

You can run the analysis yourself or with your marketing team. With that knowledge, you can incorporate the decoded elements into your brand and throughout your marketing communications.Ī semiotic analysis can be part of a checklist when developing a new ad campaign or publishing a core content asset. Here’s what a semiotic analysis would unearth: (Source)Ī semiotic analysis decodes the meanings (cues) that resonate with your audience. To get there, Apple’s messaging had to go through filters in their consumers’ subconscious: Apple sells those traits as much as it sells hardware. People don’t queue for hours just to buy smartphones or laptops they queue to buy status and a specific lifestyle. Semiotic theories and methods can be used to identify trends in popular culture, to understand how consumer attitudes and behavior are formed in relation to popular culture, including brands, and how marketing and advertising programs can best meet the needs of consumers by improving communication with the end user.Īpple is the quintessential example of a brand that has intertwined itself with identity. As Laura Oswald of Marketing Semiotics Inc. Marketing is all about communicating the right message, at the right time, to the right person. That powerful but invisible communication is exactly what semiotics can help marketers understand.

Your feelings and impressions are influenced by the world around you and especially by all the non-verbal symbols your brain interprets, packages and creates meaning from.

Emotional System 1 calls the shots here: it’s the source of our beliefs, and it deliberates all rational choices of System 2. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls it the preponderance of System 1 (emotional) over System 2 (rational) in the human brain:Īlthough we might think it’s System 2 that helps us make rational decisions, it’s not so. Our subconscious interpretations rely on emotions, not information. It explains meaning through our social and cultural background, revealing how we interpret messages instinctively. Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols.
