Semiotics: Involving the 5 Senses in Marketing
Why you should include touch, smell, taste, sound, and sight in your marketing mix
What Is Semiotics?
Semiotics is the science of signs, what they mean, and how they convey messages subconsciously through our cultural and social backgrounds. Essentially, it is about how signs create meaning.
Signs are all around us.
For millennia, humanity has used signs to decode the world and understand new concepts, laws, religions, and customs. Examples of these early signs are the cave drawings from Ice Age humans from Lascaux in France and religious symbols illustrating the deep connection between a sign and a message. For example, the cave paintings could represent a ritual to try and improve future hunting activities.
Take a more recent example of traffic lights. When we see the light's different colours, we automatically know what they mean and how to react to them. The simple traffic light is a sign which has been established and reinforced by cultural conventions over a long period and is now embedded in our subconscious cultural knowledge. Semiotics ensures that intended meanings are clearly understood by the person receiving them and assure clarity of meaning.
In marketing, semiotics is an underused tool. Marketers need to grasp this powerful concept and feed it into their marketing strategies to create meaningful connections with customers. Signs can be used to influence how a customer perceives a service or product by utilizing the subliminal messages it conveys by tapping into their loves, fears, needs, or wants. By doing this, marketing campaigns will connect with audiences to spread messages about their brand in the most effective and truest way possible.
Remember that your brand is a sign. You create it with a mission and values, carefully chosen wording, and visuals. But you don’t control its interpretation by your customers. Your audience will interpret those symbols as intended in a successful marketing strategy, and your brand will become linked to this identity — creating a perfect harmony of visual semiotics.
How Can I Use Semiotics in Marketing?
Marketing is all about communicating the right message, at the right time, to the right person. Customers are not just buying a physical product or service from you; they buy a lifestyle or a product that matches their values and needs. We don’t realize it, but subconscious perceptions and emotions drive our purchases. This is where semiotics comes in.
Semiotics can:
- Improve brand messaging.
- Communicate meaning about your brand, service, or product.
- Influence customers’ subconscious decision-making.
- Tap into cultural messages to improve localized marketing strategies.
Semiotics can take a multitude of forms, not just visual. A simple way to think about it is by using and tapping into the body's five senses — sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. When applied correctly, semiotics can enable marketers to create better advertisements, websites, social media content and engagement, shop design, and merchandise. It is a vital tool for improving marketing output and also to gain wisdom in understanding your customer. It is an essential research tool that you should add to your kit.
Keeping in mind that there is no single way that everyone understands a symbol, it’s a great way for companies and brands to understand how consumers might reflect on their products and services and knowledgeably grow their brand. It is important to bear in mind that culture and context play a big part in how symbols are understood and interpreted and can vary from culture to culture. So the research phase should always be conducted thoroughly to understand how your chosen symbol might be interpreted.
Conducting Semiotics Research
Before embarking on including semiotics in your marketing strategy or campaign, you need to ensure that the signs and symbols you want to use are conveying the correct message.
Here are some simple questions you could use to ask a focus group, include in surveys or in a 1–2–1 interview, about the semiotics you want to use in your campaign to ensure the right messaging is getting across:
What does the text say? Is it attention-grabbing? What does it say about my product or service? Does it sell the product or the emotions behind it? How does it relate to the images?
- What does the image say? How does it grab attention? How does it relate to the text? Do customers understand it? Is it clear? Are there any negative associations?
- Who is the target market? Does the message address their age, income level, pain points, views, culture, product requirements? Which elements highlight this? Why?
Take a look at this example semiotic analysis of a Heinz Tomato Ketchup advert:
Visual Semiotics
Apple Mac — when you think of Apple Mac technology, you think of its symbol, its icon, the apple. The apple has many different meanings in different cultures, such as knowledge — Isaac Newton — health and wellness — an apple a day keeps the doctor away — or taking risks — William Tell’s risky shot. It can also have negative connotations, such as temptations from Snow White and sin in the story of Adam and Eve. It’s important to consider these potential interpretations and inferences and make sure you’re prepared for how people might reflect on your brand. Semiotics even reaches to the type of emojis you use on a social media post, so signs should be considered in all stage of your communications.
Visual Colour Semiotics
Staying with the visual semiotics concept, it is not only shapes that can influence us. Colours also play an important part in interpreting meaning. Interestingly colours carry different meanings in different cultures. For example, purple is seen as a regal colour in the UK, but purple is worn to funerals in Cyprus. Red can convey urgency, whereas green can denote nature, and blue a sense of calmness. There is a great resource called Colour Psychology: what colours communicate chart which takes you through the main colour groups along with their meaning and uses in art, design, and life. The meaning of colour and its psychology is primarily based on instinct and emotion. Colours are steeped in history, and it is important to understand what colours mean, especially if you are marketing to a specific country or a global audience.
Sound Semiotics
Sound semiotics can take the form of either non-verbal or verbal sounds to communicate a message. Take Netflix’s Ta Dum sound. This is instantly recognizable as Netflix, showing that you are now entering Netflix’s video world, generating excitement or anticipation and quality and experimentation. Film studios also have a tune associated with them, such as 20th Century Fox’s grand theme telling you that the show is about to start. Over time these short sound snippets become embedded in cultural consciousness, and just a couple of bars of sounds can convey your brand and brand message.
These subliminal messages are also important to recognize for marketers. Think about how you can incorporate sound into your adverts to convey your brand’s identity, or how can you use recognized accents or songs from local cultures to support the message you want to share about your product?
Smell Semiotics
You might be wondering how scent or smell semiotics can be created or used in marketing. But think about what happens every time you walk past a McDonald’s or a Subway sandwich shop — that smell. The smell is instantly recognizable, whether you like it or not, and can generate hunger or feelings of nostalgia. You may also have noticed that clothing brands spray the tissue paper in their boxes with a house scent, connecting that smell directly to their brand. It has long been recognized that our sense of smell is one of the most powerful senses, and when you smell something, it can immediately transport you to a certain place, time, or memory. If you have a physical shop or online delivery business, think about how you can incorporate smell into your customer experience.
Touch Semiotics
Touch semiotics is important to consider if you have packaging or a physical product to sell in your business. How do you want that product to feel in the customer’s hands, or how do you want the packaging to feel? For example, a silky texture might be good for a feminine or valuable brand. In contrast, a more natural or organic brand might want to focus on natural materials such as wood to convey a direct association between the product and the material. You may want to introduce a more rugged texture if you have an outdoor product, or you could create a relief of your logo on the packaging. Consider the filling for your packages too. Do you want to use bubble wrap, wood chippings, eco-wool, tissue paper, or cardboard? Packaging and the feel of the product are an important step in communicating your brand identity and should be part of the whole process of communicating your brand and not seen as an after-thought.
Taste Semiotics
Semiotic thinking about taste focuses primarily on food culture and flavours. Think of the taste of sugar on your tongue. Newborn children are already primed to like sweet tastes, as the meaning of sweet is generally something nutritious and contains energy. On the other hand, young babies do not like bitter tastes associated with toxic substances. Only as we grow older, we realize that not all sweet things are good, and not all bitter foods are bad. Our taste buds evolve depending on the culture in which we grew up, which foods and spices we are exposed to. These experiences form our taste buds into adulthood and can form strong bonds with certain flavour profiles.
This is an important concept for food and drinks brands to be aware of, as a flavour profile that may work in one country may not work in another. A simple example of this is the UK margarine I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter!. This product exists in the UK and The Netherlands, but the recipe is slightly different in The Netherlands, which includes more salt. This is because Dutch taste buds prefer more salty foods and would consider the UK version bland. This is also the same for Coca-Cola’s original drink. For example, the drink's flavour in the USA and Mexico is different as the Mexico version has cane sugar added to the Coca-Cola® formula instead of corn syrup, creating a slightly different taste.
Also, food trends are now deeply rooted in sensory escapism, cultural identity, and nostalgia. Especially since COVID-19 and the closure of restaurants and cafes, consumers now want to recreate that experience in their homes, leading to the rise of at-home or DIY meal kits from burger shops to Michelin-starred restaurants. As well as creating indulgent at-home experiences, health is a new default, leading to a rise in plant-based foods and ethical foods such as fair trade products and organic foods.
Knowing about the food trends and taste profiles of countries you want to grow your food and drinks brand in is essential to create a product that locals will enjoy.
Key Take-Aways
By creating semiotic experiences, you are connecting all of your customers with your brand. You are creating a shared experience.
How do you ensure the right meaning is conveyed? Ensure you conduct thorough research into semiotic options for your brand to ensure it has the right connotations for your target audience.
You can use semiotics to target audiences. You may wish to use different colours for different campaigns for parts of your business or different locations. Think about what conveys your message to those audiences.
Semiotics helps to predict trends and social change. Always keep an eye on what is happening in the world around you to react to these changes with your brand identity. This doesn’t mean change your brand completely but be aware of changes that may negatively impact your brand so you can always remain relevant to your customers.
Do not under-estimate the strength of feeling that customers have when presented with a word, object, smell, sound, or touch for strengthening your brand identity. Be recognizable across the whole spectrum and tap into your customer’s psyche to generate brand loyalty and sales.
