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?

CHRIS BARNHAM

I developed a keen interest in philosophy at school — where I first encountered existentialism and post-modernism. At university, I studied philosophy and focused on the theoretical backdrop to modernity that developed in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century periods. This created a lifelong interest in the topics of epistemology, human cognition, and meaning creation which, in later life, became a central facet of my marketing career. The underlying curiosity that philosophy invokes is essential to any semiotician. As a discipline, philosophy encourages us to acknowledge that the world is not how we see it. Indeed, it drives us to the conclusion that the very way in which we experience the world informs what we think it is. Our cognitive powers are not neutral.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHRIS BARNHAM

My first encounter with semiotics occurred when I was working on the client side. I immediately recognized its philosophical roots and the challenge that it poses to the conventional model of cognition that is still widely adopted in marketing. As a discipline, semiotics posits the core idea that consumers experience ‘essences’ in culture (and brands, of course, are essences in markets). These essences, created by consumers, are the true carriers of meaning.

This position is, of course, in radical contrast to conventional marketing perspectives that (rather dualistically) conceive the world as containing products (and services) which then have psychological associations. The dominance of this model goes unquestioned in most business schools, marketing departments, and creative agencies. Paradoxically, however, this model complicates our grasp of the branding process, and it leads directly, for example, to the flawed ‘messaging’ model of brand communication.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

CHRIS BARNHAM

From this initial experience of semiotics on the client side, I became increasingly interested in it as a practising qualitative researcher — often using semiotic theory and analysis in commercial projects. In 2014, I decided to formalize my background in semiotics by earning a PhD at University College London. Once I started my postgraduate research, my interest in cognition drew me immediately to Peirce. My thesis evaluated how Peirce’s semiotics emerge from the philosophical traditions of the nineteenth century — taking quite a different view on semiotics to those who come to Peirce from linguistics. During the Covid lockdown I was able to write a more comprehensive analysis of Peirce in a book — The Natural History of the Sign — published by De Gruyter in 2022. Here I try to show how Peirce’s semiotics is founded in a fundamental rejection of our conventional account of cognition. Peirce sees human cognition itself as working through sign systems. In other words, we don’t just see signs — we see the world through signs.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

CHRIS BARNHAM

The key attributes required are a refusal to accept the key tenets of modernity and to challenge the ways in which Western culture conventionally sees the world. When applied to marketing culture this means adopting a critical stance on what brands are and how they behave. As mentioned earlier, this involves a rejection of the belief that brands behave like physical objects and have brand associations. The latter model draws much of its strength, of course, from the fact that the quantitative mindset requires marketing professionals to think about brands in this way. Otherwise, its modus operandi — the counting of incidences — won’t work. But this is a case of the methodological tail wagging the dog. Just because quantitative research has only one way to think about brands does not mean that this is how brands actually are.

In contrast to this, a good semiotician should start with the assumption that brands are essences created semiotically. This requires a different model of cognition and a radically different (semiotic) account of how brand meaning is created.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHRIS BARNHAM

These choices very much reflect my philosophical entrée into semiotics.

• The best book on what is flawed in our conventional model of cognition is Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty explains the dominant model of cognition in our modern world and how it underpins our understanding of the world. This book, in fact, makes a great introduction to Peirce, who shares many of the same criticisms of our model of cognition.
• Purely Objective Reality is by John Deely, another semiotician who comes from a background in philosophy rather than linguistics/cultural studies. It presents a view of semiotics that takes the discipline beyond the analysis of culture and opens up the possibility that semiotics has a role to play in understanding the world more generally. It is not an easy read, but I found it invaluable in understanding Peirce.
• The third book is more accessible and takes semiotics into the world of child-learning theory. This is Vygotsky’s 1934 book on child development, Thought and Language. This book hardly uses the terminology of modern semiotics, but it describes the activity of concept formation in terms that parallel Peirce’s semiotics. I found this book invaluable in understanding Peirce’s semiotics. When applied to marketing, Vygotsky inadvertently provides a useful semiotic model of how consumers build brands.

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?

CHRIS BARNHAM

Critically, I take semiotics beyond the purely ‘cultural’. I use it to analyse how brands are created, how they are structured, and how their meaning can be subsequently managed by clients. As such, I analyse the brand as a sign itself — e.g., as a carrier of meaning, rather than a sender of ‘messages’ using cultural signs in its brand communications.

I combine this approach with the belief that consumers are semioticians too. Peirce argues that meaning is created at the individual level — it does not just exist collectively in culture. As such, consumers are the ‘creators’ of brands because brand meaning is formed in the mind of each consumer in the activity of sign formation. Each individual will create brand meaning in their own particular way, which is why consumers can have differing views of the same brand. This is a radical suggestion, as semiotics traditionally positions its appeal on an understanding of meaning-creation at a cultural level. Peircean semiotics opens up a new possibility: that of understanding the divergence of consumer views on a particular brand.

It is thus possible to combine semiotics and qualitative research in a new methodology: “Qualitative Semiotics”. I have written about this potential new field in the International Journal of Market Research (2019) — winning a MRS Best Paper award in the following year.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHRIS BARNHAM

Qualitative Semiotics allows marketing companies to understand how brands create their meanings through ‘propositional hierarchies’. Every brand has one and every brand finds that its ‘propositional hierarchy’ is (or is not) expressed in its various touchpoints: packaging, advertising, merchandising, online presence, etc. These ‘propositional hierarchies’ are formed through the ways in which signs combine to create meaning and they can be explored with consumers.

There is an order effect in the way that ‘propositional hierarchies’ are formed. This can often mean that competing brands in a particular market have similar values, but they arrive at very different meanings depending on how their ‘propositional hierarchies’ are formed. The task of the semiotician is thus to identify how a brand is structured looking at two dimensions. (1) What are the values of the brand and how are they ordered in a hierarchy? (2) What qualifications of these values are expressed by the brand? The interplay of these two dimensions uncovers how a brand’s meaning is constructed.

Projects where I have used this technique include positioning studies in the financial sector for banks, branding projects in the UK yogurt market, and packaging studies in the Hard Seltzer sector.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHRIS BARNHAM

Semiotics is still in its infancy — both within marketing and within the wider culture. It has immense opportunities to reframe how marketing companies think about brands and the ways in which meaning is created. Commercial semioticians have, for all the right reasons, focused on selling semiotics as a ‘cultural’ tool. But the real power of semiotics lies in understanding how individual consumers create their own meaning systems. As such, semiotics has, in many ways, the opportunity to transcend both traditional quantitative and qualitative techniques. These latter approaches assume that meaning is simply a matter of ‘association’ (the quantitative mindset) or that meaning is simply a matter of ‘psychology’ (the qualitative approach). In contrast, Peirce shows that consumer meanings are created through sign formation. At the grave risk of proposing a ‘Third Way’, I believe this may represent a new way forward for semiotics in the next decade.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

CHRIS BARNHAM

Peirce offers a stronger, deeper, and more comprehensive account of how signs work. Critically, he takes sign development back to the basics of human cognition and he rejects the conventional model. Saussure, in contrast, hardly addresses the question of cognition. He simply assumes that we observe things in the world and that they can, through culture, become signs. This approach from Saussure is not surprising; he is a linguist rather than a philosopher. But it does mean that his account of meaning creation is entirely cut off from the world. Signs, in his view, become a system of arbitrary constructions based on culture, whilst, for Peirce, signs emerge from our struggle to understand the world. The effect of this is startling — Saussure’s semiology institutionalises Cartesian Dualism with his insistence on the arbitrary nature of the sign. In contrast, Peirce view his own semiotics as a means to overcome such dualism.

Peirce and Saussure agree that symbols are the main carriers of meaning in our culture. The key difference between them is that Peirce provides an underlying framework which explains how such symbols are formed (and also how they can change over time), whereas Saussure starts from the view that signs are arbitrary cultural constructions in a synchronic system of meaning. To put the distinction between the two thinkers in a nutshell: Saussure believes that words have meanings, whilst Peirce adopts the much older view that meanings have words. For Peirce, the pool of possible meanings (e.g., essences) is much wider and deeper than the meanings that can be captured in words.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHRIS BARNHAM

I would suggest reading as much philosophy as you can and to apply this to the view in marketing (often propounded by business schools/marketing courses etc.) that brands operate in a dualistic manner. Paradoxically, this mindset actually undermines what brands are, how they are structured, and how they evolve. And this mindset makes our professional task of understanding brands much harder.

Key to becoming a successful marketing professional is, I believe, a recognition that the consumer is the source of brand meaning-making — not the brand owner or their communication agencies. Often this view is expressed in marketing circles as a need to ‘understand the consumer’, or to ‘see their point of view’. But, in fact, what is required is a recognition that the consumer generates meaning and does so semiotically. The brand simply provides the material from which that meaning is formed.

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