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.

Warsaw…

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?

KRZYSZTOF POLAK

As a child, I went completely crazy over Egyptian hieroglyphics. I spent days copying hieroglyphs from photos of old papyri or bas-reliefs. I made my own papyrus scrolls, mindlessly copying out signs that were mysterious to me. I wanted to be a second Champollion — the philologist who was the first to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs — and it worried me greatly that perhaps all ancient writings had already been deciphered.

Shapes suggesting the sun, a bird, a mouth, or an eye — connected in long vertical lines — I was attracted by this mystery. These symbols meant something, they hid some content. What was it?

SEMIOVOX

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

KRZYSZTOF POLAK

In the 1980s, I studied Culturology with a specialization in cultural theory at the University of Wrocław (Poland). It is worth mentioning that, at that time, Poland was still under communist rule and most cultural theories were formulated in a Marxist spirit. On the other hand, the Institute of Culturology was the first center to break away from the communists with its cultural theories. My master’s thesis was a critical polemic with one of the Marxist cultural theories popular in Poland at that time.

At the Institute, semiotics was a mandatory subject. We studied Saussure, Hjelmslev, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Eco, Propp and, of course, the semioticians from Tartu — with their concept of cultural semiotics — were at the forefront. At that time, structural semiotics was regarded as a rather outdated theory. The gates of post-structuralism were opening up before us.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

KRZYSZTOF POLAK

After my studies, I worked partly at the university and partly in an advertising agency as a creative director. In those days, we used a lot of different consumer research tools as a basis for building brand concepts and creative strategies. Why didn’t marketing research use tools developed by anthropology, cultural theory or semiotics? That surprised me.

In the early 2000s, my future business partner Marzena Żurawicka and I got in touch with Virginia Valentine from Semiotic Solutions UK. In 2005, we decided that it was high time to establish a similar company in Poland. We decided to undergo training and acquire a license for semiotic research. The name of our agency was Semiotic Solutions PL.

It wasn’t easy at first. For 10 months, we travelled to Polish companies and presented a semiotic approach. They looked at us quite strangely. At that time, for marketing researchers, the concept of culture primarily meant theatre, music, literature, etc. — and semiotics was a concept from some other world. We focused our communication primarily around the concept of culture in its socio-anthropological sense and its study as a source of knowledge for marketing.

In the research departments of companies, we mainly looked for people who were brave and sought innovation in their approach to brands. In 2006, we completed our first project — for Nestle. This was followed by a project for Orange, then a very large project exploring beer culture in Poland for Carlsberg. Since then, we have completed over 300 semiotic projects.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

KRZYSZTOF POLAK

I do a lot of workshops and trainings in semiotics for both students and marketing researchers. Participants can be divided into two groups:

• Those who struggle to go beyond learned ways of categorizing through objects and their similarity, e.g. books, children, landscapes, etc. They have ready-made “containers” in their heads via which they categorize the world. It is difficult for them to understand what “codes” are. Breaking away from container-thinking is very difficult for them.
• Those who quickly understand what it entails to think about codes and meanings.

This difference is a bit like Jacobson’s two axes of language — metonymic and metaphoric. The first group classifies on the basis of contiguity and similarity, the second through the semantic relationship. The second group usually makes up no more than 20-30 percent of the people participating in my trainings. These folks have the ability to be good semioticians.

It’s also important that a semiotician be curious about culture without getting overly invested in it. We need to immerse ourselves in culture… while at the same time remaining an outsider.

SEMIOVOX

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

KRZYSZTOF POLAK

• Jean-Marie Floch’s Semiotics, Marketing and Communication was and is a great methodological inspiration for me. It is a collection of analyses characterized by an extraordinary methodological rigor, which I value. A great combination of theory with insightful analyses, which are rarely seen in today’s texts.
• Umberto Eco’s novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. It’s one big semiotic analysis of Italian pop culture texts over several decades, starting from the birth of fascism. Eco shows us how the identity of the book’s hero — like our own identities — is constructed, layer by layer, by the culture surrounding us.
• Jean Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Baudrillard’s theory of semiurgy [the expansion of the semiosphere; the production of new meanings] and his vision of the overproduction of meaning is increasingly relevant today. Inspired by Baudrillard, we created a slogan that we have been using to provoke and challlange our clients for many years now: “Sell meanings not products.”

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?

KRZYSZTOF POLAK

The quick, cocktail-party pitch is: “We’re hunters of symbols and signs, like Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code.

However, after 20 years in the Polish market we no longer need to explain ourselves. The clients who come to us already know about semiotics. It’s sufficient to share a case study with them, and to discuss our proposed methodology for their project.

SEMIOVOX

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

KRZYSZTOF POLAK

I am most pleased with projects that don’t end up “in the drawer” of the company that ordered them. Unfortunately, this happens too often. The reasons this happens are usually personal — e.g., a change of marketing director, brand manager, etc. — rather than anything else.

Marzena and I recently found tremendous satisfaction in writing a textbook, Semiotyka w marketingu [Semiotics in marketing research]. Its 300 pages capture what we’ve learned over the past 20 years about studying the signs, symbols, and codes of the market.

SEMIOVOX

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

KRZYSZTOF POLAK

In the marketing research space, semiotics is often lumped in with “cultural analysis” — but although both disciplines take culture as their object of study, they are not the same thing!

Culture analysis can be conducted using various methods, most often taken from cultural/social anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, discourse analysis, cultural studies. Semiotics, on the other hand, is a cognitive perspective that treats culture as a sign-symbolic system. The object is culture, but the subjects of the semiotician’s research are signs and meanings, their creation and dissemination.

I’m also irritated when semiotic analysis is lumped in with trend forecasting. Many agencies promise “semiotics,” but what they’re really studying is trends.

Finally, I wish that more people understood that “residual, dominant, and emergent” doesn’t mean “past, present, and future.” In Raymond Williams’ formulation, “residual, dominant, and emergent” all refer to aspects of contemporary culture.

SEMIOVOX

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

KRZYSZTOF POLAK

Many young people uncritically learn semiotics from various “semiotic gurus” — who, sad to say, often deform such basic concepts and tools as sign, code, semiotic square, and so forth. Don’t trust the gurus. Go straight to the sources!

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