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.

Mexico City…

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?

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

By the time I turned 16 I had lived in four countries, so I had my first encounter with the non-obviousness of culture at age 7.

New country, new school, first day of class. The teacher asks us to draw a scene from our vacations. With the blank page in vertical position and eager to make a good first impression, I sketch quick overlapping triangles along the upper half, I draw a partial sun between two of the triangles, and — just as I’m about to draw some trees and my Santiago de Chile house in the lower half of the page — the boy sharing my desk shouts, “What the *&%# are you doing!” As everybody flocked around my desk and laughed at my crazy overturned cones, I looked around at the surrounding drawings. Everybody else had neatly divided their horizontal page in two with a (more or less) straight line, with houses on top of the line, fluffy clouds and a fat sun above the houses, and green fields and cows below the line.

In Chile, where I’d come from, you see, the Andes defined the landscape… but Uruguay is a flat country. I understood all of this later, but in that moment there was only ridicule — and no help from the teacher, who was cross with me about the disruption. Reassuring my classmates that I wasn’t a complete weirdo and making friends took a couple of weeks. But it would take me the rest of my life to learn what to make of the seemingly arbitrary, odd, wonderful ways of culture.  

SEMIOVOX

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

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

Shortly before I began a PhD program in Pre-Socratic Greek Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg, Umberto Eco’s semiotics-inspired novel The Name of the Rose was published. The pleasure the text gave me was doubled when I found out that writing novels was a side act for the author’s work as a semiotician. For the next 20 years, my relation to semiotics was of a theoretical, leisurely, hedonistic nature. So of course, everything about semiotics attracted me.

Eco’s essay “L’antiporfiro” [translated as “Anti-Porphyry”] (from the 1983 collection Il Pensiero Debole) shed more light on Pre-Aristotelian rhetoric than most of the specialized literature I’d read. The “referential fallacy,” for me the guiding thread to his Trattato di Semiotica Generale [translated as A Theory of Semiotics] not only provided a fulcrum for a non-representative (Platonic) interpretation of Pre-Socratic texts, it also provided a key to the wobbly, seemingly arbitrary ways of everyday culture.

Eventually I’d discover that as a university teacher, my side act in semiotics commanded a lot more interest than my fixation with Parmenides and Protagoras.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

Some of my ex-students, now in executive positions in media and marketing, began to require consulting in semiotics. After two decades of semiotics as a leisurely theoretical interest, I had to learn how to do this work for a skeptical — and at times, disgruntled — audience. However, for the most part my clients have responded with a mixture of surprise, perplexity, and gratitude.    

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

Above all things, we should live up to the Barthesian injunction to go out into the street and see signs where others see things. A commercial semiotician, however, must figure out how not to offend the client’s common sense — and how to translate their abstract findings about signs into real-world things their clients can achieve. (Barthes, it’s worth recalling, was run over in the street by a laundry van that insisted on being a thing.) A brand is a real-world thing — but one whose market value depends on signs and meaning. When I explain this to clients, they start listening.

SEMIOVOX

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

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

• Eco’s Trattato di Semiotica Generale, as already mentioned.
• Eco’s Lector In Fabula [partially reformulated in translation as The Role of the Reader], in cogently arguing that the author of a novel does not own its meaning, serves to refute the notion that a brand’s audience is merely a target for communication — i.e., the basic principle of contemporary marketing. A brand’s owner does not solely own its meaning; it takes two — both brand and “target” audience — to tango. That’s Eco’s message to narcissistic marketers, who are naturally perplexed. To which he’d reply: Deal with it!
• Jean-Marie Floch’s Sémiotique, Marketing et Communication (translated as Semiotics, Marketing and Communication) is brilliant. I was rather lost in commercial semiotics before I read it; now, however, I typically sum up my findings — explicitly with very cooperative clients, implicitly with others — in terms of a semiotic square. Which, when properly used, is a true what-to-do and what-to-avoid instrument.

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?

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

I explain that a good brand is — in Gianfranco Marrone’s [Professor of Semiotics at the University of Palermo] terms, “a project in meaning.”

Also, I try to persuade them that the consumer is not a “target” — an enemy, of sorts, to be defeated. Can we move beyond this military approach and collaborate with consumers — help them win, instead of attempting to triumph over them? Would Shakespeare’s plays have been improved, I ask them, if he’d thought of his audience as targets to be scientifically managed?

SEMIOVOX

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

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

I enjoy food and drink enormously, so projects in these categories are my favorites. Also, food and beverage brands are more rewarding than functional brands — soap, toilet paper — because when the client knows that pleasure is the end in itself, then they are eager for deep cultural insights.

Within food and beverage, my favorite projects are those where the client understands that the brand is an evolving “meaning project” — one that must reflect changes in society and culture. Beer clients like Corona and Victoria, for example, are aware that there is a distinctive “Mexicanicity” to chelear — a concept that can’t simply be translated as “beer drinking.” I am also extremely proud of the work we’ve done for Takis, a tortilla chips brand that has held its own against bigger brands, both nationally and internationally, with an indelible streetwise authority.

SEMIOVOX

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

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

This is a very good time to be practicing semiotics. Although it is no longer an esoteric thing, the discipline still preserves some of its mystery — so clients can get excited about it.

My advice to commercial semioticians is two-fold:

• There is a cultural revolution in marketing underway, so semioticians must learn to collaborate with anthropologists — and do more field semiotics.
• On the other hand, while we must collaborate with all specialists, traditional marketers included, we should not translate our results into marketing-ese. Semioticians don’t do “targeting.”

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

Peirce, because semiotics is not just an extension of linguistics; Saussure, because semiology only needs a signifier and a signified, no need for referents.

SEMIOVOX

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

ALFREDO TRONCOSO

You don’t need to study theory to get into marketing — but commercial semioticians should do so. If you can make your way through the classics (Peirce, Saussure, Jakobson, Lottman, Greimas, Barthes, Eco) and walk the streets like Barthes (just be careful though!) seeing ever-changing sign nebulae, then it’s all downhill from there.

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