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.

Delhi…

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?

RAJAN LUTHRA

I’m reminded of a tour guide showing us marble inlay work on the walls of the Taj Mahal: “this is how the petals make an OM symbol,” “this forms the lotus.” Hindu iconography on an Islamic structure, building the unique Indian design language… that was the beginning.

In middle-school literature class, a section on ‘Similes, Metaphors & Personifications’ enthralled me. I recall immense joy drawing imaginative metaphors, and building personifications in most of my essays. Shakespeare’s texts were, for me, vigorously busy pages, scribbled with pencil annotations… encircling ‘it’ and everything that it could mean. I remember Caliban’s “the isle is full of noises, … that when I waked, I cried to dream again” as an important 20-mark question with an elaborate commentary on humanizing the monster, the themes of colonization, and so on. Along with this were the Hindi literature lessons — tedious, but with sufficient fodder for our school jokes on the ever-persistent question for every poem we studied, “kavi kya kehna chahte hain?” (What does the poet want to say?)

My fondness for art later shifted to amateur photography. I tried to capture images that would, in my mind, carry more than “a thousand words” of meaning. I also dabbled in poetry. All of these outputs were coded (and concealed) forms of fickle adolescent expression.

Since a young age, then, I’ve compulsively looked for a hidden meaning in everything.

SEMIOVOX

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

RAJAN LUTHRA

I was introduced to the theory during my post-graduation course at MICA, Ahmedabad. Prof. Harmony taught Semiotics along with complementary subjects like ‘Metaphors and Narratives’, ‘Imagining India’, and the like — all of which suddenly, seamlessly channelised all my free-wheeling interests. I now understood that there was a structure, a process, and a theory to all of this unravelling and meaning-making.

Although the initial lectures were overwhelming — there was a barrage of names, theories, and academicians — I was in awe of how it could all be crystallized in practical application. Two images from Prof. Harmony’s presentations are still imprinted in my mind. A pasta package: decoding the abundance of fresh tomatoes and the subtle usage of red, green and white to build credibility with Italian provenance. And the iconic Rene Magritte painting ‘This is not a pipe’. For me, this painting came to be a symbol for semiotics itself.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

RAJAN LUTHRA

I was lucky to find myself in a brand strategy and design company, DY Works, in the early years of my career. Work focused on brand design, anchored in understanding the consumer, establishing the core and essence of the brand, its positioning and the way it should manifest in its various forms, from personality and tonality to nomenclature, product line and packaging or communication.

Decoding and encoding culture was part of the process; and parts or the whole of it depending on where the project brief lay. These were semio-ethno studies, like laying out the codes of whisky, to the codes of pleasure in India. A memorable one was to decode the evolving essence of relationships and romance for a lab-grown diamond brand. The idea was to tap into deep-rooted belief systems. The other end was to encode these belief systems into design — primarily for packaging or communication projects. Finding various dimensions of ‘natural’ ingredients and the one which fits the brand’s desired expression.

Since then, in addition to getting into the grind of qualitative consumer research, over the last 12 years I have found ways of incorporating semiotics. In my role at Metrixlab-Toluna, I’ve created a range of modules that incorporate semiotics for the ever-so-persistent briefs on pack and ad tests. 

Currently, I have been working with a bunch of global social media giants and OTT brands. It is interesting how we end up using semiotics, here, to enhance user experience and interface to orchestrate user behaviour. 

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

RAJAN LUTHRA

A keen eye and an eagerness to expand the layers of meaning. Looking out for the micro signals. Checking one’s own biases. And a persistent curiosity about culture.

Also, while working on commercial semiotics I have learned that the eventual presentation is critical — the way we write and communicate our learnings, for them to be action-based.

SEMIOVOX

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

RAJAN LUTHRA

Since my focus has largely been applied semiotics, most of my theoretical learning has been through the post-graduate course material. Collections of essays and excerpts, including the likes of Eco’s Looking for a Logic of Culture or Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale.

There are handwritten notes that I prize — a lot from mentors in the industry: Alpana Parida (mentoring through years of live projects and methodologies at DY), Hamsini Shivakumar (her blogs and podcasts), Dr Kaushik (through her reviewing of projects at Quantum), and Chris Arning (with his power-packed seven-week course).

However, I thoroughly relish reading stuff on Indian culture and am often consumed by the underlying meaning-map and ways of being. In this area, a few mentions are:

1. [Indian and South Asian art scholar] Vidya Dahejia’s The Body Adorned and The Thief Who Stole My Heart. These books explore Indian art and aesthetics, in conjunction with classical poetry as they engage with cultural, religious, economic and social meanings associated with such art. It brings together material culture with spirituality. The Body Adorned is a wonderful read on Indian visual and literary culture; it challenges sacred/profane binaries. 
2. [Indian advertising professional and social commentator] Santosh Desai’s Times of India weekly column and his book Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India — one of my earliest exposures to any text related to understanding culture. The book (and the column) are an easy, fun, and insightful read. Desai makes sense of everyday India through language, rituals and popular culture. Some of them are so simple and yet so surprising.
3. [Indian mythologist] Devdutt Pattanaik’s books and blogs add a tangential dimension to my understanding of Indian mythology — the iconography, the stories and the symbolism expand the infinite intersection of everyday religion, spirituality, and deep-seated philosophy driving parts of our way of being.

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?

RAJAN LUTHRA

Over the years I have found only a few clients familiar with a ‘tool/solution’ called semiotics. However, they lack clarity on what it is, how it is done, how robust it is, and what it would yield.

I often contrast semiotics with qualitative research across three levers:

• the need of it
• the process (including object of study)
• what it delivers

For example, it helps clients to understand that with consumer work we only scrape the surface, and that there is a gap between what the marketer says and what the consumer perceives.

Outside the immediate consumer/market research industry, I describe semiotics as a science that helps us understand our surrounding culture. Based on the encoding and decoding aspects of it, I talk about how to read through the signs that have been built in a way to communicate something to us, and how we could use the same technique to be able to create impactful design or communication.

SEMIOVOX

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

RAJAN LUTHRA

The most exciting ones are where I get a chance to explore a concept for a target group or a culture. An example is a study for Tata Salt (a legacy salt brand in India). It was two-layered — Tata as a heritage brand with the idea of solid trust underpinned to it. Salt on the other hand has so many connotations in India — being part of the rituals (e.g., sacred, and to ward off evil), or the symbol of resistance with Gandhi’s salt march against British colonialism, and language (again linked to the idea of loyaltyn as in — ‘namak halal’ — having one’s salt), and increasingly associated with health (the dangers of high sodium intake).

One exciting area has been to explore the codes of identity (from given to chosen identities) and masculinity in the Indian context (evolving gender expression). Both of these developed from other projects into two papers I presented at Semiofest 2018 (Mumbai) and 2022 (Mexico City).

The most frequent projects are category codes like for skincare or laundry (i.e., how the emerging codes are moving from brute force to magic touch for stain removal) or semiotics for packaging design.  

SEMIOVOX

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

RAJAN LUTHRA

Clients are often excited, at first, when they see semiotics as part of an approach to solve their business problems. However, the challenge may come in either early on — when they need to crunch budgets and/or timelines, or at other times later in the course of the study when they will ask, “Did consumers say this? Can we add a verbatim?”

Other potential clients, meanwhile, simply don’t appreciate the value of applied semiotics in very relevant business questions. They assume that applied semiotics too would be ‘heavy,’ academic, difficult to process.

I wish that commercial/applied semiotics would be more defined, for example through incorporation in course material for future marketers.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

RAJAN LUTHRA

Saussure’s fundamental sign-signifier, when built upon by Barthes’ denotation and connotation, becomes a good way to interpret signs in a cultural context revealing a sign’s deeper ideological meaning. I have found this second-order interpretation fascinatingly useful for many projects.

Derivations of Peirce’s concepts have been useful for most of the design work. It helps in creating brand messaging which is rooted in consumers’ culture. His categories of icon, index, and symbol help in deconstructing ads or communication to go beyond the literal meaning. And is particularly useful for UX/UI work.

SEMIOVOX

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

RAJAN LUTHRA

Signs are all around us! Besides learning the theory, technique, and application of semiotics, look out for signs, symbols, and patterns in everyday life — and tease out of them the ideas that they communicate.

Also, when at work on your first projects, you will discover that the process can be very rigorous and time-consuming. But stick to it — and enjoy it. The results will amaze you!

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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).