Using Semiotics in Logo Design

Ian Paget: As I mentioned, I’m a graphic designer, but I’m primarily self-taught, and I know there’s a lot of self-taught designers out there that will be listening that will probably not even be aware of the topic that we’re going to be speaking about today. So in communities online, I’ve heard people mention semiotics and when they mentioned it originally I wasn’t really familiar what it was. I looked into it briefly, and I guess even today I’m still not that familiar with what it is beyond what I’ve read in your book. So I thought it would be fantastic to bring you on to speak about this topic. I think as a starting question, can you explain what semiotics is?

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, for sure. I would love to do that. I think that your note about a lot of designers being self-taught is a really interesting one, and the reason I think that’s interesting is because consumers are self-taught as well. So let me explain what I mean by that. Semiotics, if you want the dictionary definition, it’s the study of signs and symbols. And of course, what are logos if not signs and symbols?

Some logos are what we would call iconic signs like Kentucky Fried Chicken, and we’ve got a picture of the friendly Colonel with his beard. We’re invited to think that this represents a real human in real life type of thing. Then the logos are almost completely abstract symbols, so they could just be strings of letters or a single letter or something along those lines.

Any logo, even the simplest logo, is full of design decisions. As I’m speaking to you, I’ve got a bunch of them up on my screen in front of me. We’ve got things like shapes, like the Nike swoosh. We’ve got some icons, like the Colonel from Kentucky Fried Chicken or that mermaid on the Starbucks logo, or the Playboy bunny. Then we’ve got shapes like the Atari logo for example, or let’s see, there’s that B logo which is the logo of Dr Dre’s headphones, which is… The brand is called Beats so there’s that, but also the shape of it looks like a headphone as well.

So there’s all these. We’ve got shapes and we’ve got decisions about how literal we’re going to be with representing something. And we’ve got use of color, and we all know that color means different things for different people in different parts of the world. And then you’ve got decisions about how complex or simple do we want to make this, are we going to include the brand name as part of the brand mark or not, and all of that stuff, right? Every logo is full of all those design decisions as you know.

Ian Paget: Yeah.

Rachel Lawes: When a consumer encounters a logo, and this is also true of consumer encounters with products and advertising and company websites and all that stuff, right? When a consumer encounters a logo, their task is to decode it, to figure out what it means, okay? And they are going to do that using culturally available resources. What I mean by that is every consumer, from the time that they’re born, their whole life consists of exposure to different kinds of cultural experiences, right? For little children, for example, like I’m speaking to you in the UK, and I think almost every British infant will receive a little picture book which their parents will lovingly look through with them.

Ian Paget: Yeah, we just got our little one one as well.

Rachel Lawes: There you go, she’s got one, right? On the first page, does it say A is for apple?

Ian Paget: Yes, it does.

Rachel Lawes: There you go. See how I knew that, right? Is it a red apple, just out of interest?

Ian Paget: Actually, the one in that book is green surprisingly.

Rachel Lawes: Is it? Is it really?

Ian Paget: Yeah, but when I was younger I do remember them being red. It was almost always a red apple.

Rachel Lawes: Exactly, exactly. That’s semiotics right there, right? So your young child, who’s… did you say a year old?

Ian Paget: She’s a year old now, yeah.

Rachel Lawes: That’s adorable. So she’s already having lots of culturally specific experiences, which are telling her things like apples kind of stand in for fruit in general. They’re quite a reliable semiotic sign for fruit in general. In fact, as recently as the seventeenth century, apple was a word that was used to mean any kind of fruit including nuts. Really interesting, right? We use apple to signify fruit in general, and apples are generally… I’m going to go with the line that they’re generally red. If you look at the clip art apple right now, it’s going to be a host of red apples, you know?

Ian Paget: Yeah.

Rachel Lawes: So your daughter is already amassing cultural experience, so that in 25 years, when she encounters the logo of some new brand and she needs to decode it, she’s going to use all the cultural experiences that she’s had in her life up to now to help her figure out what this brand means, okay? This is what I mean by consumers being self-taught. Consumers don’t go to art school or go to university to learn how to read logos and brand communications, but they’re very skilled at it.

And where do they get this skill? Well, through a lot of practice, and through repeated exposure to experiences from their surrounding culture which teach them this is what things mean, this is what red means, this is what blue means, this is what circles mean, this is what sharp angles mean, this is what it means if you write something in all caps and so on and so on.

Ian Paget: So I know as a designer, you can use all of these things to your advantage in practically everything that you’re doing. I know the podcast is primarily around the topic of logo design, but you can use it in identity, you can use it in marketing, you can use it in so many different places. I’m thinking of one real question that comes to mind is when you’re working on a brand identity project, a logo design project or identity, and you’re working with a specific client, I know you can take advantage of semiotics, but the challenging thing is that all of us are individually, I guess, learning semiotics on an individual basis.

So if you’re wanting to target a very specific audience, you can’t really… I guess you can, to some degree, use common sense, but is there any way of understanding what semiotics a particular audience are already aware of, so that you can use that to your advantage to try and target them in some way?

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, can you give me an example… some sorts of the specific consumer groups that you had in mind?

Ian Paget: I know in your book you used the example of weddings, so I think that would be a good one for you. For example, if you are designing a logo or an identity for a wedding company, how would you go about targeting women that are looking for items to plan for their wedding?

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, I think this is a really interesting question. I’m very fascinated by weddings, because they present somewhat of a problem for the consumer, they’re somewhat of a puzzle. Let me explain why I think that, okay?

Ian Paget: Yeah, okay.

Rachel Lawes: On the one hand, I’m just specifically talking about the west here, because I think in Asia and stuff like that slightly different rules apply. If we’re talking about the western world, brides to be are very keen, almost unanimously keen, that their wedding should be a bit different. They want something special, they want it to be unique, they want it to be special and unique to them. Also, let’s bear in mind as well that when people… you know how people in their late 20s or early 30s, they hit that age where suddenly everybody’s getting married and they find that they’ve got to go to like four or five weddings over the summer, you know? It’s considerably annoying, it’s expensive, you’ve got to keep buying gifts and outfits, and the food’s usually not up to much, and it gets repetitive, right?

Ian Paget: Yeah.

Rachel Lawes: When it’s your wedding as part of that circus of weddings that go on, the other problem is these weddings are all the same, because people go and buy these packages from these wedding venues. So you’ve got this… they end up being very similar to each other. So you can understand, once you’ve attended about 10 or 12 of these things, when it’s your turn to plan your own wedding, that you want something a bit different. No wonder they’re dead-set on having something that’s unique to them, okay?

And quite a lot of brides will put quite a lot of effort into trying to think up ways to make it new. Now this should be fairly straightforward, because you can do whatever you want at your wedding. It’s your wedding, you can do whatever you want with it, right? But the problem is, this is a really interesting from a social science point of view, is that if you ask yourself why do weddings feel special? Like how is a wedding different from any other type of a gathering, the answer to that is in its repetitive features. A bit like Christmas, right? What makes Christmas Christmas? It’s repetition, that’s what makes Christmas Christmas, it’s the-

Ian Paget: Yeah, it’s the music, it’s the presents, it’s the tree.

Rachel Lawes: It’s the music. It’s whatever you do every single year.

Ian Paget: Yeah, you get a lot of nostalgia from it.

Rachel Lawes: It’s the tree, it’s the turkey, it’s the same Christmas decorations, it’s the same routine where we have grandma round on Boxing Day and all that stuff, right?

Ian Paget: Yeah.

Rachel Lawes: You know how some people say they will try and break the rules? They’ll go like, “Oh, I just fancy something different this year, so what we’re going to do is go on holiday to the Caribbean,” you know? Then they come back and you go, “How was it?” And they go, “Oh, well we had a lovely holiday, but it didn’t really feel like Christmas.”

Ian Paget: Yeah, I’ve heard people say that.

Rachel Lawes: Right. It’s because you stripped out all the semiotic signs that made it Christmas. Christmas doesn’t exist outside of all of these semiotic signs like turkey and pine trees and all of that stuff, right?

So the same thing with weddings. If you go too off piste, you’re going to end up with something that doesn’t feel like a wedding, and you feel disappointed with it afterwards. So consumers are caught in this interesting catch 22 situation, where they want it to be unique, but on the other hand, if you go too successful in that, then it no longer feels like a wedding.

Ian Paget: Yeah, that makes sense.

Rachel Lawes: It’s really interesting. What happens then is that they spend a great amount of energy trying to find ways to just be different enough without losing that sense of wedding-ness. If anybody listening is selling to the wedding industry, it’s a really interesting thing, because wedding suppliers can take advantage of this insight, right? So there’s a website called Offbeat Bride, where people go to look for inspiration for their own weddings, but also people who have their weddings already will upload photos and sometimes they’ll do an interview and tell a little story.

What we see here, what it’s showcasing, is couples whose weddings achieved this balancing act between originality and convention. On the one hand, you’ve got certain advice or semiotic signs will be retained, like there’s got to be a cake that has tiers, and there’s got to be a big frock, and all this type of stuff, you know? But also, some things are allowed to be different, like you’re allowed to have a Star Trek theme if you want one, or you’re allowed to have your wedding in a library and have all your table decorations and everything be book-themed. You see what I mean?

Ian Paget: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rachel Lawes: So what we’ve got here is consumers manipulating semiotic signs, okay. So they’re saying, “Right, we need some of this, we need this size and style of cake, and we need this style of dress and we need this style of invitation. But also, we’re going to import semiotic signs from over here, we’re going to import some Star Wars, some Harry Potter, some motorcycle club type of stuff.”

And what they’re doing is mixing and matching semiotic signs from different, the technical word is codes, in order to achieve something that is different but not too different. So for a weddings supplier who’s in that industry, let’s say that you want to be able to sell table decorations or something like that, this is really useful to know about, because what’s what your customer is aiming for.

I’m going to say this, because it’s the way I look at the world, but most things in life, most things that consumers experience in life and most things that they populate their lives with, are made out of semiotic signs, and it’s just a question of which one you choose and where you get them from.

Ian Paget: Yeah. That’s very much like when you think about if you want to be a specific type of person, like I know a number of people that want to be different, but by being different they kind of end up falling into a category in a way.

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, that’s right. It’s the irony of youth, isn’t it? Isn’t that the irony of youth?

Ian Paget: Yeah, exactly.

Rachel Lawes: Everybody wants to be different, but they end up being… everybody’s the same. A very long time ago when I was younger, I used to be a gothic punk. It’s just the irony was just painful, because we all looked exactly alike, all of us. So there you go. It’s like, I was a kid and we only had so many semiotic signs to work with, right?

So when I was a youth, you could either conform and wear mainstream fashions, which this was like late ’80s, early ’90s, so there was a lot of stonewashed jeans and pastel coloured shirts and things like that, and you could perm your hair. Or, if you rejected that and everything that it implied, like a love of capitalism and that type of thing, then really the only option was available was gothic punk. So this would involve dying your hair black and using a can of hairspray every weekend to make it stand up on end and wearing ripped up clothing and things like this. Frankly, it was a lot cheaper and easier to achieve.

Ian Paget: Yeah, that in itself is interesting, because that is semiotics in action really, isn’t it? That people don’t necessarily realise that that’s what they’re working with.

Rachel Lawes: Yeah. They don’t really. But you see, semiotics is a really useful theory, because once we’ve embraced this idea that the world and all the stuff that the humans created is made out of semiotic signs, then we’re in a position of considerable control as designers, because we’ve got a theory now which helps us to see that semiotic signs are a form of currency, yeah? That consumers choose and use them and wear them on their bodies and bring them into their homes, and admire some and reject others, as part of an ongoing project of being themselves and living their lives.

Once you know this and you start to regard semiotic signs as a kind of currency, as a kind of token that can be passed around and which has some meaning attached to it, that puts you in a very strong position from a design point of view. It also, frankly, puts you in a great position when your client says, “I’m not sure about this, why did you design it like this?” Semiotics will give you a robust story that you can tell about why this is the right choice for the consumer, that will help you to get past these… You know with some clients they’re like, “Oh well, the chief executive shows all these designs to his wife, and she doesn’t like any of them, so we’ve got a problem.” That type of scenario, you know?

Ian Paget: Yeah.

Rachel Lawes: When semiotics was new in marketing, I’m going back 20 years now, it was brand new, designers were initially suspicious. They were like, “Wait a minute, why are market researchers encroaching on our territory?” But then they quickly realised that semiotics will swing the balance in favour of the designer in situations where the client’s going, “Well, the boss’ wife likes it in pink so we should do a pink one.” Semiotics will get you past that and offers a bit of muscle and credibility and are strongly linked to actual consumer behaviour, that will help designers to get their best work in the places where they need to be.

Ian Paget: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I definitely think semiotics is really important in particular for logo design. Not just for creating the most effective solution, but also being able to present it your client and have something to back up what you’re presenting.

I know we spoke about the wedding example, and we mentioned Christmas as well, and those particular examples are relatively easy to picture what those semiotics are. So as you mentioned with the wedding, it’s the dress, the cake, the ceremony-

Rachel Lawes: And also, and the cursive script and all of that stuff.

Ian Paget: Yeah, yeah, there’s a number of things.

Rachel Lawes: There’s that ongoing joke that when consumers do anything to do with their own weddings, you know like when they put their wedding lists online or they do their own invitations or something, they always use that horrible Papyrus font. It’s almost universally hated, along with Comic Sans, isn’t it?

Ian Paget: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Rachel Lawes: It’s very much the logo of the amateurishly organised wedding, isn’t it?

Ian Paget: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, with weddings and with Christmas, it’s easy to picture in your mind, especially if you’re in the UK, or I guess western cultures, you picture a specific type of thing. But when you’re working with a business and it’s potentially a business outside of your knowledge, it’s not something that you’re that familiar with, how do you go about researching that industry to understand what those semiotic are so that you can use them to your advantage in some way, as you clearly can within the wedding space?

Rachel Lawes: There’s usually stuff out there that you can find. I’m trying to think of an example that is not so confidential, that I can talk to you about. I do a lot of work with ad agencies, and I do a lot of work in particular with Gray London. And they had the United Nations for a client that was pretty exciting. Major change from FMCG. And the United Nations said, “We’ve got a problem reaching younger people, because they’re not very interested, they don’t know much about us, and it’s hard to get their attention.”

So we’ve got an interesting problem on our hands here, which is that people are not paying attention to something, don’t know much about it. So I kind of wanted to know… to me, I was immediately thinking of the United Nations as a semiotic sign, and what I mean by that is there’s the phrase United Nations and there’s also the phrase UN, and then there’s the idea of the United Nations, which is this sort of international consortium of responsible people, who make responsible decisions.

So I was thinking, obviously, the average person, never-mind the average young person, doesn’t really have any contact with the United Nations at all. So I then was asking myself, well in that case, where would they get their ideas? If they know anything about the UN, even if it’s only that the UN is boring, where would they get their ideas about that? So I did a bit of digging around in pop culture to see where I could find any examples of the UN being talked about or visually depicted in any way.

And what I found quite entertainingly was that the UN is surprisingly… makes appearances in action movies, particularly ones with a comedy element. So what will happen is that the UN exists in these things as a sort of fall guy. It exists to be a bit pathetic and useless, so that the hero can come in and save the day. You’ll see it in like Captain America movies and things like that. There’ll be like some villain or some natural disaster is about to bring the world to an end, right? Then we’ll cut to a scene in the United Nations, which is normally depicted as… there’ll be a big room, there’ll be a lectern at the front usually with an old white man standing at the lectern making a boring speech.

And the room will be arranged so that people sit… the seating is in these curved tiers, right? So you can see it, can’t you? I know you can see it in your mind.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I can picture it as you’re speaking.

Rachel Lawes: There’s all people. There’s people sitting in these banks of seats. They’re all from different countries. Everybody’s got a name tag in front of them saying what country they’re from, actually. They don’t have names as people, but there’ll be a tag in front saying what country they’re from. None of them speak any of the languages of the others, so there’s a massive communication problem. And the whole situation is really… it’s just ineffective.

So what we’re being shown here, is a room full of old boring people who can’t understand each other, sitting around talking and not doing anything. And once this establishing shot has happened, then there’ll be a massive explosion and Captain America will come smashing through the glass window and shake things up and ultimately save the world, right?

This is the kind of thing that semiotic research will lead you to, is watching kind of ridiculous action movies and stuff like this. But what I’ve discovered was that there’s a lot of that out there, and that it wasn’t really a surprise if people had got the idea that the UN doesn’t really do anything. It’s just this boring consortium of people who just sit around talking and waiting for a superhero to show up and save the day.

So once you know that, you’re in a better position to turn the brand around. I then went to have a look at the United Nations’ own website, and it was really recessive visually. It was using a very muted institutional shade of blue that wouldn’t have been out of place in a hospital, and there was this logo that was like a diagrammatic globe shape that wouldn’t have been out of place in a maths textbook.

And it was like, well look, you’re just reinforcing this impression. If people already think that the UN is kind of cold and remote and boring, well you’ve borrowed semiotic signs here from hospitals and maths textbooks. If you want to talk about cold and remote and boring… you see what I mean?

That’s essentially how you do it. What you do is you ask yourself this question. You think of your target customer and you ask yourself this customer, where has my consumer seen this before? Where have they seen this before? Whatever it may be. It could be anything. It could be baby shampoo. It could be wedding clothes. It could be anything you can think of. It could be organic lentils. It could be some package, some new brand. It could be some new product format. It could be some new business model.

In every case, you’re going to ask yourself, on behalf of the consumer, where have I seen this before? And you do a bit of detective work, and what that’s going to do is answer the question of what cultural resources are consumers bringing to the task of interpreting this brand or of interpreting this business? Does that make sense?

Ian Paget: Yeah, it does, very much so. I guess to some degree, in terms of understanding what the semiotics are of a client, is just a case of being incredibly curious and trying to understand exactly where these references are coming from. And I think with what you said with the UN and bringing that to a younger audience, you’ve identified all those different things, and I guess what you could do is mix it in with semiotics that the target audience would be familiar with that would allow it to be a little bit more fun and you could combine it from a graphic design perspective and it makes…

I guess thinking of semiotics and looking at the problem in that way and recognising what those things are actually makes solving the problem a lot easier.

Rachel Lawes: It does. One of the things I like about is that, as I say, it can often help to swing things in favour of the designer where there’s a disagreement between a designer and a client, because most designers have got good reasons for thinking the way they do. They’re not just going, “My wife likes this one.” Most designers have got some reason for coming up with this stuff. What I like about semiotics is that it provides a common language that we can use to talk about what’s going on. You see what I mean?

Ian Paget: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because you’re referencing cultural things, it’s very black and white. I mean, you can debate it to some degree. But it is very black and white, so if you are using that, it’s easier.

Rachel Lawes: Well, what can you do… although, as you say, it’s not completely… nothing’s predetermined. It’s not ever completely black and white. But what semiotics will do is equip you with loads of visual, visible evidence. So I try to avoid saying things, or making claims about aspects of consumer life without some evidence that you can see using your eyes. So I’m a big collector of things like, oh god, you know the photos that people post on their Instagram accounts? I’m a huge collector of-

Ian Paget: Oh, memes.

Rachel Lawes: Memes, and that type of stuff, because again memes are a form of currency, aren’t they?

Ian Paget: Oh yeah, yeah.

Rachel Lawes: And they exist, the successful ones exist, because they successfully capture a certain mood, a driving idea, or a particular way of expressing things visually. Successful memes are successful because they are very well-functioning and very powerful semiotic signs. This is all great, tangible evidence that you can use with your client when they’re going, “Well, why have you designed it like this?” You can go, “Well look, because of these eight things over here,” which are all in completely different categories but which are conveying a similar meaning to a similar customer.

Ian Paget: So is that how you would go about presenting stuff to the clients when you are using semiotics? Is it simply a case of pulling up a number of images and showing how you reference certain sources to understand what symbols you use?

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, that’s the way I like to do it, because often I sometimes want to say provocative things. Actually, one of the best things about being an independent semiologist, is because it’s kind of a new discipline and it’s a bit edgy, I find you’ve got… I’m just going to say this between you and me and the listeners, okay? It gives you a certain amount of diplomatic immunity. You’ve got a certain amount of freedom and permission to say provocative and controversial things that might not be so easy if you were somebody’s full-time employee.

But because semioticians, a bit like creatives, are regarded as being a bit… free thinkers, shall we say? You’ve kind of got a bit of a license to say things that are slightly outrageous. So there are times when I want to say things like that, like I essentially want to say this is a terrible brand or why don’t we make it look more like this? This thing over here, that you would never have considered. I’m going to want some evidence that I can point to to back it up, to back up these assertions.

It’s not the only way of doing semiotics, but I like to use, when I’m writing about semiotics and sharing it with clients, I like to use loads of visual resources and visual evidence, and go, “Look, these are some of the products of the culture which your consumer is experiencing. This is what they’ve learned. So if we design your brand or logo like this, here’s what they’re going to conclude about you.” Do you see what I mean?

Ian Paget: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.

Rachel Lawes: Or you can give them more strategic directions. You can say, “Look, why don’t we steer it in this direction, because there’s loads of energy over here?” You see what I mean?

Ian Paget: Yeah, it really gives you ammo to be able to go into someone like the United Nations and say, “This is really dull and miserable and-”

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, exactly, exactly. You can kind of blame it on Hollywood, you know?

Ian Paget: You can, yeah.

Rachel Lawes: You know what I mean?

Ian Paget: Yeah.

Rachel Lawes: We know that you’re lovely and warm and interesting.

Ian Paget: Yeah, so it’s not coming from you. It gives it a lot of weight, because it’s not just coming from you, it’s not what you think. It really is based on research.

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, it doesn’t really matter what I think. What I care about is what kinds of experiences consumers are having. That’s what matters to me. It’s pretty difficult to come up with something so new that consumers don’t have any resources for interpreting it. Most of the time, if you show them some new product or service or logo or whatever it is, it’s hard to come up with something that’s completely original. There’s going to be stuff in there that even if the overall effect is new, where they can go, “Oh yeah, I recognise this, I’ve seen that bit somewhere before,” and they can piece it together like a jigsaw and work out what it probably means.

Ian Paget: When you’re working with a potential client that is within a culture that you’re simply not familiar with, so for example if I was working on something for Japan or somewhere in Asia, where they have a very different language, a very different form of communication, the references that they have and associations that they have with a colour like red, it will be very different from my understanding. So when you are working or when you are approached with a challenge like this, is it best to just steer clear of it because your understanding of the semiotics is so culturally different? Is it better just to avoid it, or can you go in and properly research it?

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, this is a great question. You definitely can go in and properly research it, which is useful, because there aren’t semiologists in every country already, so it’s good to know that you can find somebody who’s not from the target country and get them to do the work. Let me explain how that works.

Ian Paget: Sure.

Rachel Lawes: When you’re doing research, whether in your own culture or in a culture which is unfamiliar to you, there are going to be pros and cons of doing that, okay? Let’s say I’m working on a British brand, the huge advantage of that is that I know how life proceeds in Britain, I know what kinds of things consumers normally do, I know how the game is played around here, you know? The disadvantage, the flip side of that coin for semiologists when they’re working in their own culture, is that you run the risk of essentially going native. You run the risk of not being able to see what’s important because it’s too familiar to you. You can’t see the wood for the trees. Do you see what I mean?

So you wouldn’t think to tell your client that some particular type of consumer behaviour or whatever is significant because it’s your assumption that that’s what everybody does, when in fact they don’t. Do you see what mean?

Ian Paget: Yeah, it’s like drinking tea. Until I went abroad, I had no idea that was a very British thing to do.

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, especially with milk in it as well. When you’re at home, you know what’s going on, but the disadvantage of that is you can be a bit too immersed in it, you know?

Ian Paget: Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Lawes: When you’re working in a foreign culture, clearly the advantage is that you’re not going to go native, because everything is strange, everything is new. So you’re not going to make the mistake of thinking that anything is obvious or doesn’t require any explanation. It’s all new and it’s all making itself very… you’re alert to everything as being culturally specific and unusual. The disadvantage, obviously, when you’re working in a foreign culture is that you don’t know all the everyday rules about how things normally proceed, right?

So the way I’ve found that’s worked is that I will normally find somebody in that country who they don’t need to be trained in semiotics. They just need to be reasonably intelligent and to know how things go. So I might work with like say a market researcher or somebody who’s got a job in marketing. Or quite often somebody on the client side. Clients absolutely love it, if you get them to be your research assistant.

So I’ll work with somebody who’s native to that culture. Now, their job is to essentially know about the content of the culture, what kinds of things do people eat, what kind of things do they do during the day, and what kind of experience are they having when they’re shopping online and stuff like that? So their job is to know about the content of the culture.

My job as a semiologist is to have a set of tools for thinking. We’ve covered quite a lot of theory, Ian. In this short conversation so far, we’ve actually done quite a lot of theory, this idea about everything being made out of signs and symbols, right? So once you’ve got that idea installed, there’s quite a lot of theory. In other words, there’s quite a lot of useful concepts and questions that you can ask that will help you get to the right answers.

For example, I did a piece of work for an FMCG client probably two years ago now, and it concerned digital shopping in China, so it concerned Taobao and Tmall and these sorts of practices. So one of those is a bit more like Amazon, and the other one’s a bit more like eBay. Do you know how here and also in the US, we have like Black Friday?

Ian Paget: Yeah.

Rachel Lawes: Obviously it’s a really big deal in the US and kind of a little deal in the UK.

Ian Paget: Yeah, it’s growing in popularity in the UK, but I’m aware that it’s come from the States.

Rachel Lawes: Exactly. There’s a Chinese equivalent, which is called Singles Day for whatever reason, and it’s a gigantic circus of an event. I mean it is epic. It makes Black Friday look like a funeral. Singles Day is… I can’t begin to describe how massive it is. It’s like Superbowl and Christmas and presidential election all rolled into one. It’s big, big, big. It’s not just taking place on your internet shopping platform, it’s on TV, it’s everywhere, right? The celebrities are involved, it’s this huge televised event, you know? It’s a gigantic thing, right?

I’ve got skills in semiotics which means that first of all, number one, I know how to think in terms of signs and symbols and design decisions. Number two, I’m ready equipped with a load of penetrating questions that you can ask, which are helpfully set out in this book of mine that you’ve been reading, right?

Ian Paget: Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Lawes: And I worked with a woman who was born and raised in China and was fluent in Chinese, and she just understood a lot about how life in China proceeds. I met her in London, but she’d only been in London for about two years, so prior to that she’d been in China and she was thoroughly Chinese. And she and I worked together over a period of a few days where we just got our phones out, and we looked through Tmall and Taobao together in the run-up to this massive event.

What we were doing is looking at how these online shopping platforms were generating excitement ahead of this event. What I could see, when I looked at these apps, I could see a whole lot of semiotics going on. I can see colours, shapes, I can see headlines, captions, I can see use of space within a frame, and all that stuff that designers work with every day, right? And I’ve got some ideas about how that conveys meaning to the consumer.

But what she’s got is this lived experience of being in China, of being swept up in the excitement of this event. Now between the two of us, we managed to decode it pretty successfully. This is normally how I would work. I’ve repeated this in about 20 countries, by the way. Normally what I would do is find somebody, often on the client side if I can get someone, who is native to that culture, who speaks the language, who’s lived there for lots of years, and my job is to know how to do semiotics, and their job is to be an expert in their own culture. And then we work together in tandem and that can be really successful.

Ian Paget: So basically you are creating a code, kind of like a DNA that you can use if you want her and recreate that.

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, that’s exactly right, yeah.

Ian Paget: That’s fascinating.

Rachel Lawes: Exactly right. It’s a bit like coding, in the sense that… I know code is a word that’s used in semiotics. But now I think about it, now you mention it, it is a bit like writing software actually. It’s a bit similar to that type of coding, like you tell me what you want and I can write some code that’ll make it happen.

Ian Paget: Yeah, or rather something like a toolkit or some kind of DNA so that you can recreate that feeling.

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, exactly.

Ian Paget: That event. And as a graphic designer or a marketeer, knowing that if you want to create something that will target that, that you have to use this DNA.

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, that’s right.

Ian Paget: You can be flexible with it, but you have to use those parameters in order for it to be successful.

Rachel Lawes: So interesting.

Ian Paget: It’s fascinating.

Rachel Lawes: On that Chinese shopping project, that took place over a period of several days. Like every western consumer, I do a lot of shopping on Amazon and that’s what I’m used to. When I first encountered these Chinese shopping platforms, I found them hard to understand, not just because they were in Chinese, but because it seemed really garish. It was quite painful to look at, right? Incredibly loud colours. A lot of it was heavily animated. There was loads of things whizzing around on screen and exploding and this and that, and fast-moving splash screens and all of this stuff, right? I actually found it difficult to look at, never-mind understanding it.

At the end of that project, after I had spent some time with my accomplice and I’d really become familiar with how Tmall and Taobao work and how they went about generating excitement ahead of this massive Singles Day event, I’d become quite immersed in it, and it finally made sense to me. When that project was over and I started using Amazon again, I couldn’t believe how drab it was. It was like looking at a funeral directors. I couldn’t believe how somber and subdued it was.

And now, because I’ve been immersed in the Chinese semiotics, when I come back to Amazon, which had previously seemed perfectly normal, now I wondered why it was so funereal. Why is it so static? Why is everything in black? Where’s the fun? Where’s the movement? Where’s the excitement? Where are all the semiotic signs that are going to stimulate joy of shopping? Do you see what I mean?

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah, well I think you just identified exactly the reason why when… I worked with a Greek, I think they were from Greece, a Greek client a number of years ago. We were creating a new website for them, and literally they wanted something… I guess what I would describe as quite ugly, but when you look at everything from the culture and what they’re familiar with in those instances, actually doing something like what I would have personally done… What I would have done was something relevant for our culture, but the people in those locations, they expect to see something different. And if you want to comply with trends, the trends in our culture is different to what they would be in different parts of the world.

Rachel Lawes: That’s right. People have different expectations. A friend of mine married a South American woman, and when she first came to the UK, which was a number of years ago now, when she first came to the UK and she started to watch British TV, she remarked with surprise that she couldn’t understand why the news presenters didn’t dress up more to present the news, because where she was from being on the TV was a big deal, so you would really put on your best outfit and honor the occasion by absolutely looking your best. So she found the British presenters a bit dowdy in comparison.

Ian Paget: Yeah, yeah. You mentioned about these tools for thinking and you kind of implied it was simply questions, but those tools that you’re using, are they workshops or activities? What are those tools that you can use?

Rachel Lawes: There’s a whole bunch of separate things. So yeah, there are workshops and activities and things you can do with clients to make them feel like they were involved in the decision-making, which is really useful, all right kids? So there’s loads of that stuff that you can do to create buy-in and client engagement and that type of thing. But there are also, more privately, there are tools for thinking which I use when I’m just sitting at my desk my myself, that are tools which come out of semiotics… we’re back to theory again. Which help me to ask questions, interesting questions, and look at things in a new way. I’ll just give you an example of one, because I use this on an almost daily basis.

Ian Paget: Yeah, sure. Okay.

Rachel Lawes: Okay, here’s one. By the way, semiotics, as you can probably tell, for me this is not just work, this is a lifestyle. I do this. If I’m awake I’m thinking about semiotics. It’s been like this for years now. If you read this book, people, and you get into semiotics, there will come a point where it won’t switch off, and you’ll just do it forever, you know?

Ian Paget: Yeah, yeah. I feel that way already.

Rachel Lawes: It’s really life-changing, you know?

Ian Paget: Yeah, it really is, yeah.

Rachel Lawes: There’s this thing that I use all the time, right? If I’m trying to test some idea that appears to be true, self-evidently true, like let’s pick something that… like everybody should try to take care of their health and be in good health. Sounds obvious, right? Really robust, doesn’t it?

Ian Paget: Yeah, it does, yeah.

Rachel Lawes: So what I will do is if I encounter something that seems to be self-evidently true, is I’ll test out the hypothesis, here is the hypothesis. If something is true, then the opposite of that thing is equally true. This is a typical semiotic approach. Semiotics all about looking for the opposites of things and flipping things on their head and seeing what happens, right? So I will routinely do this. If I encounter some truism that everybody takes for granted, like it’s important to look after your health, I will test it by finding the opposite of that idea and seeing if it holds any water.

Now where that will get you is not necessarily everybody should commit suicide, because I’m not sure that that holds water in the way that you’d really want it to. But where it does get you to is it will cause you to notice the built-in moral imperative in this idea that everybody should take care of themselves. You should look after your health, you should do this, you should do that, right? So what that will cause you to notice is what sociologists call coercive healthism, which is the tendency within a culture to try and strong-arm people into doing certain behaviours that are believed to be good for their health.

But the fact is a lot of people engage in behaviours which are not good for their health on paper but which in fact… they’re doing it for some reason. So if you think about the types of things that are normally considered to be vices, like during lockdown, during the pandemic, there was some panicky news report on Fox News of all things, of course, the other day, saying… you know they love to put these frightening charts up just to alarm everybody? They put a frightening bar chart up saying… essentially, it was about vices that have gone up since lockdown, and on this list of vices there was drinking, smoking weed and playing video games.

Well, what did you think was going to happen? I mean, all right, so technically speaking these things may not actually promote the best physical health that’s possible to have. Oh, junk food. That was the other one. Eating junk food. Well obviously. I mean, okay, so if we’re going to say everybody should take care of their health and be in the best health that they can be, well that’s all well and good, but people drink and smoke weed and play video games and eat junk food for a reason. They’re not wrong. They’re not mistaken about the benefits of those activities. They do these things because they make them feel better.

So the point of pursuing this semiotic hypothesis, which is if you encounter something that seems to be self-evidently true, like people should strive to be healthy, and look for the opposite of that thing, and find out if there’s any… if it holds water, quite often it will do. What that can lead you to is insight, new ways of thinking about consumers, new ways of looking at the world around you. It will help you to break out of this culture blindness that you can get when you’re examining your own culture. And also, it can lead to just fresher, more innovative marketing strategies and more interesting brands.

Did that make sense?

Ian Paget: Oh yeah, it does. I mean it really opens up potential ideas for thoughts that you wouldn’t have thought out of any other way.

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, exactly.

Ian Paget: So it’s a fascinating exercise in its own way.

Rachel Lawes: It’s also fun. I really recommend it.

Ian Paget: Yeah, yeah. I think just the concept of semiotics, if you are the type of person that just likes to think and understand things, it… In itself, just any thought exercise is absolutely fascinating, but when you consider semiotics within there, and it applies to everything that the audience would be working on, so whether you’re in graphic design or branding, marketing, strategy, semiotics applies in absolutely everything and it seems like a very powerful tool.

Rachel Lawes: It applies all the time, it’s really interesting. I love it. And it means that you’ve got something original to say. This is where a big part of my work comes from. Some of the time I’m working with brand owners, and what they want is insight about consumers, and sometimes that can be a fairly substantial, essentially market research project. Other times, when I’m working with ad agencies or designers, they want answers that are quicker than that. They don’t necessarily care about having me go out and do a load of primary research. They just want some snappy ideas.

And because I’ve got a set of tools for thinking about things, like this truisms technique, what that means is that let’s say that you’re a branding agency or ad agency or something, and your client is some… they own some brand in some really boring, familiar category. Let’s say insurance or something like that, right? Not many people are excited about insurance. It’s kind of a boring necessity, you know? All the brands seem the same and all that stuff, right?

So what the ad agencies have learned is that they can call me up and say, “We’ve got a briefing for insurance. Can you help us think of something original to say about it?” Semiotics can deliver against that type of a thing at short notice, because it’s got this built-in toolkit. So it’s a really great way to get to a new place when thinking about a familiar category, and you can do that quite quickly and easily. And then, of course, it will then go on to inform design decisions and things like that.

Ian Paget: Yeah, absolutely. Well I think semiotics is one of those topics that I know we could speak about for endless hours, but I want to divert people towards your book. So for listeners, what I wanted to do, I wanted to do an episode on semiotics because I heard people speaking about it online. I didn’t really have a great understanding of what it was, so I did a search online for relevant books and then I bought Rachel’s book, Using Semiotics in Marketing, and I’ll tell you what, Rachel, it’s really opened my eyes as to what semiotics and how I can use that within my work. And I know it will be the same for listeners. So do you want to spend the last few minutes or so explaining through your book so that people can go and check it out if they want to?

Rachel Lawes: Yeah, I’ll just hand over some essential facts right now. So here, guys, here’s what you need to know, right? Number one, semiotics is fun. This is the most fun you can have while you’re at work, seriously. I would not have got into this if it wasn’t entertaining. It makes me laugh every single day. It keeps me mentally stimulated. There’s a world of fun to be had from semiotics, number one-

Ian Paget: Yeah. You know what? I just want to say, I was expecting this book to be a little bit dry, but you’ve made it really fun from the outset. Just reading through, I was gripped. It’s a textbook, but you’ve got stories in there. It was a really fun read.

Rachel Lawes: Thank you. One of my reviews said, “This book is juicy.” It is, it’s juicy.

Ian Paget: Yeah, it is.

Rachel Lawes: Semiotics is regularly saucy. I was just in a client meeting this morning in which I felt it necessary to discuss the adult entertainment industry. It’s regularly a saucy topic. So number one, you can have fun with it. Number two, it’s useful for everybody who works with consumers, brands and marketing. Number three, you don’t have to have studied semiotics at university in order to be able to use it. Up to now there was a problem in the sense that the only books which really existed would be academic.

And also, they were very focused on the details of how to do analysis, but they were not focused on the business processes surrounding analysis, like what happens when you get a briefing from a client? What happens if you need to write a proposal and you want to use some semiotics, how are you going to write that proposal? Or how are you going to do your costings, or once you’ve come up with these glittering insights, how are you going to share them?

So this is the first book that will take you all the way through the business process, right from, “I’ve got a marketing problem on my hands, maybe semiotics would be a good idea,” all the way through designing and implementing a research project, coming up with some strategic insights. One reviewer said that my chapter on strategic insights was worth the cover price of the book alone. And then finally how to share that with other people. So you don’t need an academic background in semiotics. If you’ve got a basic idea about marketing, this book will take you all the way from A to Z, okay?

There’s also other stuff you should know. I’m very available on LinkedIn. I’m quite visible on social media. I’m on LinkedIn almost every day, and I’m there. You can ask me questions once you’ve got the book. If you want to have a chat with the author and say what did you mean on page 53, I’m right there for you. There’s also a read-along group which is happening right now. You’ve still got time to sign up for that, folks.

It’s a read-along that is happening over a period of a few weeks. It’s wrapping up at the end of July. We’re not too far through it. And everybody’s encouraged to do their own research project in semiotics in conjunction with the read-along. You’ll find the details of that on LinkedIn, if people want to follow me. My name is Rachel Lawes. You spell that L-A-W-E-S, and if you look me up on LinkedIn, you’ll find details of the read-along and you’re very welcome to join in with that and learn how to do semiotics as we go along.

If you just want the book, the book is available on Amazon. It’s also available direct from the publishers, koganpage.com, and from all good book stores.

Ian Paget: It sounds like you’ve said that a thousand times.

Rachel Lawes: No, not a thousand. Maybe a few.

Ian Paget: Well, what I will do is the read-along that you mentioned, I will add a link to that in the show notes for the episode-

Rachel Lawes: Amazing.

Ian Paget: … so that if anyone wants to find it easily, that would be the best place to look for that. But I think that’s the perfect point to wrap up the interview. I think it’s been absolutely fascinating, because like I said, I’ve seen people online speak about semiotics. And it’s been one of those topics that to me as a self-taught graphic designer, it sounds a little bit like fluff and they’re just using fancy words, but actually there’s a lot to it. And even though I haven’t read all of your book yet, just the few chapters I have read and skimming through it, it’s changed my perspective of it.

And I know that every single project I work in some way, I’m definitely going to be researching and trying to understand semiotics so that I can use them to my example. I think it’s going to change my process in quite a big way. So appreciate you writing the book and thank you for coming on to share some insights with us in the time that we’ve had.

Rachel Lawes: Ian, thanks very much for having me. It’s been lots of fun. Thank you so much.