in balustrades, but with the shutters, balconies and neo classical influences of French architecture. This 1937 building, is an example of forging something distinctively Vietnamese out of semiotic resources available.
Museum of Fine Art, Ho Chi Minh City
The colouring of the pack is interesting too. The ochre yellow is ubiquitous in Hanoi and in the South. This stucco seems to be used on all the old French colonial houses. Significant now of faded grandeur, it is arguably used to re-orientalize Vietnamese products for the Viet Kieu, South Vietnamese exiles who crave romanticized views of Vietnam they had to leave behind in painful circumstances in the 1970s and because they do not now recognize their country.
Vietnam is a country still quite divided between North and South living in the shadow and the trauma of two bitterly fought colonial struggles. The North via photography and other elements martially commemorate their struggle and eventual triumph against massive odds. The South who lost the war – but appear to be winning the peace – are nostalgic about remembering what was interrupted and purged in 1976. Being publicly nostalgic has only quite recently become a possible trope in Vietnam. As cultural anthropologist Christophe Robert comments: “Indulging in nostalgia is akin to dilettantism and bourgeois loafing…After independence and reunification of the country had been achieved. Nostalgia for the bad old days was inappropriate. In political terms, and especially in Saigon and southern Vietnam, nostalgia could potentially open the door to revisionist accounts calling into question the brutal means- and the authoritarian governance of the Communist Party.” (Robert, p. 408)
When it comes to the luxury goods there is a demand from more discerning old money in both Hanoi and Saigon for nostalgia in art, interior design and packaging. It seems that the two Frenchmen who set up this brand wittingly or unwittingly tap into this vein whilst also auto-orientalizing Vietnam for foreign visitors. I picked this item up in the Sofitel in Ho Chi Minh –; at 131,000 dong, (about $5) it is definitely a chi chi item you wouldn’t find it in a normal supermarket. My cultural anthropologist colleague Christophe Robert believes that this pack would appeal only to the very pinnacle of the social hierarchy in Vietnam, those with both money and symbolic education to be able to appreciate the references. Aside from being beautifully and artfully put together, this pack seems to be a semiotic text that shrewdly pushes the right buttons both with overseas Viet Kieu diaspora, nostalgia craving rich Vietnamese and easily impressed, time pressed foreigners like me looking for swift souvenirs.
© Chris Arning 2012
References
Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Public Culture (1990)
Robert, Christophe ‘The Return of the Repressed: Uncanny Spaces of Nostalgia and Loss in Trâ`n Anh Hùng’s Cyclo’ Positions 20:1 (2012)
Thurlow, Crispin and Georgia Aeillo, ‘National pride, global capital: a social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry’, Journal of Visual Communication, (2007)
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Reserved Meaning
Friday, September 28th, 2012
Using different drinks glasses as a way of explaining codes and cultural meanings is a well-established routine in the discourse of commercial semiotics. Monty Alexander first introduced this at Semiotic Solutions and Australia’s Jake Pearce has more recently adapted it on a short YouTube film. Pearce introduces semiotics by using an obvious everyday example – demonstrating the differences in perception that arise between witnessing sparkling wine being drunk from a beer glass and seeing someone drinking it in a more properly ‘meaningful’ way from a champagne glass. Jake Pearce goes on to argue that the confusing sensation of seeing champagne in a tankard, like seeing a mature man wearing bright red lipstick, is an error in the continuum of meaning – of the sort that semiotics can help you avoid in actual commercial communication in any form.
"I'm in the wrong place on the semiotic expert continuum"
I enjoyed Jake Pearce’s performance since nothing in the world seemed more stable than his examples. But this impression lasted only a month or two. You may understand my surprise when in at the beginning of the winter, the season when dark beer usually comes out on the stage, the local Bulgarian brand Zagorka (owned by Heineken) launched new 360º campaign promoting its variant of stout beer but with an explicitly wine-like style message. This brand new product was called ‘Reserva’, offered in a limited edition and for a limited period (“only this winter”) – and its distinctive feature was the blueberry taste.
It should be noted that in Bulgaria people involved in food and drink industry are clear (or maybe were clear) about the taste preferences of the average consumer. Everything should have a consistent, strong taste – black strong coffee, fiery alcohol, etc. Briefly, beer is nothing, but beer, and the perception of the local consumer was seriously challenged especially by the TV commercial. In the spot we could see beer bottles put on familiar wine shelves with date plates on them displaying years in the near future – 2015, 2016 and so on. Then a hand picked up the bottle and filled a wine glass with the beer in question.
The Reserva case was made even more complex because in previous years dark beer in the local market had been rather exception rather than the rule, although with the arrival of this different kind of taste and sensory experience a few dark beers had taken their place on the shelves. The most curious fact was that the overall message put together by different channels tended to accentuate he wine reference as an interesting tool for distinguishing such an extraordinary product from the beer category as a whole – but without positioning it as wine, since after all it was actually still a beer.
I don’t know what Jake Pearce would say about this, but I appraised this marketing move as daring and potentially paradigm-changing. Pearce’s argument is completely supported by the U.S. professor of malting and brewing science Charles Bamforth, who dedicates a whole book to the topic of Grape vs. Grain (Cambridge University Press, 2008), aiming to demarcate clearly the origin and cultures of the two drinks. Bamforth even aspires to give brewers and the world at large a different perspective on beer and to underline its inherent qualities and heritage, in spite of beer’s “outrageous advertising regimes” and unequal battle with the originally French and precious derivation of wine’s image.
Returning to semiotics, we should remember the principle that meaning is fluid and that nothing is ultimately stable in culture, including the world of alcoholic beverages. Semiotics also teaches us as that if you are presenting something new you should use something close and familiar as a meaning bearer, otherwise your idea will lack some kind of skeleton or face.
That is why I found the Reserva ad semiotically provocative – it positions the product not against wine, in its taken for granted sense, but superimposed on wine (working through a sort of mimicry) and by doing so it draws on the exclusivity and higher class image of wine.
Probably, in a global context, the ad is neither totally new nor original in its attempt to stir up the beer market. In the upcoming winter season Reserva won’t even exist any more in the Bulgarian market place. But in the sprit of above and potentially taking the beer-wine crossover into new diemensions, Charles Bamforth writes: “I believe that the brewer has much to learn from the winemaker”, not least perhaps in moving the beer category forward to a point where it can begin to be associated with a wholeseome lifestyle of health and longevity.
© Dimitar Trendafilov 2012
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No dress code for food
Sunday, September 9th, 2012
Food voyeurism seems to be a global phenomenon going purely by the number of food related shows from all over the world that are on air. In India we consume them all with gusto. Never mind if most us in India are totally unfamiliar with many of the ingredients and certainly have no idea what a terrine or a béchamel sauce may be. Unfamiliarity with an Enoki mushroom does not keep us from participating in the drama surrounding it on Masterchef. We are learning how the other side eats and we are learning to consume food visually.
Food presentation is something fairly alien to us in India. The kormas and the curries are just one mass which see nothing further by way of presentation than garnishing with finely chopped coriander. Even in garnishing the repertoire doesn’t extend beyond coriander or perhaps coconut and on a really good day it could be fried onions, all on a consistent background color varying between pale yellow to reddish yellow. Compared with the food art that other cuisines are given to, Indian cuisine can be described as visually limited.
This visual poverty seems a little odd for a cuisine that uses a rich array of spices and has a multiplicity of expressions, with each region having a rather complete & distinctive set of offerings. It is rich and imaginative in every way except that it refuses to romance the ingredients and will not dress up charmingly to lure the diner. A carrot will submerge its identity amongst five other vegetables and no vegetable will attempt to hog the limelight by posing as a flower.
Food on the table is good enough. It does not need hard sell. For a culture that believes each grain is a manifestation of god, demanding that food look pretty would be blasphemy. Grains, vegetables, spices themselves are treated with respect even in a busy bazaar. They will all be washed and polished and arranged into geometric heaps. Every transaction with the customer disturbs this arrangement but it is carefully restored. It is much less efficient than simply putting it in a heap or displaying fruits & vegetables in a cardboard box.
Food demands respect. The equation between the diner and the food is fairly clear. Food does not have to try too hard. In fact it will be romanced by ornate containers. The only points of embellishment are the plate and the containers. The great Indian thali does not woo the diner but the food itself.
© Sraboni Bhaduri 2012
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Beauty Calls
Sunday, June 10th, 2012
“Vicky knows that she has only three seconds to make a good impression”. This is what one of the Head & Shoulders ads says and stunning brunette Vicky shakes her hair in front of the young handsome guy’s face. The voiceover continues to persuade us that her hair is beautiful and healthy.
The perception of beauty is like a religious sense – everybody has it inside but few could define it straight away. It embraces philosophical notions and varies from culture to culture. One thing that seems stable is that beauty is perceived to provide pleasure – but it is not taken for granted that it is something ‘good’. In this regard, the most significant thing is that advertisers and mass media constantly compete to display and represent beauty in better ways. They use art, top models, different inspirational metaphors, slow motion effects, show some elements of nature etc. in order to impose themselves on our perception of ‘beauty’ or (if we can signal and elevation of individual physical manifestations to a higher level of abstraction) of ‘beauty-ness’.
This topic becomes increasingly dramatic when the ‘beauty’ is turned into a focus for social and even political discussion. Last year a renowned Bulgarian plastic surgeon met wry face of the local authorities demonstrating social consequences of his work. He had started a billboard campaign in spring – it was not his first but it was in a different style to previous ones – including a number of different images displayed in the city center of Sofia and other big towns in the country. The images portrayed various good-looking girls drawn in American 1950s style, looking much like Coca-Cola imagery, for example, from that time. The connotative meaning seemed to be deliberately chosen because in the epoch in question American women were mostly housewives whereas Bulgarian women worked on equal terms with their husbands to build together a future Socialist Eden. But the more curious thing was the headlines accompanying the beauties on the billboard, such as “I’m in love with myself” and “I’m too beautiful to get a job”. All of them had the same tagline – “Thank you, doctor Enchev!”.
At the beginning of June 2011 the ethical board of National Council of Advertising Regulation denounced the whole campaign as ‘uneducative’, ‘offensive’ and an act of ‘discrimination’. Naturally, quite a few bloggers and concerned citizens directed some peppery remarks toward the doctor’s message, and even named the pictured women as the ‘jobless ones’. As a result the authorities pasted yellow patches on the second half of the poster headlines with a black ‘censored’ sign on it. This was the first example of overtly banned advertising in Bulgaria for many years – except for the usual issues around tobacco and alcohol ads placed near by schools, or TV spots screened at inappropriate times of day.
The story did not end here. The free market had its say as the surgeon had paid in advance for several month of billboard exposure and the images stayed around until October. Thus the censorship sign served only to enhance the impact of the advertising and attract the attention of passers-by. There were some who even thought that the ban was an ad agency’s trick and pointed to the billboards as a clever promotional plan.
So, the social perception of ‘beauty’ turned out to be a tricky matter. Obviously everyone rejected the idea that there was no link between work and looking, maybe because even models sell their appearance as ‘labour’ in a sense. The campaign, in fact, was justified by the doctor as “jest”. But eventually the jest doubled up its effect. The sluggish efforts of the authorities at censorship only increased the buzz around the ads. There were several articles in the media dedicated to the case and widely publicizing the phrases hidden bybthe censorship stickers. As to the ban itself, it attached different kind of connotation to the main message and in extremely high degree brought the much-hated times of socialistic censorship back to consumers’ mind instead of, as intended, protecting his and especially her best interests.
© Dimitar Trendafilov 2012
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A bag is a bag is a bag
Friday, March 23rd, 2012
Handbags are mysterious to men and profane to their mistresses. They are an accessory for almost every woman, whether young or matured, Christian or Buddhist, rich or poor, modern or conservative. They are universal and at the same time very personal, even intimate. Peeping in one’s bag or borrowing might be acceptable but not encouraged and only trusted friends and close relatives are allowed to do so, mostly under the owner’s control. Handbags are powerful icons and heroines of modern times stand behind ‘IT bags’ as godmother.
Why are handbags so important?
Many women strongly identify with her handbag and some develop an almost symbiotic relationship with the bag and its content. Others have a more playful and flirtatious relationship with it. They change their leather or linen companion according to season, occasions or mood. The bag bond can be born when falling in love at first sight of blinking sequin or playful fringes or result from a more rational strategy of comparing sizes, materials and styles.
Certain items such as keys, purses and care products can be found in almost every bag, other personal items such as breast implants or a fruit knife might be a surprise to an indiscreet viewer. A bag is a bag but is also unique at the same time: “My bag reflects who I am and what is important to me.” A bag can match your dress – but first of all it matches yourself. Bag owners can be characterised regarding what their bag contains inside and what they express outside, what a bag tells about their personality and their social identity.
The ‘mistress of the bag’ is in a power position and in control of her bag and its content. She highlights the non-emotional character of her relationship with the bag and treats her bag as her property that often feels neglected or even maltreated. She doesn’t want to compromise and demands a lot: ““I like to be in control and must admit that I treat my bag like a slave: it’s always with me and has to do what I want it to”.
The ‘expressive hedonist’ enjoys her ownership of (often many) bags. The bag represents her style and fashion consciousness – whether in the form of prestigious luxury shoppers or the latest must-have bags. She feels reassured and entertained through her steady companion: “One may understand who I am from both my bag and by its contents. My bag is the mirror of myself”.
The ‘protective dependent’ has a strong and very emotional relationship with her bag. She is in need of comfort and security. Her bag looks individualised, caring and exciting from the outside and often chaotic in the inside caused by various layers of more or less helpful tools, notes, souvenirs and good luck charmers required to be next to her at all times: “If my bag gets lost my world would tremble.”
The ‘capricious passionate’ wants her bag to make her happy and light-hearted. She has a rather flirtatious relationship with her handbag although she might be looking for ‘real love’ in her very heart. She can fancy the pink patent leather shopper during the day and the golden clutch in the evening: “I bought this bag because it makes me feel good”.
Every bag has its own character and reflects the character of its owner. A bag is nothing less than a practical container filled with helpful tools and personal treasures and a mobile miniature version of a woman’s world at the same time. The bag is the steady companion who never lets you down, supports you to deal with any eventuality and allows you to either hide or to make you noticed. No wonder women can’t do without it.
© Ute Rademacher 2012
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Just Radical Enough
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
Banca Cívica is a recently created Spanish bank, originally an offshoot of the semi-public regional savings bank, Caja Navarra (CAN), which itself became well-known through its policy of allowing its customers to choose which charity would benefit from the interest accrued on their money (a first in Spain). However, while remaining linked to its mother institution, Banca Cívica has become a self-standing bank, which suggests that CAN is trying to expand beyond the limits imposed by its regional identity.
This (below), I believe, is a representative sample of Banca Cívica’s introductory campaign.
The campaign is mostly text-based, using messages in a typography and colours that imitate urban graffiti – so convincingly, in fact, that many people have taken them for actual graffiti. It should be however noted that this is ‘tasteful’ graffiti – words are correctly spelt, and the colours are Banca Cívica’s corporate colours – pink and purple, remarkable in themselves given their feminine connotations, quite unusual in the banking industry. This feminine connotation is no doubt connected to the way in which Banca Cívica defines itself as an organisation that is ‘different from other banks’ in its social concerns and its transparency.
In addition, the typography used to imitate graffiti does not resemble any forms usually employed by graffiti artists, but rather is partially reminiscent of the typographies created by Spanish avant-garde designer, David Delfín, and ultimately of the source from which many Spanish designers have drawn, directly or indirectly: Javier Mariscal, well known for his thick traits and naive, child-like visual style.
Obviously, Banca Cívica’s target audience is not the graffiti artist demographic. But its target audience – 30 to 40-year-old urban upper-middle class – can aesthetically identify with a softer, more chic and palatable version of graffiti. Likewise, Banca Cívica provides a ‘non-radical’ version of solidarity and cooperation with which middle-class professionals can feel comfortable: the message being that capitalism is not incompatible with social concerns (in fact, this is the idea at the core of the entire notion of Corporate Social Responsibility).
An index of this ‘capitalistic’ conception of cooperation is the emphasis placed by the campaign on the first person singular: “I should be able to decide which charity”, “They should tell me how much they make from MY dough”. This is a trait which Banca Cívica inherited from CAN’s breakthrough strategy of allowing its customers to decide exactly which charities to sponsor. And again in Banca Cívica this trait signals a considerable difference both with respect to other banks and with respect to other organisations dealing with social problems, such as NGOs. The idea seems to be that the same individualistic, self-interested and demanding attitude that a bank’s customers have with regard to their own money can be applied to a bank’s social action: that transparency and customer choice also apply to charity. Banca Cívica’s campaign is meant to visually encode this idea by means of an aesthetic which can be described as alternative but not too much so – (relatively) innovative but not in a radical (i.e. threatening) way.
© Asunción Álvarez 2011
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Shamanic small ads
Saturday, April 16th, 2011
Korean Shamanism is rooted in ancient folk religions and dates back at least 40,000 years. The shaman has a special ability to make connections as a mediator between the human world and the spiritual world. Most Korean shamans are women and in some cases, they got the ability when they were very young. There are two types of shaman. Some are understood to inherit Shamanic skills within the family, others through a call from the spirit world. Shamans hold a special ceremony (gut) or give a fortune-telling, to deliver good fortune for their clients or heal unidentified illnesses. Traditionally the shamans also hold an annual gut to propitiate gods of the village or locality. Each shaman is a specialist of some kind. Some are good at healing the souls of the dead, for example, while others can predict the future -while others again are good at the yearly ceremony to exorcise the town.
The integration of shamanism into daily life in South Korea is reflected in brand communications and popular culture. The image on the right is a famous comedy talk show, where the set design is based on a shaman’s shrine. The host, in costume, plays the role of a shaman and the guest acts as a client seeking a solution to a problem. Shamanism is also a widespread theme in Korean films and teledramas. The centre image was used in Compaq computer advertising some years ago, supporting the claim that the functionality matches that of a shaman. Odd as this may seem as a hi-tech metaphor it signals the strength of continuing belief in the power of the shaman – unlike corresponding ‘magic’ hi-tech metaphors in the West, Korean shamanism in this context is still connected with a culture that maintains literal belief in the underlying spiritual forces.
For anyone unaware of this living connection with Shamanism, in the country Koreans see as the original home of shamanism, one of the most surprising expressions of this cultural phenomenon will be the small-ads offering shamanic services. These are common and particularly in evidence in magazines targeting women of middle age. The message in one of these advertisements below reads “The shaman and exorcism are like diagnosis or surgery for your spirit. If you find a good doctor you can get good treatment. So it’s really important to find a good shaman”.
Small ads list telephone numbers, shrine locations, and give potted histories explaining how and why this particular individual became a shaman. The personal story also supports the track record of big successes – predicting Michael Jackson's death, correctly calling the Korean presidential election, predicting the tsunami etc. And some ads list the shaman's TV appearances in her/his professional capacity. The small-ad also tend to detail the shaman.s specialism: e.g. solving job difficulties, predicting relationships and resolving relationship problems, business predictions, working on marital compatibility or concubine problems, entrance examination predictions, property investment predictions…
In the hierarchy of specialisms, one of the things people clearly want to solve most through a shaman is the secret of material and wordly success. The shaman is the mediator or agent to satisfy such desires. The list of problems people want to solve through a shaman leans significantly in this direction. The shaman is a mediator (or an agent) to satisfy these very practical ambitions. Here certain questions and uncertainties arise. It is in a way covetous to go to shaman since, as Koreans tend to believe, the shaman can see the future and so perhaps change it to be as a client wants it to be. There is something perceptually unrighteous and shady about this because people also understand that their future is their responsibility, something that's being made by themselves.
This ambivalence means that the shamans’ advertisements are normally located in places like the last few pages of magazines or the back of the seat on night buses – like these advertisements in the illustration above. This is also a highly commercialised activity, however much its origins are oriented towards the spiritual. There are no free shamanic services. This is a job, a drive to sustain business for the shaman and his/her divine backing. In the pictures in the Korean advertisements, the shamans wear elaborate make up and vivid colour costumes to attract attention – this is a kind of mainstream marketing.
Koreans tend to go to a shaman when they have a problem they’re not able to deal with for some reason and need to try to find an alternative possibility for now. Although shamanism is deeply rooted in traditional culture and still very much alive today, most Koreans don’t completely trust the shaman’s ability. However we strongly believe that through the mediation of shamanism it is possible to get, at least, solace of soul and some alleviation of desire.
© Hyaesook Yang 2011
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What it means to be human
Monday, January 24th, 2011
Ours is a culture in crisis where we’re struggling to figure out what it means to be human. We are deeply fixated in the virtual world and enviously in chase of the latest technology. At the same time we are experiencing an anxiety over the liquidation of self in a fluid, constantly innovating world.
Once we have logged and given away our noteworthy moments on Facebook and Twitter, we cease to retain them as a testament to our own heritage. As we prove our progress we appear just as much in need of a way to define ourselves in reverse— away from the oppressive filtration of ourselves into digitized experiences that can be uploaded and streamed instantly across time and space.
The proof of this conflict has been confirmed by the popularization of two opposing types of codes. On the one hand, there are those symbols that demonstrate our ideals about advancement into the promising future. Tech logos, for example, are as slippery and fluid in line quality and shape as our transient, efficient lives — void of details or adornments which might refer specifically to time period or place. As reassuring as they are of our relevance, we are equally comforted by signifiers of uninhibited, amateurish self-expression. They are awkwardly analog, irregular and imperfect in line quality and shape. The two stills from Microsoft's TV spots "People Ready" illustrate this well. This humble, bumbling style has emerged in an effort to monumentalize our real selves …free to live outside, mainstream expectations and the compulsion to move ahead feverishly.
Interestingly, these signifers frequently appear in advertisement for these same tech companies. Perhaps that have become the latest and most important trust marks of authenticity and heritage—the company’s silent promise that our humanity will not be lost in the adoption of the innovative product they’re offering.
© Michael Colton 2011
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New Home New Language
Thursday, January 6th, 2011
In Bulgaria the financial crisis has reduced the amount of advertising and encouraged an increasing focus on price and savings. However there are still strong signs of creativity in this local market, a good example being the campaign run by Baumaxx – one of the biggest retail chains in Central and Eastern Europe, which specializes in materials for construction, home repair and supplies.
Like the better known brand Ikea, Baumaxx focuses its communication on the idea ‘do it with your hands’ – but does so deploying a distinctive mix of low price messaging, a promise of shopping comfort and convenience and making it clear that the offer extends beyond furniture to a wide range of domestic goods. In Central Europe the TV spots use Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ playing behind an appropriate domestic narrative. In Bulgaria Baumaxx also uses distinctive local language and humour in its advertising.
After the summer season 2010 there was a little more time and probably some money for households to spend on renovating their homes. Baumaxx caught that wave and used it aggressively in order to respond to the increasing demand in the repair and maintenance sector in the months before winter – and to cut through the messaging clutter as there are a lot of players in this marketplace. An integrated marketing campaign deployed booklets, 7-second TV spots, radio spots, a massive billboard presence and the launch of a Baumaxx a group on Facebook.
In the Bulgarian market the new and highly creative Baumaxx print and TV campaigns featured two young characters, one male one female, and a dynamic (even aggressive) hip-hop flavoured tonality. Such communication codes have been extremely popular in local advertising for fashion brands, telecoms and some food and snacks products – but were unknown till now in the big retail chain category.
By way of illustration, Baumaxx advertising uses colloquial everyday phrases prominently in radio spots and as headlines in the print ads and billboards. In the print ad shown here Baumaxx points out different products which may be purchased as a good bargain, each one representing a different department of the store. The original elements in the ads are not the prices themselves but the presentation of home repair as a fun, energetic process which fits young people’s taste. Till now home repair was associated with older, family people. The whole message positions what used to be regarded as tiresome maintenance of the home as something easy and, with the support of Baumaxx, very much in the consumer’s control. Among other wordplays here deploying street metaphors, phrases taken from actual everyday language include “The prices break off” (Цените къртят), which also connotes something being ‘cool’ (Кърти мивки), and “Prices are concrete”/“Prices are iron”, i.e. the prices are low and solid and this is for sure [Нещата са бетон, железни са].
What we see here is youth codes beginning to mature and cross into categories that target an older life stage as the consumer target groups accustomed to more nuanced and culturally attuned styles of brand communication themselves grow a little older. In the case of Baumaxx a direct down-to-earthness which is part of the ‘cool’ cultural appeal of hip-hop, interpreted here through colloquial ‘street’ Bulgarian idiomatic language, skillfully combines creative appeal with a clear and hard-hitting message on value. The general principle is that at times of relative economic constraint there are ways of talking about price and value in a stylish, culturally connected, even quite edgy tone of voice – rather than having to go with just a crude, functional, stripped-down price message.
© Dimitar Trendafilov 2010
Links
http://www.vbox7.com/play:b8f69c16
http://www.facebook.com/pages/BauMax-Bulgaria/113068988755021
Posted in Brand Worlds, Categories, Clients & Brands, Consumer Culture, Emergence, Europe, Making Sense, Semiotics | No Comments »
Korea’s Flag of Learning
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
These are typical images about war or revolution and victory. With the drama and the symbolism of the flag they show a mighty determination to win even if the cost is death. On the left Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of American soldiers raising the flag on Iwo Jima (February 1945) and on the right Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. You can view more to know where you can get your own flags.
Less familiar to most of us is the middle image – which is in fact an advertisement for a private education company offering extracurricular lessons for primary and high school students after their normal classes. In this dramatic Korean ad, the bold and dynamic handwriting says ‘Let’s go ahead a grade’ – that is to say fight, win, move ahead with a higher mark.
Private education provision always implies social hierarchy and a competitive arena in which the stakes are high. If public education aims to provide a level playing field, the private provision tilts it and sets the odds in favour of the child and the parents who give an extra push in terms of time and resource. Our featured image for this article (on the Semionaut home page) shows scenes from a Korean university advertisement. On the left, the lady proudly states “my child is studying at the university”. On the right she questions the professor about how good the university is. So this is not just about individual students but about families, not just personal striving but a kind of team battle.
“If you sleep 5 hours you will fail to enter a university, but if you sleep 4 hours, you can enter a university” is a common adage given as advice to high school students in Korea. The education system has had a strong market dimension to it in Korea since the early days of modernization in the 1970s with the New Community Movement. Investment of time and money can lead to good results which, in turn, can get the student into a good school. Images of hard work, cut-throat competition and exhausted students are already familiar from a country like Japan but the promotional rhetoric at least seems to have escalated even further in Korea.
So far we have seen one example of the family as the student’s greatest ally and another in which educational success is metaphorically linked to military triumph. This latter association is, in fact, now an expression of an increasingly familiar code. Here are two others ads for Korean universities in which the iconography of the flag against the sky depicts the triumph of the student/warrior over all opposition, while a third (right) states “Sharp intelligence conquers the world, with the sword of this university”.
With the shelling of Yeonpyeong island by North Korean forces in November 2010 the world was reminded of a military context which has been part of Krean consciousness, language and popular culture for over half a century. Wr and fighting metaphors have had positive connotations since the end of the Korean War in 1953 and through subsequent periods of national regeneration and economic growth.
In Korea, when people want to say something like ‘Let’s do it together’ or even ‘Cheer up’, they say “Fighting!” Related to this “If you feel you cannot do it you have to force yourself to do it!” is a common attitude. The language of war and military conflict is commonplace in international business discourse with its metaphors of ‘strategy’, ‘outflanking the opposition’, the ‘coup’ and so forth. What’s distinctive about this area of Korean culture and communication is the explicitness of such warlike imagery – and its insistent presence in an arena which is so central and so critical in young people’s preparation for adult life.
© Hyaesook Yang 2010
Posted in Asia, Categories, Consumer Culture, Culture, Making Sense | 2 Comments »
Drinking Collagen
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
In China, Japan and Malaysia women are drinking collagen to fight the signs of ageing. Slogans in Beijing and Shanghai departments stores promise: "Take a collagen drink for 30 days and have skin as soft as a baby's". The Gilgamesh pan-Asian restaurant in North London is also promising to introduce collagen-infused dishes before the end of 2010.
The inside-outside beauty dynamic becomes increasingly supple as the skin gets semiotically reconstituted as a kind of sentient membrane that allows traffic between inside subject and outside object worlds increasingly to pass both ways. If this traffic has, in one sense, an almost science fictional feel it is simultaneously underwritten by codes of natural authenticity. So authentic and natural is the DHC China cosmetic firm's pale yellow juice, for example, that it comes with an explanation that the collagen is taken from fish – and a promise that the drink won't taste fishy.
Posted in Asia, Categories, Clients & Brands, Consumer Culture, Emergence, Global Vectors, Technology | No Comments »
China’s ‘Fresh’ Beer Code
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
Tags: beer
Posted in Asia, Categories, Consumer Culture, Culture, Global/Local, Making Sense | No Comments »
iEverything
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
Have you noticed how many products have come around over the last few years sporting a tiny “i” before their names? Well, if you know not what I speak of, think iPod, iPhone, iPad, iGoogle, iMAX, etc. And these are only a few of the best known. A quick Google search returns over a thousand product names that follow the pattern of a noun preceded by an “i” that is almost isolated in its stately lower-caseness.
Internet! Yes. That seems to be the obvious word that justifies the fame of our little “i”. That seems to be the expression the letter seeks to contract, to simplify. And the trend just goes beyond: iWater, iFood, iHouse, iCity, iTaxes, iGlasses… It’s as if, in this abstract universe that is the internet, all human creation needed to be reborn, rethought, reconsidered, to become lighter, to become iMmaterial.
The “i” initiates and hides behind its challenging and friendly humility. It wants us not to notice it and so it stands humbly ahead of what we already know — while surreptitiously changing the entire genetics of the object. This is the new life of post-internet objects. A new life, its sins washed away by the “i” — the insignia that identifies objects that have been converted to the cult of the ultimate god of objects: the World Wide Web. The object unobjectified.
Objects which operate under different laws of physics. Free of weight, free of volume, free of time. That is to say, ticking to a different time. And all this is identified by our dearest little “i” — which is but the center of our vowels. The anthropomorphic letter that rises up to the global network heavens. But what does it want to tell us, other than "internet”?
Well… the “i” is a lonely letter. As lonely as I. The self-effacing I, that positions itself as an individual, that acknowledges its individuality, its independence. It is isolated, but adds itself to the object in order to become.
Perhaps the letter “i” has been the greatest gift the digital age has offered us: a way to restate, in a subtly stark manner, that we stand small, internet and all.
© João Cavalcanti 2010
Posted in Americas, Categories, Clients & Brands, Global Vectors, Making Sense, Technology | 6 Comments »
Chinese Bottled Water
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
Effective packaging design is essential for bottled water. Codes such as mountains, lakes, human-like figures, splashes of colour, as well as shapes and lines, can all be seen on water bottle packaging. Using semiotics, the packs can be organized according to their signs into two main poles. On one side is the pole of nature which claims that the water is from a natural source, and on the other side is the pole of industry which stresses that water has to be controlled and transformed to be untainted and healthy.
The pole of nature contains two visions of water: wild water and preserved water. In China, the category of “wild water” includes products like Pepsi-owned Enchant’s (莹纯, yíngchún) purified water, whose blue package has coloured splashes to showcase wild water in movement as a manifestation of life and freedom. The message it conveys through its sign is strength, vitality, and the human being’s fusion with nature.
The category of preserved water is well represented by Aquarius’ (正广和, zhèng guǎng hé) natural mineral water with its mountain and static lines. It represents a nature to contemplate – a source of peace and quietness, a preserved nature, untouched.
In the pole of industry, the two visions of water are controlled water and tamed water.
In the” controlled water” category, shapes and lines are geometric and clean. Wahaha and Masterkong’s mineral waters, have simple blue or red colored geometric figures and lines on their packages. Their industrial-feeling design suggests that their controlled waters are totally safe and clean.
The tamed water category suggests water is adapted for consumer benefit. Nestlé’s Pure Life, for instance, uses more dynamic shapes and human figures to demonstrate its tamed water’s message of happiness, liveliness, and cooperation.
At first glance, it looks like actors exist on all possible dimensions in the bottled water market. You might think that there is no space remaining for product innovation. Yet, we can find empty territory surrounding the concepts of what we call “absolute water” and “harmony water”.
Absolute water is in a league of its own, and uses neither nature-themed nor industry-themed signs. Currently, there are only two players that convey the concept of absolute water in China – Uni-President’s Alkaqua mineral water and the distilled water made by Watson’s. The designs of the bottles are revolutionary and futuristic. Their beyond-nature and beyond-human appearance suggest that their water is extremely pure and transcendent.
Moreover, the big players in the bottled water market have yet to invent a way to combine the nature-theme and the industry-theme together to introduce the harmony between humans, nature and industry to the market.
Based on this analysis, the next steps could include product development around the two concepts: “harmony water” and “absolute water”.
© Vladimir Djurovic 2010
Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Categories, Clients & Brands, Global Vectors | No Comments »
Tom Ford
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
A major international male icon at the turn of the 2010s Tom Ford represents unparalleled design and fashion flair combined with great business acumen. His personal glamour (a focus for both the male and female gaze) and critically acclaimed breakthrough from fashion and branded commercial communication into mainstream film directing with A Single Man (2010) makes him one of the most powerful and intriguing male symbols of his time.
All the more because Tom Ford a) pioneers for gay men the discrete privilege long enjoyed by heterosexual males that one’s sexuality need not necessarily be core to the definition of one’s character & identity and b) stands aside, in terms of critical intelligence and comments on public record, from an unthinking commercialism and love of consumption proverbially associated not only with his chosen métier in the fashion/luxury industry but also with the Sex And the City era’s unholy alliance of postfeminism with camp male culture (‘you go, girl’, ‘shop, shop. shop’). A 2010 US public radio interview in the link below, for example, critiques variously the vacuity of a culture in which everything has to be regarded a ‘brand’ and the excesses of a beauty industry whose ‘posthuman’ norms attempts to nurture in young women, among many other altered perceptions, a belief that breasts which are traditionally breast-shaped, rather than resembling the shape of a blown up half-grapefruit, are defective and therefore in need of being ‘fixed’ by cosmetic surgery.
As an icon of contemporary masculinity Tom Ford also signals a cultural shift from the dominance to the Alpha male image to that of a more evolved leader who incorporates positive Omega male characteristics (independence, resourcefulness, depth, a pride which can manifest itself in ways other than conventional ego gratification).
© Malcolm Evans 2010
Notes: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121405891
Posted in Americas, Categories, Consumer Culture, Emergence, Making Sense | 1 Comment »
Double Exposure
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
Middlebrow Enlightenment. Analysis of a Sun Chips print ad from U.S. showing how the ideal American woman is in search of a contemporary middlebrow version of enlightenment characterised by a clear un-anxious head, healthy heart, toned legs, tight abs and pretty toes. How to "live brightly" according to a media version (Oprah, Eckhart Tolle) characterised here by cultural commentator Joshua Glenn. 2009 Hilobrow blogspot.
Posted in Americas, Categories, Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence | 1 Comment »
Dynasty Re-Loaded
Friday, June 25th, 2010
It’s the bottom lip that does it. The son – we know it’s his son because the evidence of inherited genes is so strong – betrays physiological and psychological traits the father has long learned to control (or suppress). Too full, sensual, prone to tantrums – the lip is already commanding. Touch, taste, speech – its right to consume and direct is supreme. We are rendered mute in turn as we witness this triumphant transition of biological property through the medium of the absent mother. Not the compassion of the Mother and Child; instead, something much harder. Not the heroism or pathos of the single parent, but an imperial re-versioning of the Self. A perpetuation moving in an ever-refining upward movement, accompanied by the discreet tick-tock of an eternal clock mechanism. The greyscale of it all, the muted fugue in fascistic elegance, the hint of panelled room (the boardroom, the hallway of the Hamptons house, the suite at the Waldorf, the reception corridor of the INSEAD business school?). The readiness of the photograph to succeed to a line of imagined painted portraits (imagined, because the stress on ‘Begin Your Own Tradition’ cannot hide the pained newness of the dynastic ambition here).
Father to Son: Protection, grooming (not in an unhealthy way, we hope), schooling (private, West of England, Swiss, East Coast – all the connotations of Privo-land), all-governing, rhizome-like networks, the senior accomplice in dealing with Mama and all her issues/pills/limited female brain, the hope that he will emulate and speculate. The unspoken expectation that the son is to be the father’s perfecting mirror.
Son to Father: loyalty (for now), admiration mixed with some useful fear (of bank accounts being frozen, perversities exposed, onerous, even weird family rituals being exacerbated), the disciplined, invisible hands and wrists (masturbation/trembling pathologies kept temporarily at bay), the still-growing boy-into-man saga (will he bypass the ‘rebel’ stage?), the binding of wills to serve one purpose (fascism).
Chronos (chronometer) kills Saturn; reborn, Saturn in turn eats his young (consuming lips) and Zeus in turn kills Saturn. The cycle is assuaged by the promise of inheritance, one that measures eternity
© Mark Irving 2010
NOTES
Image: http://www.selectism.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/patek-philippe-advertising.jpg
Recommended reading:
Pierre Bourdieu (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
David Cannadine (1996), The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy
Posted in Categories, Clients & Brands, Europe, Making Sense, Socioeconomics | No Comments »
Chinese Medication Pack
Saturday, June 5th, 2010
Bái jiāhēi 白加黑 is a popular over-the-counter cold medication in China, and its success can at least partially be attributed to its effective use of codes both on the cultural level and within its product category. The brand name itself means “white plus black”. The brand slogan is translated as “White pill for day, not sleepy; black pill for night, sound sleep.” Both the packaging and the pill colors utilize powerful and intuitive codes to communicate with consumers- white symbolizing day and black symbolizing night. Together they give a sense of a holistic treatment aligned with the natural cycle of one day. Balance and harmony with nature are important concepts in Chinese culture, as is symbolized by yin and yang. This cultural appeal most likely enhanced the effectiveness of the black and white codes as opposed to other colours such as yellow and blue.
Bái jiāhēi ‘s choice of codes, furthermore, differentiated the brand within the product category of over the counter (OTC) cold medications in China. Although there were competitors with similar offers, some even using the same concept of day time and night time relief with colour-coded pills, Bái jiāhēi emerged as the market leader.
© Vladimir Djurovic 2010
Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Categories, Clients & Brands, Global Vectors | 1 Comment »
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