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.

Penang (Malaysia)…

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?

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

I’ve been doing all of these tasks — without being consciously aware of them, of course — since I was very young. My mother is Chinese Malaysian, my father is French-speaking Belgian, and I was born and raised in London: three places which are each complex and diverse in their own right. We travelled a lot between these places to stay in touch with family, and so as a ‘third-culture kid’ I found myself naturally exposed to very different cultural environments and trying to navigate among them as smoothly as possible. This ranged from all the tiny daily ways that cultures manifest themselves — manners, gestures, words — to the deeper cultural perspectives and mythologies that I gradually became aware underpinned these.

It’s also worth mentioning that, growing up in the eighties and nineties as global consumer culture spread from the US around the world, and spending a fair amount of time in US and Asian mall culture as a child, brands and commercial texts were another important element that shaped my view of the world, and provided a certain consistency as I moved between cultures.

SEMIOVOX

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

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

My academic background is in languages, which — probably for the same reasons I outline above — had always been a core interest and strength of mine. I first engaged with academic semiotics in the context of my master’s at Cambridge; I believe we touched on it through the lens of structuralism, as part of a general overview of the evolution of literary theory. I remember being struck by its pleasing flexibility: being introduced to it at the same time through Saussure’s more ‘scientific’ approach and Barthes’s wonderfully nuanced and human approach. After that I put it largely out of mind, having no idea that it would be any use to me in my professional life. But it did appeal to me more than most of the other literary theory approaches we encountered which seemed much more concerned with intellectual self-gratification than with actually understanding a text, or the world beyond it.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

I ended up doing semiotics because it’s the thing I was born to do, and also completely by chance. Practically, it was the early days of LinkedIn and I had just updated my profile when I was contacted by [British semiotician] Alex Gordon, who had recently started Sign Salad and was looking for someone with a background in market research (I was working at a boutique qual agency at the time) as well as in critical theory. I had no idea commercial semiotics existed. I joined him at Sign Salad in 2009 and grew the business with him, watching as semiotics went from niche and incomprehensible to… marginally more mainstream and slightly less misunderstood. I set up by myself when I moved to Brazil a few years later, and carried the business with me when I relocated to Malaysia a few years after that. I’ve been happy to have been a part of the spread of cultural insight and semiotics around the world, but most of all to have found something which allows me to be paid for expressing the way in which I naturally see the world.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

I often describe my work in terms of dimensionality, and would probably apply this to qualities I would value in a semiotician too. Breadth of experience and interest, across different cultures, languages, industries and domains of thought. Attention to small details as well as to deep philosophies and worldviews. Interest in history, understanding of how things change and how they stay constant. Flexibility and lack of dogma. Usability and visual self-expression, the ability to tell a complex story in a simple way. Commercial common sense, keeping the client’s goals in mind. Awareness and scepticism of the Western norms which dominate the marketing world, if dealing with non-Western markets.

SEMIOVOX

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

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

The books and authors which spoke to me when I read them are those which retain a flexible, open-handed approach to decoding meaning.

• As a student of French literature, I must mention Roland Barthes. Mythologies is wonderful of course, but it is probably his later work such as Camera Lucida which I would cite, which leaves more room open for the role of the emotional and the personal.
• A second would be Ways of Seeing, where I found John Berger’s accessibility and lightness of touch to be admirable and eye-opening, reading it after leaving the academic world.
• My third I have chosen to avoid the habit we have of associating semiotics just with Western thought. There are deep veins of semiotic thought elsewhere, and it is arguably more embedded in non-Western worldviews. For me the Tao Te Ching is emblematic of this search for meaning while remaining open-minded and even sceptical of the search; it embraces the necessity of understanding only through what is visible, but also the impossibility of understanding only through what is visible.

The Master observes the world

but trusts his inner vision.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is as open as the sky.

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?

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

I always have difficulty in describing what I do and tend to use different descriptions depending on who I’m talking to. As I’ve been talking about coming from a linguistic background, one description I use is this: “If you want to learn a new language, there are books to teach you, dictionaries, grammars. But if you are a brand wanting to learn a new market, a new positioning, a new product or design, there are no such readymade guides. Semiotics, as the study of all these non-verbal languages that surround us, provides a brand with the tools necessary to speak these new worlds confidently and meaningfully.”

For a sceptical client, I would speak in practical and specific terms for their particular challenge, rather than anything bordering on theory. I would speak in terms also of the limitations of other research approaches such as qual to get them where they want to go. Showing them similar past projects helps too.

SEMIOVOX

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

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

Those in which semiotics is involved from start to finish, and where its impact is visible in the outcome! I think the unique power of semiotics is that it can bridge the gap between strategy and execution, and the occasions where we’re given the chance to follow things all the way through I find very gratifying. Personally I’ve enjoyed those projects where there’s a design output and where I’ve been able to work with a design team to produce visual identity or pack designs that are rooted in solid cultural strategy. I find these are relatively rare though, as semiotics is often called in just for one part of the journey, and design teams are understandably protective of their work; and so they are all the more enjoyable for their rarity.

SEMIOVOX

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

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

Our little industry seems to be characterised mainly by the great diversity of individuals and approaches that take part in it — see the plethora of different responses to these SEMIOVOX interviews! This can be a strength, as there’s scope to satisfy a wide range of clients and to differentiate from other semioticians, but I recognise that it can be a drawback, as the industry seems always to be soul-searching to understand what it’s actually doing, and plenty of clients remain somewhat unclear on what semiotics can do for them. But to change this situation so that there is a unified standard approach would be to flatten it and make it less wide-ranging, less flexible and less interesting.

I do have one specific frustration. Semiotics often bills itself as providing global cultural insight, but too often this takes the form of local market partners providing insight which is then consolidated by a Western agency for a Western brand team, and real local insight is reduced to little dashes of exotic nuance and colour. This smacks of colonialism to me. But perhaps it is unavoidable in the way the commercial brand world is structured.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

Saussure, but this answer is by default as I have much less experience of Peirce’s work. The times I’ve tried to get into it, I’ve never got very far. By contrast, I find Saussure’s binary structures both simpler and also more powerful to use (and to explain to clients when necessary).

SEMIOVOX

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

JOËL LIM DU BOIS

Go and do other things first. Study other fields, not just semiotics or marketing. Work in other industries, work in other parts of the marketing industry. Live in other countries, learn other languages. Think about all the important and unimportant stuff that surrounds us. Learn about the world and learn about yourself. If you’re still interested in helping brands understand and have an impact in the world, then come back to semiotics and you will be a much better semiotician because of it.

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