In the midst of the fourth Industrial Revolution, more than one-third of the skills we believe are essential for today's workforce will have changed according to the Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum. ESOMAR in partnership with Market Research Society of Singapore (MRSS) is delighted to launch 'Insight Spaces'; a webinar series to enable marketing and research professionals to continually upgrade their skills in uncovering data-led insights.The launch episode will explore how Semiotics can be leveraged to uncover richer insights.
Digital media offers oceans of 'real data' but cannot of itself identify the human meanings. Semiotics enables us to identify the structures which define meaning but is entirely qualitative. We combined both to create 21st-century Qual & Quant.
In 2008 in Great Britain, Gordon's Distilled Gin, the largest gin brand, was facing a yearly decline circa -32%. Today, it is growing at an amazing rate of +74%, which is faster than any other big, international gin brand. Turning around a long-term decline never happens by chance. We will demonstrate how applying four specific principles delivered this incredible commercial impact:1. Insightful consumer and category understanding;2. Crystal clear and concise strategy based on these insights;3. Inspiringly simple marketing principles that are easy to apply across markets;4. The leadership behaviours that galvanize the business to see future opportunities and stop being constrained by the past.This research brings to life the consumer understanding, the strategic clarity, the inspiringly simple marketing principles and the leadership behaviours that made Gordon's transformation possible.
When can a brand benefit from laughter and is it possible to research a joke? Through a combination of consumer investigation and semiotic decoding, we were able to arrive at a framework that we believe will help brands navigate this complex space. While humor is very culture and space-specific, we believe this approach will help researchers and brand custodians know when to use it, as well as other emotional devices for their brand's storytelling.
Suze is a traditional French aperitif, born in 1889. The iconic logo and the yellow brand colors are well known from posters, brasserie carafes, and wall murals in French towns. But the brand itself had become quite dated. We applied semiotics to understand the DNA of the brand and its cultural connotations, resonance. This allowed us to be free from any influence of (current) consumer perceptions. This x-ray of the brand's DNA revealed strands of potential future positioning stories - from a natural ingredient story right through to gender-fluidity: astonishing for a brand that is over 100 years old.
Suze is a traditional French aperitif, born in 1889. The iconic logo and the yellow brand colors are well known from posters, brasserie carafes, and wall murals in French towns. But the brand itself had become quite dated. We applied semiotics to understand the DNA of the brand and its cultural connotations, resonance. This allowed us to be free from any influence of (current) consumer perceptions. This x-ray of the brand's DNA revealed strands of potential future positioning stories - from a natural ingredient story right through to gender-fluidity: astonishing for a brand that is over 100 years old.
Qualitative research is actually innovating ahead of quantitative - and leading that innovation into the quantitative arena itself. Think of what is being done in biometrics, neuroscience and ethnography. It all starts in the qualitative arena and then people start trying to work out how to bring it into the world of quantification. Today, there are companies trying to figure out how to bring to market mass ethnography and even mass semiotics. I would further argue that the 'new' qualitative is bringing fun (read engagement) back into research for both the respondent and the researcher - and that this too is making quantitative researchers think about how they do the same. In addition, some of the new technological platforms in qualitative research, which make it possible to combine ethnography, one-on-ones, billboards and focus groups, both offline and online, are showing the way to quantitative researchers in terms of what 'integrated' or holistic research can mean. This is not just to give qualitative researchers a pat on the back.
This paper calls for a reading of advertising discourse in the context of this overwhelming cultural specificity. It is proposed that, to create semiotically relevant discourses, advertising will have to invoke the cultural backdrop and build it into its communication strategy. This paper is based on the central hypothesis that advertising in India cannot escape the context-sensitivity that is so deeply intrinsic to Indian culture. It argues for strong diachronic analysis. It conceptualises modern advertising as one of the communicative variants on a parallel plane with classical literature, folklore, religion, etc. This paper proposes that, as advertising shares a base with other discourses, some significant psychological and thematic continuities should exist. It also calls for a culture-specific sensitivity to the modes of communication.