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?

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

Spielberg’s movies, Lego bricks, and extreme metal! It all comes from this unexpected combination.

Born in the late ’70s, I grew up in the ’80s, during what might be called the early golden age of Spielberg’s movies. Indiana Jones, E.T, The Goonies… I was (and still am) a big fan. These films were not just adventures; they were exercises in interpretation. Their heroes constantly deciphered hieroglyphs, ancient scripts, secret codes, alien languages, cryptic maps, even reflections on water to determine if a shark was lurking around. Meaning was never given outright: it had to be unearthed, decoded, assembled from fragments in order to survive traps, reach hidden treasures or send an alien home. Insidiously, the idea took hold that the world is layered, that surfaces conceal deeper structures, and that understanding is an active process of interpretation.

At the same time, I spent countless hours with Lego bricks. Back then, Lego was a semiotic playground: a limited set of basic elements capable of generating an infinite number of forms. And I learned intuitively that systems are built from simple basic units and that meaning emerge from combination, structure, and imagination — long before I had the words to describe it as such.

As a teenager Lego boxes were replaced by rock & metal audio tapes, and the poster of Raiders of the Lost Ark on the wall of my bedroom lost its place to pictures of over-tattooed long-haired headbangers and album covers from bands with indecipherable logos. Indecipherable, that is for the uninitiated. These visual codes, deliberately unreadable, operated as markers of belonging and exclusion. Understanding them required learning a new cultural language, rich in symbols, myths, and shared references. Once again, meaning was not transparent — it was reserved for those willing to dig beneath the surface.

I could have become an adventurer, an archaeologist, a secret agent or even a death metal vocalist. But through a series of choices and chance encounters, the twists of fate led me elsewhere. Retrospectively, becoming a semiotician feels like the most coherent outcome of all.

SEMIOVOX

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

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

I discovered semiotics during my studies in international trade, in an introductory marketing course. One day, the lecturer used everyday products, including my own Motorola flip phone, to show how their design elements targeted different consumer profiles. By analysing shapes, lines and colours, he revealed what had unconsciously influenced my own choice and led me to take this particular phone and not an other one. Its compact format, the gesture of opening and closing it, its slightly sharp lines, all of this spoke to a particular positioning and a certain idea of style, discretion, modernity and “cool” that had seduced me. It was a revelation to me: objects speak, and their design is not driven by function alone. Some months later, I enrolled in a postgraduate degree in applied semiotics.

The beginning was both exciting and challenging. I was enthusiastic about the strategic value of semiotic analysis for marketing and communication, yet I struggled with the complexity of its concepts and vocabulary, coming from a business rather than linguistics background. Despite the difficulty, it fundamentally changed the way I understand brands, products and consumer desire.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

After my postgraduate degree, I joined a small boutique market research agency that hired me specifically for my semiotic training. In Paris in the early 2000s, many independent agencies valued semiotics as a strong complement to qualitative research. I began by conducting semiotic analyses for brands and communication projects.

Over time, semiotics has gradually moved to the background of my day-to-day work, while qualitative methodologies have become more central in my activity. Yet semiotics has never disappeared, either as an analysis on its own, e.g., around communication or packaging research, or as a less visible framework to structure what consumers say.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

Analytical skills, the ability to articulate detail and big picture, curiosity, open-mindedness of course. On top of that, flexibility and an ability to understand that clients’ business issues are also key. Our methodology should not be rigid or dogmatic, it must adapt to the question at hand. A good semiotician must keep a cool head and always ask himself during his analysis how interesting, relevant and useful his production is. What does semiotics bring to the party? is the key question. Semiotic analysis must remain grounded and useful. The objective is not to produce an intellectually brilliant interpretation, but to help answer concrete business issues

SEMIOVOX

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

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

Semiotics, marketing, and communication: beneath the signs, the strategies by Jean-Marie Floch. It has been truly decisive for me, the only book I would really recommend.

Through a series of real marketing cases, Floch establishes a clear link between Greimassian semiotic theory and the concrete analysis of brands and discourse. He demonstrates that brands are systems of meaning, not simply commercial offerings, and therefore shows how semiotics can be a strategic and operational tool. He proposes a rigorous, structured methodology that is directly applicable to qualitative research. His typology of valuations (practical, playful, utopian, critical) has become a major strategic framework I still regularly use, in one form or another.

No other book has been as foundational to me, and I would not be fully honest if I tried to name other references.

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?

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

I often refer to a quote from the popular French author Bernard Werber: “Between what I think, what I want to say, what I believe I’m saying, what I actually say, what you want to hear, what you hear, what you understand… there are ten possibilities for communication difficulties. But let’s try anyway.” This perfectly captures the complexity of communication and that a message is never a simple and linear transfer from sender to receiver. What a brand intends to communicate and what consumers actually decode can differ significantly. That is precisely why focusing exclusively on consumers’ feedback only tells half the story. If we only analyse reception, we risk overlooking a crucial dimension: the emission phase. Semiotics is not an extra analysis, it is often the missing piece that makes other research more actionable and more coherent.

And at this stage, if the client is not fully convinced yet, I use the cost effectiveness argument. Compared to many qualitative approaches, semiotics delivers rich, enlightening learning for a relatively limited investment.

SEMIOVOX

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

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

I particularly enjoy analyzing a market, considering all the key players in the category, in order to decipher the underlying value system and the relational structure that organizes the competitive landscape. Many brand managers define their competitive environment using purely marketing criteria (market share, price positioning, distribution strength, performance indicators, etc.). What I find really rewarding is when semiotics offers them a completely new perspective: when clients understand their market as a structured system of cultural positions and no longer as a simple battleground of numbers. Sometimes, it reveals competitors they had overlooked or considered too distant from themselves. And It often opens the minds to new perspectives for repositioning or narrative differentiation.

SEMIOVOX

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

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

The widespread lack of understanding, together with strong preconceived ideas around semiotics. It is often perceived either as overly abstract and academic, or as a kind of intuitive, finger-in-the-wind, almost mystical decoding of symbols.

And the heterogeneity of practice does not help to clarify. Today, almost anyone can claim to “do semiotics.” And consequently, the quality and relevance of deliverables vary significantly. When clients ask for a “semiotic study,” it is often unclear what they actually mean: a quick symbolic decoding? A cultural analysis? A strategic positioning framework? A stylistic audit?

Actually, I face the same issue with Tai Chi Chuan. I practice a lineage-based, disciplined and internally coherent original Yang style. Tai Chi suffers from the same combination of lack of understanding and misconceptions, being often reduced to a vague idea of “slow movements for relaxation”.

What I would like to see change is the overall awareness, understanding, and recognition of semiotics — as it really remains underutilized in business, marketing, and brand strategy.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

Saussure with no hesitation. For the simple reason that I learned semiotics in France from lecturers who had worked directly with Greimas. My intellectual framework was therefore shaped within a structuralist tradition rooted in Saussure. There was little room for Peirce, because the conceptual tools we used (structure, difference, value, the generative trajectory of meaning, the semiotic square) belonged to a Saussurean lineage.

I never took the time to truly deepen the theoretical differences between the two approaches. My analytical toolbox remains, clearly, Saussurean and Greimassian.

SEMIOVOX

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

ALEXANDRE DIDIER

Be rigorous in your foundations (master the semiotics principles), pragmatic in your application (prefer marketing jargon to technical terminology), and flexible in your mindset (don’t be dogmatic and remain open to other methodologies).

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