Marketing Semiotics Signs, Strategies, and Brand Value This page intentionally left blank Marketing Semiotics Signs, Strategies, and Brand Value Laura R. Oswald 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX26DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Laura R. Oswald 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–956649–5 (Hbk.) ISBN 978–0–19–956650–1 (Bbk.) 13579108642 For Nicolas and Julia This page intentionally left blank n CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii LIST OF FIGURES xi LIST OF TABLES xiii Introduction 1 1. Semiotics in the World of Goods 17 2. Marketing Semiotics 44 3. Mining the Consumer Brandscape 70 4. Brand Discourse 98 5. Mining the Multicultural Brandscape 125 6. The Semiotics of Consumer Space 148 7. New Directions in Marketing Semiotics 185 REFERENCES 203 INDEX 215 n ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Marketing Semiotics originated in an espresso cafe´ in Evanston, Illinois, in 1991. I had become weary of writing on hair-splitting topics in postmodern critical theory and asked a neighbor, Mary Ann McGrath, to share with me her academic interest in shoppers at the local farmer’s market. In the course of that conversation, I realized that the marketplace formed a living and breath- ing laboratory for semiotic inquiry, and that consumer research would take me out of the library and into life. I also left the cafe´ with the names of three people who would, over the next decade, help me bring this idea to fruition— John Sherry, Rita Denny, and Jerry Cole. John Sherry, a marketing anthropologist, introduced me to the interpretive consumer research literature during a seminar at Northwestern University. Without thought for reward, Sherry guided me through my first published ethnography with consumers, where I applied semiotics to a cross-cultural setting. Rita Denny, an anthropologist and consultant, handed me my first business project, the luxury perfume case that I discuss in Chapter 2. And Jerry Cole, a senior vice-president of strategy at the D.D.B. Needham Agency, hired me to conduct exploratory research in the automotive category and walked me through the steps of the strategic planning process. From the very beginning, I was struck by the generosity and creativity of the marketing professionals who were willing to take a risk on an academic who was cobbling together an approach to branding that is not taught in business schools. I took the next ten years off from teaching and built an enthusiastic clientele comprising blue-chip companies such as Ford, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and General Mills. I am indebted to Sally Lombardo, from the Ford Motor Company, Malachy Walsh, a senior vice-president of strategy at J. Walter Thompson, and Brenda Williams, a consumer insights expert at Leo Burnett, for their enthusiastic support in the early days of the business. I am also grateful to Virginia Valentine and Monty Alexander, who are responsible for making semiotic research standard practice in the United Kingdom. I was fortunate indeed to have been included in many international projects for their company, Semiotic Solutions, and to have enjoyed their friendship and creativity for many years. The Marketing Semiotics approach draws energy and creativity from balancing semiotic theory and business practice. I have been inspired by notable academics, Russell Belk and Douglas Holt, who in writings, confer- ences, and edited books have challenged the rigid boundaries separating academic research from the realities of the marketplace. They have helped ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX forge a new paradigm in business education that thrives on the tensions between theory and practice, art and science. This book might still be an idea in my mind were it not for Simon Nyeck and Marie-Laure Djelic, who invited me to teach marketing semiotics at ESSEC Business School in Paris from 2005 to 2006. I developed lectures for MBA students that would become the framework for Marketing Semiotics. I also thank the many talented students at ESSEC for putting these ideas into action in class projects and research. Balancing theory and practice formed at once the greatest impetus and also the greatest challenge to writing this book. Ellen Neuborne became the sounding board for my ideas at various stages of the writing, and provided me perspective and direction when my pen faltered. I am also indebted to Lynn Childress, whose exacting and tireless work on copyediting the manu- script was indispensable to the coherence and readability of the book. My acknowledgments would be incomplete if I failed to mention French semiotician, Christian Metz, who agreed to direct my research on semiotics while I completed a Ph.D. at New York University, without any material reward. Metz inspired me to tackle the big issues and to challenge the status quo without losing the rigor and precision of the scientific process. At his untimely death in 1993, he had already formed a worldwide following that included another prominent marketing semiotician, Jean-Marie Floch. Since a book on visual semiotics necessarily demands reference to actual marketing images, the author is grateful to the copyright holders of the following images for their specific permission to use their images from the text: Figure 1.12: reproduction of Rene´ Magritte, La Trahison des images/Ceci n’est pas une pipe, courtesy of the Artist Rights Society, NY, the Art Resource, NY, and the Los Angeles Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Figure 3.2: the Kodak logo, courtesy of the Kodak Company, Rochester, NY. Figure 3.6: photograph of Nicole and Etienne Emery courtesy of Patrice Lucenet, France. Figures 4.5 and 4.6: drawings created by Tonik Associates, London, UK. Figure 5.1: Freedom from Want by Norman Rockwell, courtesy of the Nor- man Rockwell Family Estate. Figure 5.3: Olympic Games logos, courtesy of the International Olympics Committee. Figure 6.2: Angry Landscape (1967) by Karen Appel, courtesy of the Appel Foundation and Van Lennep Producties, Holland. Figure 6.3: Untitled (1950) by Beauford Delaney, courtesy of the Minnea- polis Institute of Art and Les Amis de Beauford Delaney. x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Figure 6.4: Music Pink and Blue II (1918) by Georgia O’Keefe, courtesy of the O’Keefe Museum, the Artists Rights Society, and the Whitney Museum, NY. Figure 6.5: White Center by Mark Rothko, courtesy of the Estate of Mark Rothko, Los Angeles Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Art Resource, NY. While every effort was made to contact the copyright holders of material in this book, in some cases we were unable to do so. If the copyright holders contact the author or publisher, we will be pleased to rectify any omission at the earliest opportunity. Chicago, Illinois December 2010 n LIST OF FIGURES I.1. A Binary Competitive Analysis—Soft Drinks 13 1.1. The Dual Structure of the Sign 20 1.2. Double Axes of Cultural Organization 22 1.3. Code Swapping in a Multicultural Society 23 1.4. Mind and Meaning 24 1.5. The Dialectic of Symbolic Consumption 25 1.6. Selection and Combination 29 1.7. The Two Axes of Discourse 30 1.8. Metaphor and Metonymy 32 1.9. Brand Rhetoric 34 1.10. The Logic of Metaphor 35 1.11. Semiosis in Action 36 1.12. Magritte, “This is not a pipe” (1928) 37 1.13. The Structure of Myth in the Diaper Category 42 2.1. Likeness of the Two-Page Perfume Advertisement 45 2.2. The Dual Structure of Signs 48 2.3. Logos as Signs 52 2.4. Brands in Translation 57 2.5. Alignment and Substitution 58 2.6. The Binary Structure of the Beverage Category 59 2.7. The Binary Audit of Luxury Perfume Advertising 64 2.8. A Paradigmatic Analysis of the Luxury Perfume Category 66 2.9. Two Feminine Archetypes, Two Styles of Advertising 67 2.10. Positioning Against the Grain 68 3.1. The Consumer Brandscape 71 3.2. Tensions in the Kodak Brandscape 76 3.3. The Dynamic of Consumer Decision-Making 82 3.4. Strategic Dimensions of the SUV Category 86 3.5. Strategic Dimensions of the Preretirement Category 95 3.6. A Consumer-Centered Positioning 96 xii LIST OF FIGURES 4.1. The Plaque on Pioneer 10 98 4.2.