Semiotics and culture: Signs, symbols and their meanings for insights and marketing

What is semiotics?

Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, unlocks cultural and psychological meanings in consumer behaviour. In commercial contexts, it decodes how brands, products, and communications can be perceived through the signs and symbols they use. This allows businesses to align strategies with cultural trends and consumer values.

Why is Semiotics important in insights and marketing?

Consumers continuously interpret signs based on their cultural background. A red car from a specific brand communicates colour, vehicle, and brand identity cues. These interpretations shape how consumers perceive the car, allowing brands to influence consumer understanding and behaviour.

Semiotic analysis enables brands to design signs that drive consumer behaviour and strengthen market positioning.

Three core applications of semiotics in insights and marketing

This article examines three key applications for market researchers, marketers, and brand strategists:

  1. Enhancing decision making: Understand cultural meaning as primary or supplementary data for both B2C and B2B strategies.
  2. From Ideation to Execution: Inform both strategic or tactical marketing efforts
  3. Measurement: Audit and diagnose marketing activities such as a proposition, product, packaging, or communication.

How is semiotics applied?

Semiotic analysis can be conducted either via desk research or fieldwork. The main approaches are:

  • Desk Analysis of Stimulus: Evaluate consumer responses, product, packaging or communication for cultural meaning.
  • Desk Analysis of Cultural Trends: Culture includes beliefs, practices, rituals, norms, institutions, arts amongst others. Culture can be recessive, dominant, emergent and dormant and understanding these trends helps a brand stay relevant. This can be found in category and/or adjacent category products and  communications, or cultural expressions in media (films, TV shows, magazines).
  • Cultural fundamentals: Identify enduring cultural myths—such as the American work ethic or Asian collectivism—and uncover emerging cultural codes relevant to brands. This often involves leveraging deep cultural expertise and local insights.  

Semiotics in Market Research: Primary or Supplementary Insights

Uncovering cultural meaning for B2C and B2B decision making 

Commercial semiotics complements traditional market research by analysing what consumers, customers, decision makers, or employees look at (words, images, icons, typefaces, colours), hear (sounds), touch and feel (textures), smell.

1. Primary Research

Semiotics is employed as a primary research tool when a cultural insight into consumer, customer or employee context or trend is necessary for decision making. For example, analysis of independent office-hours lunch hotspots in key cities to understand what are the emergent cultures of grab-and-go lunch. In B2B context, an example is the analysis of the language and visuals of employee recruitment adverts in a challenger start up sector. 

Case Study

How Bryter used semiotics for a French cosmetics giant to understand culture of beauty in the US market for innovations in product and packaging. Read case study Using semiotics to uncover meaning in Lip Gloss Category for a French beauty major  

2. Supplementary Research

Semiotics can serve as a powerful tools to provide cultural context and depth to qualitative research. This is helpful when consumers cannot articulate their preferences.

Case Study

How Bryter used semiotics for a market leading meal kit brand to understand cultural drivers of meal planning, shopping, preparation and consumption in Norway, Italy and Spain. Read case study Redefining Meal Kit Experiences in Norway, Italy and Spain. 

3. Guide

To learn more about how semiotics can be used in market research read this detailed article by Bryter's semiotics experts:  Integration Semiotics into Market Research.

Key takeaways

  • Semiotics fills the gaps in qualitative research. It helps identify the cultural meanings behind consumer responses and behaviours, which cannot be uncovered by standard qualitative research methods.
  • Semiotics can be used as a stand alone research method where decision makers need to understand cultural meanings about consumer/user behaviours (e.g., shopping preferences), preferences and trends (e.g., impact of digital culture on consumption trends); market segments (e.g., what is the cultural meaning of lifestyle interests); competitor analysis (e.g., analysing competitor advertising); testing marketing strategies (e.g., A/B testing of campaigns).
  • The semiotics method can serve as supplementary to standard quantitative research, such as surveys (limited application) and qualitative research (drawing cultural meaning of focus group, interview and ethnography responses).

Semiotics Insights for Strategic and Tactical Marketing Activities

From Ideation to Execution

Semiotics can help the various stages of marketing -- from strategy, innovation thinking, to execution and communication. Semiotics is helpful in identifying cultural trends, which are

  • Recessive (high volume, low growth)
  • Dominant (high volume, high growth)
  • Emergent (low volume, high growth), and
  • Dormant (low volume, low growth)

Semiotics can generate practical insights into cultural trends, which can be applied for the following activities:

1. Blue-skies thinking

Semiotics can augment strategic brand thinking by identifying cultural white spaces for strategic brand thinking (for e.g, what are the trends in 'functional food' and how can emergent trends in the space help in new product development (NPD) or rejuvenating/refreshing an existing product.

The scope of using semiotics is flexible. It can be used to conduct an in-depth study into a cultural trend for a brand or it can be used to provide light tough thinking for inspiration and or new thinking.  

Case Study

We helped the quick service service (QSR) sector with fundamental cultural analysis to help the client understand the barriers to sustainability in fast food and drink (coffee) settings.  Read the case study - Quick Service Restaurants: Decoding Hedonism and Sustainability Across Markets        

2. Brand Proposition development

Developing successful brand value proposition involves bringing the white space opportunity come to life by proposing the right cultural meanings through the usage of signs and symbols. This allows usage of the right language and imagery to bring the brand offering to life, aligning the consumer/customer expectations (meanings) with the offer, and differentiating the proposition from competitors.

Semiotics can be used as part of a range of methods including focus groups, depth interviews or quantitative testing. Semiotics can either be used to develop the propositions or to make sense of consumer responses to them.

Case Study

Bryter engaged in a cultural and category deep dive to help a German luxury car brand  develop a clear brand proposition. Read case study - European Luxury Automotive – Inclusive Communication for a US Market

3. Ideation: New Product Development (NPD) or Product Rejuvenation

Product or service development is a creative process that makes use of signs and symbols. Design of a product - packaging (2D), durables (3D), interaction, service or experience - requires usage of signs, symbols such as colours, images, iconography, typography, materials, substrates, form, function, finish, textures, smell, and sound. Semiotics can help in inspiring creatives by developing culturally informed creative concepts. These include design toolkits consisting of signs and symbols, which designers can use as a jumping off point for ideation.

Case Study

For a global consumer electronics major, we conducted a deep dive into the category of hair dryers in the UK and EU to not only identify the white space opportunity, but we also developed the brand proposition and packaging copy for the range clearly articulating the trade up story.  Read the case study - Repositioning Hair Dryer Communication through Semiotics     

4. Ideation: Communication Development

The final piece of marketing assets include communication. This can range from advertising, in-store and online communication, events and experiences, Public Relations (PR). Communication design too relies on a range of signs and symbols to effectively communicate the brand, product, service, or promotions such as price offs.  

Case Study

A refreshed approach to offers communication, based on semiotics principles has driven a 105% uplift in our client's offer awareness, underlining the effectiveness of aligning creative output with culturally resonant semiotic principles. Read the case study - Samsung – Semiotic Toolkit for Offers in Consumer Technology     

5. Auditing and Diagnosing Marketing Activities

Despite best efforts, brands and products do sometimes run into rough weather. In such times, semiotics is useful to audit or diagnose a new or existing product or communication to understand why it is generating unexpected sales or consumer feedback. Semiotics can help fill in the gaps by examining the signs and symbols of the product or communication and pin point the potential causes as well as providing ways to address the challenges.  

Case Study

How we helped a global rum brand connect with the emergent culture of rum drinking and help them reposition and rebrand - Reviving a Classic       

Semiotics Guides

Read a detailed article on how Semiotics can help marketing activities, written by our experts at Bryter - Semiotics' Relevance to Marketing

Semiotics is of particular relevance to global marketing, wherein brands have to translate its value proposition culturally - Semiotics Value to Global Marketing 

For a practical example of applying semiotics and cultural meaning to packaging design see the article - Power of Semiotics in Action

If you would like to understand how Semiotics can help experiential retailing, read - Semiotics of Experiential Retailing

For a cultural deep dive into luxury beauty category read - Semiotics of Luxury Beauty - is Luxury Communism the New Trend

Key takeaways

  • If marketing doesn’t get under the skin of culture, it can miss opportunities for product development differentiation and communication.
  • Semiotics can help marketers identify the optimal signs and symbols to be used in a product or service so that they make meaning to consumers and customers.
  • Semiotics can help integrate the brand proposition as well as product/service into an integrated brand communication that conveys the intended cultural meaning therefor resonating with consumers and customers. It is not only helpful for B2C, but can also be used for B2B communication development.

Conclusion

Semiotics is a powerful tool that helps uncover cultural meaning behind consumer behaviour and responses to propositions, products and communications. You can read about examples of our semiotics work in the case studies section of the Bryter website and access articles explaining semiotics on a range of topics on the Bryter blog.

  • Contact Bryter for more insight into semiotics and cultural research.

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