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Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations
Volume 13, 2014, pp. 592–605, ISSN 1841-2394
SEMIOTICS AND PERSUASION
IN MARKETING COMMUNICATION
MANUELA EPURE
mepure.mk@spiruharet.ro
Spiru Haret University
ERIC EISENSTAT
eric.eisenstat@gmail.com
Spiru Haret University
CRISTINA DINU
dinu.cristina@gmail.com
Spiru Haret University
ABSTRACT. Since the first conference on Marketing and Semiotics, organized at
Northwestern University in 1986, research on the application of semiotics
techniques in marketing, and particularly in consumer advertising, has evolved with
considerable momentum. By looking at advertising campaigns as compositions of
signs and understanding the underlying relationships with the meanings they may
convey, marketers gain better control over the communication process, and thus,
create the opportunity to communicate more effectively with the target population.
This, in turn, paves the way for developing powerful marketing tools in terms of
transmitting truly persuasive messages. In this article, we review the current
theoretic and practical uses of semiotics in advertising, particularly in relation to the
concept of persuasion. To this end, it is argued that semiotics allows for the practical
distinction of persuasion from manipulation in marketing communication. Because
signs are as volatile as they are powerful, understanding the semiotic structure of the
communication is crucial: some message will almost surely be transmitted in a
powerful way, whether it is the one that was intended or not. To demonstrate these
concepts in practical application, we construct a basic, comparative semiotics
analysis of three recent public service campaigns in Romania. The resulting analysis
provides a clear framework for understanding the various shortcomings commonly
noted with respect to these campaigns. More importantly, however, the semiotics
investigation suggests that these techniques may constitute a powerful arsenal in
social marketing and other domains of marketing, not just consumer advertising.
Keywords: signs; subliminal messaging; representational codes; signification
systems; consumer advertising; social marketing
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1. Introduction
What is semiotics? Simply put, semiotics is the study of signs. But what are
signs? Scholars specialized in academic work involving semiotics, or
Semioticians, refer to signs as cultural symbols and as essential building
blocks of language and communication. In this context, signs are typically
endowed with a two-part definition, consisting of a signifier – a particular
person, object or idea, and a signified – the particular person, object or idea
that is being referred to. Semioticians typically focus on understanding the
relationship between a sign and the thing or concept that it comes to stand
for, the relationship between various signs and the relationship between
signs and the people who interpret them (e.g. many traffic signs are the
same across countries so people from different countries come to
understand them in the same way).
Let us take as an example the Romanian publicity spot for the local milk
brand Fulga.1 This brand belongs
to the company Albalact Alba
Iulia and was first introduced in
2004. Before embarking on a
semiotic analysis of this brand, it
would of course be useful to
understand the literal meanings of the
Romanian phrases involved. To that end, the
company’s name is a composition of lactate
meaning dairy; the brand name Fulga is
itself derived from fulg meaning flake.
With this in mind, consider the cow as
the symbolic animal representing the
product “drinkable milk,” whose name
Fulga is intended to transmit a sense of something white and lightweight.
Moreover, one can view Fulga as a silly feminine form of “fulg” innocently
conjured up by a child who is not yet able to speak grammatically correct.
Using animation as the basis for communicating the brand and the
message, the strategists responsible for the brand wished to transmit this
attitude of youthful jubilation. The brand creators say that “Fulga” is a
brand that grows together with the children – its own best friends. It is
pampered, it plays and it learns to speak at the same time with them. This is
what makes it so adorable – it tries to learn as it goes while preserving its
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innocence.2 The idea is reiterated through the images in which the cow
Fulga is depicted in “her world” – in the clouds, in fields of flowers
underneath a smiling sun or rocking on a swing.
Thus, the character Fulga, the way she is depicted, her way of speaking,
etc. form a combination of signifiers, which individually and in unison
transmit messages about the signified – youthful innocence, joy and
drinking milk. The ultimate signified is of course the idea that the particular
milk being produced by Albalact is in fact the one guaranteed to elicit these
sentiments and states of being for both children and adults. Or at least this is
what the creators of the brand would hope for.
Unfortunately, messages transmitted by signs are not always those
intended by their designers. Indeed, the dialog in a particular commercial
where Fulga reprimands herself for being “a cow” gave rise to controversy
when several mothers took offense to the use of the expression “I’m such a
cow!”3 Due to the negative connation associated with the word cow in the
Romanian language, some people may uncover in the language of this
character (who strives to be a dear friend of the children) linguistic
perversions, syntactic and stylistic infractions along with nonsensical
expressions. For such people, the signified is clearly not the one envisioned
by the designers of the commercial and the managers of this brand.
The immediate implications of semiotics for linguistics are evident to
the extent that all language is composed technically of signs, in form of
words. In this case, it is not only the arrangement of letters that forms the
signifier, but also the way in which they are expressed. In written language,
for example, CAPITALIZING or italicizing a word each presents a different
signifier intended to enhance in some way the meaning of what is being said
and thus transmitting a different signified. Likewise, the choice of a
particular word arrangement within a sentence or the grouping of sentences
into paragraphs, etc. each generates a specific sign. In spoken language,
signs can include facial expression (for example, happy faces versus sad
faces), body language, artistic symbols and visual cues of all kinds. The
advertising industry uses a lot of words and images, both written and
spoken, to persuade us to buy, to consume a product/service or to change
our social behavior (e.g. social marketing). But as evidenced in the case of
Fulga, the relationship between words and meaning is often difficult to
control as it depends on a complex system of human interactions and social
contexts.
Why is semiotics important for marketers? A wide range of marketing
activities are built on communication, which basically involves transmitting
a “powerful” message to consumers in order to influence their behavior, the
steps in their purchase decision process and to create some well-defined
consumption patterns.
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One of the most well known theories of communication (the linear
model developed by Shannon and Weaver, 1949) identifies three levels of
communication problems, as following:
Technical problems: How accurately can the symbols of communication
be transmitted?
Semantic problems: How precisely do the transmitted symbols convey
the desired meaning?
Effectiveness problems: How effectively does the received meaning
affect conduct in the desired way? Are these messages persuasive?
Expanding on this theory, C.S. Peirce developed a semiotics model of
communication (Eco, 1979), as depicted in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Peirce’s semiotic model of communication4
In this model, Pierce refines the index/indexal concept to allow for the
differentiation between an icon (meaning based on similarity of
appearance), an index (meaning based on cause-and-effect relationship) and
a symbol (meaning based on convention). In advertising agencies, the
copywriters “play” with all three of these in their effort to produce a
powerful and persuasive message. However, as will be demonstrated
shortly, creativity does not automatically mean the delivery of a truly
persuasive message with a great impact on consumer behavior.
In marketing communications, the human body is very often used
(ethically or not) as a vehicle or a transmitter of presentational codes. For
example, Fiske (1990) provides a list of ten such codes along with the
meanings they can convey:
1. bodily contact: whom we touch, as well as where and when we touch
them can communicate a great deal about relationships;
2. proximity (proxemics): how closely we approach someone can codify
our relationship in terms of the physical distance – within three feet is
considered intimate, up to eight feet is personal, while anything farther than
this is deemed semi-public;
3. orientation: how we are angle our bodies to others is another way of
transmitting a relationship message – e.g. facing somebody can indicate
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intimacy or aggression, while an angular positions up to 90 degrees indicate
a co-operative attitude;
4. appearance: aspects under voluntary control (hair, clothes, skin paint,
make-up) and those less controllable (height, weight etc.) can send different
messages in a number of distinctive ways;
5. head nods: mainly involved in interaction management such as turntaking in speech (one nod may be a silent permission for the speaker to
continue while successive rapid nods may indicate a desire to speak);
6. facial expression: consists of a range of sub-codes of eye-brow position,
eye shape, mouth shape, and so on, which in ensemble constitute a
particular expression, and thus, promote a specific sign related to one’s
attitude, state, etc.;
7. gestures (kinesics): while hand and arm are the most efficient
transmitters of kinesic information, the feet and head position are also
important;
8. posture: the way we sit, stand, etc. can also communicate a limited but
interesting range of meanings: friendliness, hostility, flirtation, superiority,
etc;
9. eye movement and eye contact: how often and for how long we meet
other peoples’ eyes is a way of sending very important messages about
relationships;
10. nonverbal aspects of speech: paralinguistic codes communicate
information about the speaker: tone, volume, accent and speech errors all
relate something about the speaker’s emotional state, personality,
educational background, social status, etc.
Indeed, marketing strategists attempt to exploit all these aspects of body
language communication to codify marketing messages. But what is
particularly interesting in analyzing this from a marketing perspective is that
marketing communication, perhaps more so than communication in other
contexts, typically carries a normative appeal. That is, all this codification
and explicit or implicit signaling usually aims to persuade the recipient of
the message to take a particular action, rather than being just purely
informative in nature. With this in mind, we turn to an in-depth discussion
of the topic of message content and its power of persuasion in shaping
consumer behavior.
2. Persuasion, message content and consumer behavior
What is persuasion? Lakhani (2005) refers to persuasion as “the art of
getting what you want,” while Perloff (2003) defines persuasion as “a
symbolic process in which communicators try to convince other people to
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change their attitudes or behaviors regarding an issue through the
transmission of a message in an atmosphere of free choice”.
Persuasion, however, is often confused with manipulation, both by the
senders and the recipients of messages. For example, people often proclaim
that they are “immune to persuasion.” In this sense, they often refer to an
ability to “see through” sales pitches, uncover the truth disguised by
political proclamations, and so on. Two important aspects of this view are
worth emphasizing. First, when we think of persuasion in this way, it is a
defensive view of being attacked by manipulation – someone striving to
“trick us” into doing something or believing something against our will.
Naturally, one hopes that in such situations he or she will not succumb to
the manipulator’s wishes. This casts persuasion in a rather negative light.
But must persuasion necessarily be used only in a negative way? Once we
divorce persuasion from manipulation, we recognize that persuasion has a
number of positive applications. Public service campaigns (what social
marketing targets) are great examples of persuasion intended to improve
people’s lives. Moreover, persuasion can be very subtle, and how we
respond to such influences can depend on a variety of factors. This is true
for positive uses of persuasion as well as for the negative. In the latter case,
it must be recognized that even if we like to think that we are immune to
manipulation, we do not always recognize the nature of persuasion until
after we have already committed to its beckoning.
In marketing circles, messages that persuade us without our awareness
of the fact are typically referred to as subliminal messages. How effective
subliminal messages are in advertizing is a long-debated subject; whether
such messages can coerce someone to act entirely against his/her will, or
whether they only reinforce (and perhaps remind) the individual of that
which he/she already believes or intends to do, remains an open question.
Additionally, the wide-spread use of subliminal messaging in advertizing,
political campaigns, and other contexts has sparked a number of
controversies. Are such communication techniques ethical? Of course, the
primary path in finding a suitable answer to this question once again leads
to the distinction between persuasion and manipulation.
Hence, let us state clearly the key element that separates persuasion
from manipulation and allows for a positive aspect to persuasive signaling.
The key in Perloff’s definition above is the prevalence of the “atmosphere
of free choice” that casts persuasive communication as, in fact, a
phenomenon of self-persuasion. In this sense, a persuasive message does
not trick, coerce or otherwise force us into any particular action or change
of mind. Rather, it attempts to makes us aware of all the available options,
and asks us to make a well-informed choice that best suits our individual
tastes, desires etc.
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The communicative process that achieves this, however, need not be
explicit, to the extent that awareness can exist subconsciously, and perhaps,
that information regarding choices and optimal decisions is suitably
processed at the subconscious level as well. In this sense, the “positive”
motivation of subliminal messages may very well be based on the premise
that takes the latter one step further – that certain information about choice
and the decision making process is in fact more effectively executed
subconsciously rather than with an explicit pen-and-paper type of analysis.
Nevertheless, it is often difficult to distinguish between persuasion and
manipulation in practice. To that end, it is interesting to note that the
contemporary advertising industry is becoming more and more demanding
in terms of creativity. Creativity can generate good or bad messages, ethical
or unethical, outrageous or pleasant for viewers, but its main goal is to
generate emotions and actions that lead to the purchase a particular product.
This is where creativity can blur the line between persuasion and
manipulation.
To a large extent, manipulation is simpler achieve through creativity:
one only needs to creatively masquerade a lie as a believable truth. This
generally does not require the in-depth understanding of the message
recipient from the multi-faceted psychological, sociological and economic
perspectives that a persuasive message is founded on. However, the
“success” of a manipulative message is feeble and fleeting; once fooled, an
individual is bound to discover the true nature of “the product” quickly and
is subsequently unlikely to be fooled into purchasing this product again. In
fact, the negative association of the product with feeling “like a fool” may
be a rather insurmountable burden to overcome by this and related products
(say, products distributed by the same company) in the future.
At the end of the day, is committing to a purchase really our own
decision? Are we somehow inevitably manipulated through signs rather
than simply persuaded by them? Can we disentangle the “true” meaning of
the message from its outstanding artistic creation? One reasonable
hypothesis may be that people do not actually succumb to manipulative
advertizing, but are definitely “prisoners” of their own perception of
themselves – similar to the way that for anorexics, their own image in the
mirror will always show a fat person no matter how skinny they are in
reality.
3. The power of signs in marketing communication
“I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary
form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in
curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to
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write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the
not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that
will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.”
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).
These infamous words, widely circulated among marketing researchers and
professionals, underscore (among other things) the importance of semiotics
in marketing communications. Indeed, Beasley and Danesi (2002) provide
an integral exposition of marketing semiotics and persuasion in the context
of consumer advertising, which is defined as the type of advertising that
targets the promotion of a product or service to the general public through
any media type. In this perspective, research on semiotics in advertising is
generally accepted as being inspired by the works of the French semiotician
Roland Barthes (in the 1950s) who proposed the basic theme that marketing
instruments (e.g. brand names, logos, ads, etc.) are interpretable at two main
levels:
1. surface: signs are used to create personality for the product; creativity
plays its foremost role at this level
2. underlying: the concealed meaning of the text, imagery, sounds, etc.
Of course, dividing the interpretability of marketing symbols in this
dichotomous way is simply the premise that semiotics plays an important
role in advertising. And indeed it does – by providing a comprehensive,
analytic understanding of the underlying interpretation level.
According to Beasley and Danesi, the latter is accomplished by
characterizing this level in terms of signification systems. Such systems are
in fact analytical constructs composed of the “hidden arrays of meanings”
with the important property that all signification systems are taken to be
open-ended. That is, there can be no sense of “finite” or “closure” attributed
to such arrays. A typical goal of a semiotic investigation then becomes to
uncover the signification systems associated with particular marketing
signs. Generally speaking, therefore, semiotics in advertising may be
thought of as the “study of sound and sight”. (Beasley and Danesi: 26)
It is the open-ended property of signification systems that renders signs
in advertising both powerful and dangerous. In this context, one can think of
open-endedness as a chain of meanings without an end. That is, a symbol
such as the cow representing Fulga (from the example in Section I) initiates
a chain of meanings:
child-like → innocent → lightweight → …
which is initially common to all observers of the image. However, as the
c …
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