What makes a semiotician tick? SEMIOVOX’s Josh Glenn has invited his fellow practitioners in the field of commercial semiotics, from around the world, to answer a few revealing questions.

Shanghai…

SEMIOVOX

When you were a child/teen, how did your future fascination with symbols, cultural patterns, interpreting “texts,” and getting beneath the surface of daily life manifest itself?

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

As a young child, my favorite book was an oversized (over 50cm tall) World Atlas, its imitation-leather cover boasting golden lettering. I’d skip past the opening pages, which featured satellite photos (still relatively rare in the mid-1980s), and dive into the continent maps. Zooming in on the exotic place names of West Africa, and marveling at Australia’s relatively empty coastlines, I’d then zoom out again, fascinated by the latitude and longitude lines forming a grid above the gradient-based topography. The topography and the lines indicating the shores were indexical codes that I could use to imagine myself traveling in a way that felt real and natural; but the grid of thin black lines — laid atop the other images according to some perfect and abstract order, forming an undeviating network — were puzzling and alluring. They represented a symbolic dimension “above” the map, some mythical knowledge that eluded me.

SEMIOVOX

Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

Like most of us working in commercial semiotics, I did not discover semiotics in an academic environment. In high school, we studied rhetorical devices; and at the engineering school I attended — in France, where I grew up — we learned the basics of Saussure’s contributions to linguistic theory. (Why? No doubt because Saussure’s notion that thoughts have to become ordered, and sounds have to be articulated, for language to occur, was considered useful to the scientific and engineering discipline of computational linguistics.) It wasn’t until I was in China at age 30, though, that I really began to study Semiotics. I’d become fascinated by the human ability to make sense of the world — and I was intrigued by how Semiotics offered luxuriant taxonomies, and offered access to underlying hierarchies, yielding layers of interpretations. Since I began to use the methodology, surprises have kept surfacing.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

I live and work in China, a market whose cultural opacity makes it particularly difficult for western brands to enter, grow, and innovate. Semiotics plays a crucial — even cruel, sometimes — role in guiding understanding through decoding, then guiding action through recoding. I love the Chinese language and culture, and commercial semiotics offered an opportunity for me to contribute to the mediation between China and the rest of the world I’ve developed my own semiotic methodology dictated by that drive.

Semiotics plays a crucial — even cruel, sometimes — role in guiding understanding.

Before I developed my semiotics methodology, I was already doing two other sorts of work: consulting on Chinese naming for western brands, and organizing consumer research to test names. (So with a wink to Peirce, you could say that for me, semiotics was neither First nor Second but rather Third.) Over time, I’ve developed other practices and methodologies in the fields of design, brand strategy, brand communications, brand experience, brand innovation, and brand culture — my company, Labbrand, has over a hundred consultants at this point. Semiotics has emerged as a kind of lingua franca to help smoothly coordinate these disciplines; that is to say, it’s part of our corporate culture — something that we do every day, behind the scenes, invisible to clients, as a productivity method that prevents loss of value. To that end, semiotics is the only form of training that we require for all employees each year.

I should add that semiotics is also useful in connecting the worlds of branding and R&D — which, as someone with scientific training, is important to me. For example, when tasked by a QSR chain with imagining the future of “Roasted Chicken” via taste cues, semiotics allowed us to leverage the category imaginaries [the values, institutions, rules, and symbols via which people imagine the QSR category] as a guidance system for the creation of the physical experience of taste. That was one of the most challenging and rewarding projects, for me.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

The ability to deliver value to the client is paramount. What’s required is experience, combined with a passion for the client’s problem — and the ability to make complex learnings look simple.  

SEMIOVOX

What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

• Jean-Marie Klinkenberg’s Précis de Sémiotique Générale. This book contains everything one could ever need to know about putting semiotic theory into practice. It’s extremely clear, accessible and practical, deep but never lacking wit and humor — and never too abstruse. Probably the most valuable book on Semiotics not yet translated to English.
• Jean-Marie Floch’s Sémiotique, marketing et communication: sous les signes, les stratégies (Semiotics, Marketing and Communication: Beneath the Signs, the Strategies). A fundamental read in my early days as an applied semiotician. It provides a variety of case studies, applying different semiotic “tools” to different types of brand problems.
• Roland Barthes’s Système de la Mode (The Fashion System). I read this on a beach in the Kotor Bay in Montenegro, and it amazed me; it’s the most impressive of all of Barthes’ works. It’s a highly structuralist and technical attempt to depict something as complex as “the fashion system” — while remaining easily readable, and virtuosic in its interpretations.

SEMIOVOX

When someone asks you to describe what you do, what is your “elevator pitch”? How do you persuade a skeptical client to take a chance on using this tool?

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

I tell clients that Semiotics will help you…

• Harness the invisible currents of change within a category
• Make strategic decisions and navigate the future with assurance

There’s no such thing as a perfect prediction, of course. But as someone who grew up visiting an aunt in Serbia, at whose home fortune tellers would attempt to predict the future from Turkish coffee grounds, I can say with a great deal of confidence that our methodology is a very reliable one. Semiotics is also less expensive and faster than other research methods.

SEMIOVOX

What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

The most enjoyable projects are multi-market projects that allow semioticians from around the world to work together, comparing our decoding and challenging each other’s recoding. This sort of thing adds a dose of “robustness” to the process while also extending the field of interpretation. And the most rewarding projects are those that result in a new framework — a thoroughly worked-out semiotic square, perhaps, or simply an untapped layer of meaning that can unlock a brand’s or product’s potential — which perfectly fits the client’s problem and produces valuable insights that we couldn’t have anticipated without this methodology.

SEMIOVOX

What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

Semiotics methodology is sometimes questioned by quant researchers, who claim that their methods produce objective, falsifiable results, whereas semiotics seems subjective. With my scientific background, this used to frustrate me… until William Liu, director of Qualitative at Labbrand, calmly and confidently reassured our director of Quantitative, “Yes, it is easy to distinguish between good and bad semiotic analysis.” My frustration totally vanished that day.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

I most frequently employ French structuralist methods that can be attributed to Saussurean semiotics. On occasion, though, Peirce’s rhythmic trinity of “making sense” provides a more useful method. Despite the fact that I haven’t yet found a book that teaches us how to apply Peircean theory to commercial semiotics, then, I remain hopeful that one will eventually appear.

SEMIOVOX

What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?

VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

I’d suggest…

• Taking courses in Complexity that bring together both philosophical/humanistic and scientific perspectives. The study of complex systems and how patterns can emerge from them is what semioticians do, too — only we call those patterns “ideas” or “meaning.”
• If you’re interested in Computer Science, I’d suggest studying how we can augment the operational efficiency of semiotic analysis — decoding, in particular — through programming.
• No matter what you’re most passionate about — e.g., African languages, Chemistry, Organizational Science — you can combine that passion with semiotics into a unique blend.

Finally, I’d invite you to attend Semiofest!

MAKING SENSE WITH… series: MARTHA ARANGO (Sweden) | MACIEJ BIEDZIŃSKI (Poland) | BECKS COLLINS (England) | WHITNEY DUNLAP-FOWLER (USA) | IVÁN ISLAS (Mexico) | WILLIAM LIU (China) | SÓNIA MARQUES (Portugal) | CHIRAG MEDIRATTA (India / Canada) | SERDAR PAKTIN (Turkey / England) | MARIA PAPANTHYMOU (Greece / Russia) | XIMENA TOBI (Argentina) | & many more.

Also see these series: COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | MAKING SENSE WITH… | COLOR CODEX