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?

ASHLEY MAURITZEN

As a child, I belonged to the rarefied British social group of “expats” – breaking the record for Biggest Baby born in a Singapore hospital, observing the doomed economic bubble of late-’80s Tokyo from my pushchair, romping across the empty beaches and emptier building lots of ’90s Dubai, and shivering out the Gulf War in an Edinburgh girls’ school haunted by long-dead paternal aunts in outsize gym knickers. Suffice to say, it was hard for me to make sense of things. Because the signs – and their meanings – kept changing. So I tried harder.

Things I learnt as a child that make me the semiotician I am today:

• To avoid waking in a strange place, our understanding of the world must be subject to constant semiotic reinterpretation – because change happens impossibly fast. Nothing stays the same – and it’s not just the memory of the world we grew up in that fades.

• The choppier the semiotic seas, the more we seek out “fixed” signs to provide a sense of continuity. As a child, I derived security from the otherworldly universalism of Disneyland Parks, which looked and felt the same in Tokyo, Paris and LA — I remain fascinated with the “magical” substance of iconicity (branded or otherwise) today.

• We harness signs to construct our identities — and in the absence of default identity markers (whether through displacement or societal challenge) we get to define our own. For me, as the 9-year-old resident of a Spanish-style Dubai bungalow seeking to make sense of my “Britishness”, that meant putting on a bonnet and rebranding myself a Victorian orphan. A state of flux provides opportunity for both good and bad meaning-making agents — as a professional, I partner with brands doing thoughtful work in the first camp.   

• As individuals and consumers, we would be wise to go below the surface — to read the small print on the bottle, consider the aisle on which it sits, what we know about the retailer etc. before we drink the Kool-Aid. It won’t just enrich our experience — it equips us to be active and purposeful participants within it. That’s why, in my first year at boarding school, unable to make sense of the unwritten rule book that governed this brave “old” world, I set out to read the ultimate primary text — The Bible — instead. It was an odd look for a gangly 11-year-old agnostic, but it was my first step on a path of “conscious” cultural self-education.

In the context of the global digital experience and accelerated technological and social change, we are all “expats” — making the cultivation and application of a semiotic mindset increasingly critical to navigation for individuals and brands alike.

SEMIOVOX

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

ASHLEY MAURITZEN

I studied English Literature at Oxford, where I must have bumped into semiotics at some point — be that in a book, tutorial or pub. But my first real encounter took place at Flamingo International in 2007. Chris Arning was leading their semiotics offering and I was bringing “new grad energy” to qualitative research. I’d already realised that my Research Executive role was a case of “right industry, wrong methodology” when I got a clear fix on what Chris was doing. I was blown away by the realisation that there existed a language and methodology for the kind of meaning hunting I’d been doing for years; and that I could give this passionate line of theoretical personal enquiry, practical commercial resonance.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

ASHLEY MAURITZEN

I left Flamingo to do an MA at the London College of Fashion – and, afterwards, spent a couple of years writing and editing an online magazine. I might have called myself a “fashion journalist” at this time – but I wasn’t. I was a semiotician working in fashion journalism, writing lengthy articles decoding different shades of lipstick and challenging unlucky creative directors to justify every single visual reference.

The transition from undercover fashion semiotician to independent commercial one began, once again, with Chris. He was in the process of launching Creative Semiotics when I bumped into him in a vegan café in Soho in 2010. Neither of us is vegan. It must have meant something. He invited me to get involved in a project. And the rest is history.

Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the very best commercial semioticians practicing in the UK — from Rob Thomas of Practical Semiotics to Gareth Lewis at Space Doctors to the one-and-only Greg Rowland. They provided a working semiotics education, and a client focus from the first day.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

ASHLEY MAURITZEN

A good semiotician must possess a vast reservoir of cultural knowledge and a peculiar drive to keep adding — from past and present, near and far, high and low, niche and mainstream. To stay afloat in this, they rely on their “magpie brain” — the ability to spot semiotic gems, constantly defining (and redefining) established and emerging patterns. In this sense, a good semiotician is always working.

“Creativity” is a word that gets chucked around a lot, and rightly so — it informs both thinking (the ability to make powerful lateral connections) and practise through the application of semiotics to communication. This is particularly important when delivering impactful work to clients — as a commercial practitioner, I take pride in bringing real inspirational stretch to strategy and delivering accessible insight in a way that engages everyone in the room

Natural ability counts for a lot — but there are some qualities that make an experienced semiotician a “better” one, which I can only claim after nearly 15 years in the industry:

• Firstly, an experienced semiotician is comfortable with uncertainty, following the thread when the signs get blurry instead of rigging the outcome. This takes confidence rooted in precedence — and is where real futures insight comes from.
• Secondly, an experienced semiotician is highly-attuned to “the click” — that felt sense of unlocking, as multiple semiotic bolts and pins fall into place. It’s a cultivated sensation — which is why, the longer they practice, the more sophisticated locks they are capable of cracking.

SEMIOVOX

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

ASHLEY MAURITZEN

I’m not the kind of semiotician who spends their nights in with Peirce and Saussure, which makes this question a challenging one. But if I must…

• Umberto Eco’s On Beauty. This magnificently comprehensive illustrated history of a western ideal is a wonderful and necessary reminder that the gruelling aesthetic standards that govern us are far from innate. Working a lot in the semiotics of personal care, beauty and fashion, this is something I am keen to impress upon clients as a platform for positive innovation.
• Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. This radical memoir uses the recurring motif of the “dream house” as a lens through which to explore an abusive relationship — powerfully demonstrating how the semiotics of a place can be changed through genre and lived experience.
• From Buffyverse to recipe collections to metaphysical poetry, every single book I’ve ever read has made me a better semiotician. I’d simply recommend reading widely.

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?

ASHLEY MAURITZEN

Recently, I’ve been saying “commercial semiotics is the study of signs in culture — to understand how meaning is conveyed so brands can persuade.”

As a committed evangelist for the unique value added by commercial semiotics, I will always try to fit my “testimony” to brief. But the points I come back to again and again are that commercial semiotics is a methodology that can…

• … go beyond individual perspective into collective reality
• … provide genuinely tangible toolkits for brand activity
• … make lateral connections that spark true human creativity
• … unlock the “why” behind “what the hell is going on?” to generate real future trajectories
• … “join the dots” between culture, category and brand to create meaningful consumption experiences that are far more than the sum of their parts

Today, in the context of “CONSTANT CONTENT”, I’m particularly keen to emphasise the role semiotics can play in unlocking the narrative in the noise — by applying classic semiotic techniques to the dislocated digital signifier soup. 

SEMIOVOX

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

ASHLEY MAURITZEN

I enjoy all of it. Whether it’s a super-granular piece of logo analysis or the expansive exploration of an abstract ideal, the payoff is the same — you get to make things make sense.

Having established a high base level for enjoyment, there is no denying that some projects / project elements offer the biggest reward — to me and clients:

• Strategic Recommendations. I’m astonished when clients don’t ask for these (often, I’ll give them anyway). The critical difference between academic and applied semiotics is the presence of a business question — something insight doesn’t answer, but strategy does. 
• Future Forecasting. Semiotics goes beyond trends and into trajectories, and while no one can tell the future with certainty, applying a Residual, Dominant and Emergent lens to culture identifies compelling scenarios and energetic white space.
• Brand Audits. It’s amazing what clients don’t know about their brands. A simple, timely semiotic audit exposes damaging assumptions and inherited weaknesses, providing an opportunity for true alignment within client teams and a solid basis for innovation.  
• Adjacent Borrowing. Clients know a lot about their competitor set — but there is so much inspiration to find beyond. I love helping them identify and combine unexpected adjacent categories for inspiration.

I’m as happy working across financial services as oven chips. However, my very real interest in identity construction / projection through consumption plays out most frequently in personal care, beauty, luxury and fashion category work.

SEMIOVOX

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

ASHLEY MAURITZEN

My frustrations are client frustrations — ones I’ve heard again and again when they recount getting “burnt” by previous project experiences. Namely, that semiotics is overwhelming (drowning them in detail), alienating (overly academic and complex) and disconnected (fascinating, yes, but they can’t see the commercial application).

For this reason, semiotics remains an underutilised strategic insight tool. That’s a shame for semioticians and brand alike. As a practitioner, I’m doggedly anti-“guru” — taking it back (again and again) to their business questions and subscribing to the rule that there is nothing smarter than being able to put it simply.

At the other end of the spectrum is the potential for semantic bleaching as “semiotics” becomes a bit of a buzz word. The explosion of digital content means brands are finally taking on board the importance of culture — and in this context, semiotics should flourish as a strategic tool. Where trend work captures the relentless abundance of “what”, semiotics defines relevance through “why”; and where futurism loses itself in the leading edge, semiotics forecasts tangible evolutions for the target (mass!) market.

Semiotics is quite unlike any other tool for culture analysis out there — yet there it is, popping up across LinkedIn profiles and agency websites. In this context, this uniquely focused methodology is at the risk of becoming diluted — and I frequently find myself at pains to explain to clients just what makes it “better” than trends (or their in-house social listening AI, for that matter).

Speaking of AI, it certainly feels like a bit of an industry “trigger word” in 2024 — but I’m excited about what a more partnered (human + machine) approach has to offer. AI collaboration provides an opportunity to examine and focus on what exactly we, as human semioticians, are uniquely equipped to deliver. Why not let it help with the rest?

SEMIOVOX

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

ASHLEY MAURITZEN

I can’t champion learning “on the job” enough — and the more people you work with, the better. Busy semioticians will always welcome affordable (which should never mean “free”) project support from culturally intelligent individuals with a natural pattern-spotting capability. So reach out, hang out and, where you can, help out.

MAKING SENSE 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.

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