Youth Leisure

Narrative by Maciej Biedziński, Posted February 5, 2025

Image courtesy of the author

The CASE FILE series — to which SEMIOVOX has invited our semiotician colleagues from around the world to contribute — shares memorable case studies via story telling.

About a decade ago, I worked on a semiotic assignment for one of the largest local soft drink brands. It was an important project for the company, as it was ultimately aimed at creating new positioning and defining the brand’s communication for years to come.

I was genuinely enthusiastic about the project, mainly because it involved analyzing “lived” material created by people about their everyday lives and themselves. One of the starting points was to understand the key meanings that young people — 16- to 18-year-olds — associated with the brand in connection to leisure.

For several weeks, we gathered visual material from users’ social media, as well as from auto-ethnographic diaries that a group of youths who’d been recruited kept over an extended period, documenting their lives, free time, and moments with the product.

Nonetheless, the client was eager to move forward quickly. They seemed to know a lot about their audience and were quite certain about the project’s outcomes even before we started our work. They “knew” they would receive vivid, fun images of energetic activities. They were confident the drink was a sign of playful, energetic bonding and joyful excitement.

The actual work, however, took a while. We had some issues with the teenagers’ diligence, constantly needing to remind them to fill their diaries daily. Additionally, we had approximately a thousand Instagram posts to examine. We needed time.

Meanwhile, the client was bursting with ideas. They began sending us images they had posted on social media from the brand’s events and activations. They even included their own personal photographs from summer and winter festivals, beach parties, and the like — always showing extreme excitement, super dynamic body poses, faces intoxicated with enthusiasm and euphoria. “That’s our spirit, that is what our brand is all about,” they’d say.

Our analysis, however, revealed quite a different story. All identified codes revolved around peaceful, calm recreation, meaningful connections, sincere, relaxed and intimate moments with friends. No outbreaks of sudden joy, no intensity of experiences or over-the-top emotionality. To emphasize the contradiction, we decided to present the codes backed with the teenagers’ images right next to the pictures the client had sent us.

They were shocked. They couldn’t believe how wrong they were and how it was possible that they had missed that. Happily, they treated the conclusions as a positive catalyst for an internal change of thinking, which eventually created a foundation for their new positioning.

The situation reminded me of how, in Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss described how Spanish colonizers mistook the Indigenous people for animals, and conversely, the Indigenous people took the Europeans for gods. “One was as ignorant as the other,” the anthropologist states. This principle of structural anthropology — that the ideas group A assigns to group B usually have nothing to do with reality, and can never be treated as a source of knowledge about group B, and vice versa — is easily applicable to how marketers often think about their audiences. This case made that insight especially self-evident.

The beliefs of the client team (adults about 20 years removed from their teenage years) regarding the target audience might have proven valuable material for examining the meanings and ideologies shaping the world of the generational cohort to which they themselves belonged. But that exploration will have to wait for another time.

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