Here is an image. What does it mean to you?
I asked this of 100 friends and colleagues a couple of weeks ago. Many responded ‘peace’ or ‘victory’. Neither of which surprised me. But almost as many gave other answers, such as many variations on the number 2, what Asian people do when photographed, no hard feelings, John Lennon, bunny ears behind someone’s head, and pardon me, but ‘up yours’.
So what does this have to do with brand communication? If you used this image in your advertising, people would take away different things. And this is what happens with every piece of brand communication you put out there. What you convey about your brand is rooted not only in what you say about your brand – the message or content – but also how you say it - the body language of the brand. Studies show that body language is responsible for more than half of communication between two people, only 7% is through words, the rest through intonation & the like. And this is true of interaction between brands and people as well. It’s the body language of brands that communicates the most.
So this begs the question, what is the body language of brands? It all comes down to semiotics. Space Doctors sweetly describe semiotics as being “a bit like the G-Spot. Everybody has heard about it but nobody quite knows how to put their finger on it.” Ok more seriously, semiotics is the study of signs & symbols and their social meaning. And once understood, semiotics I would argue, can quickly come to be a powerful tool in your marketing toolbox. Because applying semiotic analysis to the development of brand communication can lead to the holy grail of deeper retention, resonance and involvement.
Why is this so? Because of two basic human truths revealed through neuroscience.
First, emotion rules over rationalization – our emotional brain reacts first, acts faster and is more dominant than the thinking part of our brains. As Franzen & Bowman describe “our emotions see to it that we are convinced of certain views, regardless of whether they are true or untrue.” This is what drives the purchase of any & all brands that have no functional superiority. What the brand means to people, what it symbolizes, trumps what it actually delivers.
Second, the subconscious trumps consciousness. Lachman & Butterfield talk about how ‘consciousness is the exception, not the rule… by its very nature, conscious thought seems the only sort. But it is not the only sort, it is in the minority”. In fact 95% of thought, emotion & learning is thought to occur in the unconscious mind. This is why people with amnesia can be taught new skills which they then will deny knowing.
So the inconvenient truth of marketing is that unconscious emotions drive brand preference & purchase decisions. People retain much more about advertising than they can consciously access or express. This alone makes creative research a very imperfect practice. And makes semiotics an invaluable tool.
When we design marketing efforts we do so to convey a previously strategized and aligned to brand message. But this intended message must pass through the culture of our target before it reaches them. And how the target interprets what we meant by our marketing efforts, will depend on what the communication codes we used mean to them personally. It’s not what you put out there, it’s how it’s perceived & received. People complete ads and co-create brands in their own life context. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said ‘what you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say’. It's why consumers remembered a Gain detergent ad as a deodorant ad because Axe owned the communication code of women being attracted to the scent of men. Oh the dreaded executional distraction.
Here’s another example that blows my mind. A new DC tourism campaign broke last month themed Power Trip. My first thought was they must be nuts. In the current day context, with much of the world seeing America as on an unfortunate power trip, I think it’s very risky to associate DC with this turn-of-phrase when trying to attract tourists. My only assumption is that they are targeting Americans tourists, but I would hope in today’s political climate that Americans would also be uncomfortable with their capital city calling itself a power trip. The DC Tourism Board & their agency, likely did not do their semiotic homework.
Now while semiotics has always mattered I would advocate it matters even more in today’s world for several reasons.
Persuasion is alive and well but it has changed. We live in an age of ‘everything has been said’. Brands have been talking for a long time, and consumers have come to expect a certain way to hear from brands, which allows them to disengage. Plus in most categories today, there is a baseline trust that virtually all brands are going to do their job (all toilet paper is soft, all beer tastes good). Understanding the underlying communication codes of your category will highlight opportunities for disruption and re-engagement. Figure out how to break your category conventions.
And you’d do well to understand the cultural conventions of your target as well. 47% of Torontonians are now visible minorities. Immigrants make up 16% of the Canadian population today. Understanding cultural symbolism matters in the Canadian marketing, because ethnic groups are no longer bonus-buyers in this country - they are half the market in places like Toronto.
But it’s not only the ethnic mix of Canada that makes semiotics important, it is also today’s socio-cultural landscape. In today’s world, trying to catch people’s attention is harder than ever. In this knowledge era, with the relentless bombardment of brand choices, advertising & other marketing efforts, people’s systems would be overloaded if they actively engaged with everything all the time. The statistics are horrifying, and our need to filter is greater than ever. So people protect themselves by unconsciously limiting what they pay attention to.
And coupled with this marketing overload is life overload. People of today have less and less attention available to give to marketing. I would actually suggest, that no matter how you define your brand target, you are targeting ‘The Distracted Person’. There are a million more important things for people to give their attention to than the brand of toothpaste or floor cleaner they buy. If we even hope for our brands to be given the time of day, we need to connect them to something that is meaningful to our target, or they will automatically filter us out. Again, semiotics can help us get through those self-protective filters.
Finally, leveraging semiotics can also help create a shortcut for your brand through brand conventions, but be sure it’s the right shortcut for the majority of your target. I asked my sample of 100 people what this image said to them:
I am sure that Walmart would be thrilled to hear that they were the dominant association. And I’m sure they wouldn’t be surprised to hear that by using this symbol, they were associating the Walmart brand with ‘a feeling of happiness’, and the sentiments of ‘have a nice day’, ‘spread cheer’, ‘don’t worry, be happy’, ‘keep smiling’ and ‘friendliness’. But I am not as sure they’d be pleased to hear other associations many people have with the happy face symbol… illegal drugs, raves, the 60’s, childishness, silliness, MSN symbol, Forrest Gump. And interestingly, ‘low prices’ didn’t surface at all.
And one final reason to engage in semiotics is cold hard cash. Given the sheer cost of building a successful brand today, it is reassuring to have rational structures like communication codes within which to assess creativity. With the proliferation of new media choices comes un-chartered waters, and having an understanding of category conventions and the meaning behind the signs & symbols you associate with your brand can do two things: from a marketer’s point-of-view, it can boost corporate confidence in a creative direction; and from an agencies point-of-view, it can cut down on reiterations of creative work. And unfortunately, there is simply less money today to play with. With the growing power of retailers and the rising cost of goods, marketing budgets are shrinking. So the faster and more cost-efficiently you can associate positive meaning with your brand the better.
So go find the G-spot.
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