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.

London…

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?

RACHEL LAWES

Books were my main form of entertainment, as a child. My mother liked old things, so in addition to contemporary books for children I read Angela Brazil’s school stories from the 1920s, Richmal Crompton’s “William” stories from the 1930s, and Victorian blockbusters such as Polly, A New Fashioned Girl. The older books were quite densely written and characters spoke formally compared to the people in my everyday life. I noticed the difference. I became very interested in language and how people express themselves. 

As a young teenager, I used to go the reference library and look up witches and ghosts. If you do that, you soon run into incantations in Latin, magical symbols and sigils, and so forth. I continue to be very interested in magic to this day. There’s a lot of it in Britain. In 2019, at the annual conference of the Market Research Society in London, I presented some original research concerning the everyday practice of magic among consumers, with researcher Jessica Herridge and noted British magician Julian Vayne. I was most delighted to have the opportunity to work with him.

SEMIOVOX

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

RACHEL LAWES

I was at Loughborough University in the UK, working with the internationally renowned Discourse and Rhetoric Group and doing doctoral research which was supervised by Prof. Jonathan Potter. Now at Rutgers University, he was and is a superstar of discourse analysis in academic circles, so I was very lucky. I was passionately interested in language and methods of decoding it. I lived and breathed discourse analysis, with side orders of conversation analysis, micro-sociology and ethnomethodology.

I spent a lot of time in the library, exploring the family tree of research methods. I wanted to understand discourse analysis and every research method that is even tangentially related to it. I soon found that semiotics was one of the parents of discourse analysis. It used a familiar dialect; a lot of shared vocabulary and shared theory. But the scope of it seemed enormous. Discourse analysis succeeds because it is very specifically focused on language and conversation. That gives it rigour and precision tools. Semiotics succeeds because of its vast and ambitious scope. There’s no aspect of human communication, artistic expression or cultural product that it can’t handle. 

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

RACHEL LAWES

I simply started doing it. I read a lot about semiotics, I was professionally trained in discourse analysis. As a grad student, understanding and exploring research methods was my full time job. So at first I read as much as I could and then I started to apply semiotic principles to the things I could see around me, in my own life and in the data I used for academic research. Later, after I left academia and joined market research, I had a lot of skills at my fingertips, including semiotics, and was pleased to find new ways to use them.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

RACHEL LAWES

Semiotic analysis: Patience. Willingness to practice and not give up. Commitment to advancing one’s own skills — pushing oneself to do better work, answer harder questions, take on more difficult challenges. Insatiable appetite for literature in which people explore semiotic questions, including anthropology, cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, social psychology. There is no question that the more you read, in any of these areas, the better your semiotic analysis will be. Benefits accrue over a lifetime if you keep reading.

Clients: Clarity. They don’t want to hear vague prattling or waffle at any stage of their project.

SEMIOVOX

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

RACHEL LAWES

• Before I started writing how-to books about semiotics, my most-recommended book was Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics: The Basics. It’s written for students, so it uses a clear, crisp, explanatory style which I admire and enjoy and which lots of people find accessible. It’s also a reliable book, as Chandler takes semiotics seriously and is faithful to the big theorists. He doesn’t make things up.
• Everyone loves Roland Barthes. His essays in Mythologies were and are brilliant examples of how to ‘do’ semiotic thinking and achieve insights in the space of just a few paragraphs.
• I also like [commercial semiotician] Laura Oswald’s books and contributed a chapter about semiotics and technology to her most recent collection of essays.

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?

RACHEL LAWES

Retail was the conversation topic of 2022, because I published my second book, Using Semiotics in Retail in the spring of that year. In May, Keith Sleight, Global Director of Shopping Insights at Unilever, got up on stage with me at the Retail Week Live event in London. He told the crowd that I single-handedly doubled the sales uplift that results from Unilever’s in-house shopper marketing app. Every consumer facing brand and retailer would love to double their sales, so that’s my retail or shopper marketing pitch. Even skeptical clients believe when they see the evidence of real-world profits. Retail won a Business Book Award in the UK this year.

My new book of 2023 is an expanded second edition of Using Semiotics in Marketing. Many people know this one, it’s a best-selling teach-yourself course in semiotics. In the expanded 2^nd edition, I set myself the task of finding out how consumers are trying to solve their own problems by making themselves happy. I wrote about kindness, radical optimism, in what way people want to have their feelings respected. As for commercial impact, there’s also a classic case study in this book, based on a conference paper with SCA Tissue, now Essity. The original paper was written with my client at SCA who had a clear view of sales and revenue, pre and post semiotics. Our case study details exactly how my semiotic work launched toilet paper brand Cushelle to heights of success that the client was certain they had no right to expect.

SEMIOVOX

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

RACHEL LAWES

Pharmaceuticals — I love the intellectual challenge of needing to get up to speed on the latest research and diagnostic protocols around a new-to-me illness or disorder. I’m also deeply grateful to the patients who generously agree to take part in market research and clinical trials. Over a couple of decades of pharma projects, these kind people have educated me and provided insights which I carry around with me all the time. Pain — what it is and how people cope with it. Ageing, late-onset disability — how that changes a person’s life and how they preserve their inner sense of identity through it all. Skin disorders have massive social consequences because skin is visible — people develop coping strategies, out of necessity. Attention Deficit — how does a person decide that they or their child may have AD and should seek diagnosis? I was recently part of a team that was shortlisted for a Business Impact award for our work on cancer drugs.

Banking and fintech; it’s a fast-moving category, in line with technological innovation. A lot of startups out there, looking to make banking both trustworthy and sexy. This is a nearly impossible ask, which happens to be my favourite kind. What’s more, like health and illness, money is a lens through which all of life can be viewed. (Henry James proved this to be true a century ago, as did many of the great novelists of his era.) I feel so lucky to have this birds-eye view of what’s going on with consumers, including how they spend, how they economise, how money affects the course of their lives.

Games and toys, including video games. I’ve been a committed video gamer since 1991, so a bit longer than the mere 22 years I’ve been in marketing. I’m currently working with a client that makes toys, including crossover products that combine digital gaming with a physical toy. Everyone at that company seems genuinely happy to work there. I love gaming and researching toys and games, because it gives me an opportunity to think deeply about new sets of questions which are linked to that category. What is play? Is all play creative? What is immersion and what does it tell us about the experience of not being immersed? To what extent can people transform their identities and their real lives, using only their imagination? To what extent can imagination and fantasy impact the real world that other people inhabit? Can it bankrupt a hedge fund, for instance? I wrote a lot about these topics in Using Semiotics in Retail, in the context of talking about the future.

Other than these specific categories, anything with an open brief. Many years ago, I did a project for British supermarket Tesco, where the brief was “what do consumers want?” I was almost drunk on freedom. More recently, I’ve been lucky to work with a client who initially supplied a fairly specific brief but is now giving me licence to talk about whatever I want in connection with their brand. As a result, I’m now deeply immersed in the world surrounding this brand, I think about it all the time, so that’s how the client benefits. It’s not something I do only within work hours. The experience of this kind of freedom makes me feel like a diver who is exploring a new sea. Open briefs are similar to large, open-world games. There are boundaries, of the brand or category, but the maps are large and the objective is broad. Go out there, find interesting stuff, bring it back. Apply theory, plus 20 years of commercial experience that I earned by playing the game on different maps over time. Convert into marketing strategy.

SEMIOVOX

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

RACHEL LAWES

I don’t have frustrations, only occasionally mild disappointment. I’m disappointed when client-side marketers have poor experiences with semiotics. Sometimes suppliers who don’t properly understand semiotics make big claims and leave clients feeling underwhelmed. But I will say that as semiotics proliferates, there are a lot of good suppliers around and I’m really happy to see that. Growth is a good thing. We want more skilled people, more exciting published work and more happy customers.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

RACHEL LAWES

A person who is tired of Saussure is tired of life.

SEMIOVOX

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

RACHEL LAWES

Semiotics as a line of work is, in many ways, similar to creative writing, painting and other forms of art. If you want a career in it, just get going. Make some art. The early attempts won’t be very good but that’s how you improve. You don’t get better at semiotics (or drawing or writing a novel) by not doing it. It’s true of science as well, in fact. Do some experiments. Don’t worry if they seem naïve or clumsy. Just get your lab coat on and fire up the Bunsen burner. After a period of time you’ll discover your forte and become very passionate about it. That’s when you start breaking new ground and you’ll have a USP beyond ‘I do semiotics’.

Remember to enjoy it! It’s supposed to be fun.

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