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?

NICK GADSBY

I had a pretty typical English upbringing — a lower middle-class family from the northwest. Neither of my parents were remotely academic. We took all our holidays in Britain, so I was not exposed to a great deal of cultural ‘otherness’ in my day-to-day life that might have made me conscious of things as possessing symbolic meaning.

My first exposure to cultural difference was through history. The ruins of medieval castles and the strange mounds of prehistoric landscapes caught my interest and made me think about how people would have lived differently and also how their beliefs may have differed from our own. This was buttressed by a growing interest in fantasy and science fiction literature. Starting with things like Lord of the Rings — and the numerous other fantasy settings out there — that presented fully fleshed-out cultures and belief systems that were different from my own experiences. This came to a head when I encountered roleplaying games where the systems of these worlds were laid out in analytic detail.

In both cases, the worlds of the past and the worlds of fantasy had their own systems of understanding that differed from our own. And over time I started to reflect on our own norms and symbolic systems and began to think more about how temporal and arbitrary they often appeared to be.

SEMIOVOX

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

NICK GADSBY

That would be the applied structuralism I came across in anthropology and archaeology — Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Sahlins, etc. The strength of their approaches lies in the way they make the idea of culture accessible and easy to comprehend. It could be argued that these approaches sometimes oversimplify culture. But, to counter that as a commercial semiotician, being able to make the complex simple is really a strength.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

NICK GADSBY

I got into research after completing an MA in Anthropology. I was always interested in bringing the bigger cultural picture into commercial research. When I began as a researcher, I wasn’t aware that semiotics was a method that was actually used in commercial research. When I discovered that it was, it felt like a natural move to become an official ‘semiotician’ and formalise what I was already doing.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

NICK GADSBY

Beyond the obvious attributes like curiosity, rigour, and so on…

• Being imaginative with your data and insights. Culture is inherently creative and from an evolutionary perspective it’s a problem solver — a lot of the time it’s about resolving tensions or finding new ways to frame an issue and that often requires some counterfactual thinking. Trying to imagine what a brand, a category, a society would be like if a new element was introduced — how would people respond, how would the category dynamics change, etc. So we’re not just talking about what culture is currently, we’re helping to create what culture can become.
• Being interested in people. This may not be the most obvious trait for a semiotician, as our method is often seen as precluding people. But ultimately what we produce has to engage and motivate people. Personally, I enjoy the opportunity to see people talking about issues or engaging with brands, and to use tools like language analysis to get a deeper sense of where they’re coming from.
• Stepping out of our cultural comfort zone. Engaging with things like biology, evolution, political economy, geopolitics, etc. — as these factors also shape culture.

SEMIOVOX

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

NICK GADSBY

I don’t tend to read books that are specifically about semiotics, but rather books that look broadly at the way culture shapes society and people and its relationship with factors like the material and biological aspects of the world. A few books I’ve read in the last decade or so that have really inspired me are:

• Ian Hodder’s Entangled: A New Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Hodder is an archaeologist who takes an interest in the more theoretical as well as practical application of archaeology. In his most recent books, he has developed the idea of entanglement to describe how humans and things become dependent on one another in both positive enabling ways and negative constraining ways over extended periods of time that shape the choices societies have open to them. His idea that humans are always looking for ways to overcome a sense of alienation from material things, including our own bodies, is useful for thinking about issues like consumerism, innovation, and what motivates people to buy new things and give up old things.
• Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Barrett is an affective neuroscientist interested in the social construction of emotions. This book can help us do semiotics better by showing how emotions aren’t just something people feel about brands, but can also be constructed by brands to create a more distinctive role in consumers’ minds — e.g., brands that put words to a vague sense, to use an obvious example. (Such as Crunchie’s ‘Friday feeling’ or Ty-Phoo’s ‘you only get an OO with Ty-Phoo’.)
• Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making us Smarter. Henrich is an evolutionary anthropologist whose research focuses on the relationship between biological evolution and culture — known as ‘gene-culture co-evolution’. This is a perspective that overcomes the nature/nurture debate by showing that nurture — culture — is essentially an evolved adaptation that has been employed to enable humans to become the planet’s dominant species, for better or worse. This book and a more recent one, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, provide an excellent framework for grounding semiotics in more contemporary understandings of how society and culture work.

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?

NICK GADSBY

Clients are still very receptive to the idea of ‘unlocking the hidden meanings of brands’ or ‘identifying consumers’ unconscious perceptions’. Where a client is a bit sceptical, running through a good case study usually does the job — so it helps to have a handful of different project types in your back pocket.

SEMIOVOX

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

NICK GADSBY

I particularly enjoy projects where I have to use semiotic approaches in an innovative way or to shed light on an unusual problem. The reason why is because it is exciting and presents a challenge. Semiotics is such a flexible method that I find there’s always some new and interesting way to apply it.

SEMIOVOX

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

NICK GADSBY

By and large, our discipline is in as healthy place as it’s ever been. But if I was to nitpick, I think sometimes it can come across as quite dry, when semiotics should be exciting and thought-provoking. It’s not uncommon to hear clients talking about how excited they are to hear what the insights are from semiotics — so you never want to disappoint.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

NICK GADSBY

I’m more anthropologically influenced, so can I say neither? Bourdieu and Sahlins are my go-tos.

SEMIOVOX

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

NICK GADSBY

Don’t get too bogged down in theory. Theory is there to make you think about issues from different perspectives — it’s a tool for thinking and analysing, not a statement of fact. If the evidence doesn’t follow the theory, it probably means the theory is wrong. Theories are generalisations, and often motivated by some kind of agenda, especially in the social sciences, so they are not going to be the right fit for every subject of study.

Collect lots of data, spend a lot of time looking at it, and be imaginative with what you do with it!

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