What makes a semiotician tick? SEMIOVOX’s Josh Glenn has invited his fellow practitioners in the field of commercial semiotics, from around the world, to answer a few revealing questions.

Paris…

SEMIOVOX

When you were a child/teen, how did your future fascination with symbols, cultural patterns, interpreting “texts,” and getting beneath the surface of daily life manifest itself?

XAVIER POUGET

As a child, I loved illustrated books, fashion history, cinema, and fairy tales. I had collections from many countries — Russia, West Africa, Japan — and I could spend hours imagining sets or crafting costumes. My parents also let me watch films “not for my age,” because they wanted to share their passion for cinema, especially genre films. I wouldn’t have phrased it that way back then, but I was fascinated by these little mythologies, these highly coded worlds where a single prop or a beam of light already tells a story.

Looking back, I think that’s where it all began. I was instinctively drawn to staging, to systems of signs, to atmospheres that speak before words do. I didn’t know it would become my profession, but I was already — very naïvely — trying to understand how a world is constructed.

SEMIOVOX

Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.

XAVIER POUGET

The real turning point came at the Institut Français de la Mode. A professor — who later became a friend and mentor — analyzed brands by blending semiotics, sociology, and aesthetics. I remember the feeling vividly: suddenly, what had felt scattered or intuitive became clear. Signs echoed each other, visual choices made sense, tensions appeared. It was as if someone switched on the light in a room I already knew, but had never fully seen.

What attracted me immediately was the ability to give structure to what I perceived intuitively.

What attracted me less was the overly academic side of semiotics — too detached from reality. If analysis doesn’t restore the beauty, texture, or emotional vibration of an object, it becomes abstract.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

XAVIER POUGET

I never decided to “do semiotics.” I simply spent twenty years in luxury and beauty, where brands behave like living mythologies. Working on fragrance, fashion, and cosmetics, I realized my natural role was to help teams put words, images, and structure on what they intuitively felt.

I wasn’t a theorist; I was someone who saw tensions, codes, inconsistencies — and enjoyed clarifying them. Over the years, within the companies I worked for, I realized that this was my real added value.

I created Bon Conseil to formalize that role: a space where I can be a strategic sparring partner, someone you call not for a standardized report but to surface a vision, structure a territory, or unlock a creative impasse. A kind of intellectual fine‑tuning that helps brands see more clearly.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

XAVIER POUGET

Above all, a good semiotician needs total cultural agility. The ability to move from a treatise on political philosophy to a TikTok meme without hierarchy or snobbery. The micro‑signals of the present — a phrase, a visual detail, a tone — often reveal much deeper shifts in collective values.

But this reading of the present only works if it’s grounded in more classical culture: literature, history, anthropology. That combination is what allows you to distinguish the foam from the tide, the ephemeral from the structural.

For me, a good semiotician is someone who can look very close and very far at the same time: the detail and the structure, the everyday and the archetype.

SEMIOVOX

What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?

XAVIER POUGET

• Jean‑Marie Floch’s Sémiotique, marketing et communication. For the almost luminous clarity with which he connects analysis and strategy. Floch shows that semiotics can be a decision‑making tool, not an abstract exercise.

• Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Not a manual, but a way of looking at the world. Barthes taught me that anything — a gesture, an object, an advertisement — can become a myth, and that analysis can be both precise and deeply sensitive.

• Algirdas Julien Greimas’ De l’imperfection. A short, almost poetic text that reminds us that meaning often emerges from flaws, gaps, and accidents. It shapes the way I approach brands: their imperfections often reveal their truth.

And because a good consultant should always allow himself a bit of freedom, I’ll add a fourth book — not a semiotics book, but fascinating and deeply resonant with our line of work.

• [French anthropologist and author] Bruno Remaury’s Le monde horizontal. Part essay, part novel, it’s a fascinating text for anyone interested in signs. Remaury reads the world through details, objects, gestures — creating a kind of intuitive, almost epiphanic semiotics.

SEMIOVOX

When someone asks you to describe what you do, what is your “elevator pitch”? How do you persuade a skeptical client to take a chance on using this tool?

XAVIER POUGET

I usually say that I help brands understand what they’re already saying — often without realizing it — and then build the discourse that truly fits them. Before creating the right narrative, you first need to uncover the one that’s already there, in the codes, the choices, the tone, the history.

With skeptics, I never talk about “method.” I talk about risk. Making decisions without semiotics is like driving in a country where you don’t know the road signs: you can move forward, but you may miss warnings or opportunities.

Semiotics isn’t an intellectual exercise; it’s a tool for reducing cultural risk. It ensures the brand is readable, coherent, and — above all — welcome in culture. In short: I don’t sell theory. I sell clarity and alignment.

SEMIOVOX

What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?

XAVIER POUGET

I have a soft spot for what I call brand psychoanalysis: those deep dives into a brand’s platform, heritage, or territory where you eventually find the word, image, or tension that reveals what the brand couldn’t articulate.

I also enjoy working on small mythologies — Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day. These highly coded rituals may seem clichéd, but they’re fascinating to reinterpret. Finding a unique place for a brand within these collective narratives is both strategic and playful.

And then there’s naming, especially in fragrance. A few syllables to condense an imaginary world, a promise, an emotion. Tiny in appearance, immense in impact.

SEMIOVOX

What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?

XAVIER POUGET

The firefighter syndrome can be frustrating: semiotics is sometimes brought in when everything is already decided, to justify a campaign or fix a mistake. At that point, analysis becomes post‑rationalization.

But I’m fortunate to be called very early, sometimes even before the project exists — on topics at the intersection of semiotics, societal foresight, and cultural strategy. In those contexts, semiotics becomes an exploratory tool, almost a radar.

That’s where it’s most powerful: when it acts as a compass, not a band‑aid.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

XAVIER POUGET

Saussure — but read through Greimas and Lévi‑Strauss. Their structural approach resonates with me because it reveals the underlying architecture of a subject: tensions, oppositions, lines of force. The surface can be misleading; meaning often becomes clear only when you look at the structure.

And I love the irony: even when we think we’re being wildly creative, we’re usually moving within a semiotic square. For me, structure isn’t a constraint — it’s a way to reach the axiological core of a subject.

SEMIOVOX

What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?

XAVIER POUGET

First: learn the business of brands. Understand how marketing teams work, how a platform is built, how consumer intelligence teams think. That’s the best possible training. Semiotics only has value when it’s connected to reality. 

Then comes curiosity. Read everything, watch everything, without hierarchy. Learn to distinguish a micro‑trend from a deep shift, a weak signal from noise.

And don’t rush to build a “method.” Methods come later. What you need first is a way of seeing — a gaze that can move between the field and the signs, between marketing and culture, between the concrete and the abstract. That gaze — not a theoretical model — is what makes a good semiotician for brands.

MAKING SENSE series: MARTHA ARANGO (Sweden) | MACIEJ BIEDZIŃSKI (Poland) | BECKS COLLINS (England) | WHITNEY DUNLAP-FOWLER (USA) | IVÁN ISLAS (Mexico) | WILLIAM LIU (China) | SÓNIA MARQUES (Portugal) | CHIRAG MEDIRATTA (India / Canada) | SERDAR PAKTIN (Turkey / England) | MARIA PAPANTHYMOU (Greece / Russia) | XIMENA TOBI (Argentina) | & many more.

Also see these global semio series: MAKING SENSE (Q&As) | SEMIOFEST SESSIONS (monthly mini-conferences) | COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | COLOR CODEX | DECODER (fictional semioticians) | CASE FILE | PHOTO OP | MEDIA DIET | TATTOO YOU (semioticians’ tattoos).