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.

Dubai…

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?

NIMESH NAMBIAR

I grew up in a small coastal town in South India surrounded by numerous myths about spirits, gods, and death. Even though most of us followed a modern lifestyle, these myths and symbols harmoniously coexisted in our everyday lives. There were numerous stories and rituals — a particular temple ritual involved locals clad in sacred robes and attached figurines communicating from the otherworld — each touching different rites of passage and personal events. For many of us who eventually migrated to faraway lands as adults, these memories and the associated beliefs remain as the guardrails of the slippery slopes of adult life. The mystique of these spectres and myths is what I would say first made me curious about signs and culture.

SEMIOVOX

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

NIMESH NAMBIAR

As a qual researcher, my earliest encounter with semiotics was as a unique “outside-in” lens. It brought a fresh perspective into the research inquiry, though the scope of my early work was limited to pack design decodes. The turning point was learning about the versatility semiotics offered in understanding consumer culture. This came from the very first Semiotics book I read: Thomas Sebeok’s Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics. Even though it is not regarded as the most practical handbook, it helped me realise semiotics’ substantial potential in understanding virtually anything we partake in.  

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

NIMESH NAMBIAR

A few years ago, I reached a point where conventional consumer research seemed like hitting a brick wall — clients were increasingly frustrated with its limitations in certain scenarios. Diving deep into the literature of semiotics, I found a field that could answer many ‘research’ questions that otherwise went unanswered. And this field spoke to my interest in linguistics, philosophy, and sensory science. With the help of brave clients who placed their faith in semiotic frameworks, since that time it has become an important part of my work. Most of my semiotic projects have been tied to consumer research briefs — though once the clients saw what it can do, they began to show more interest in it. It was like recruiting new believers into a cult of enlightenment!

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

NIMESH NAMBIAR

An endless curiosity to read the culture should be primal. An almost mythical belief that one can stack and unstack the culture, or life in general, like Lego blocks also helps. It builds a sort of romanticism around the field in my opinion. Attention to detail is essential since most of what we discover about the culture is hidden in unlikely places. A multisensory mind — broadening the focus from the signs we can see to those we can hear, touch, smell, and equally importantly, those we don’t — is an invaluable asset.

Personally, the attribute I prize the most is restraint. As a researcher, I often get excited when I come across a consumer tension or an insight. That often marks the end of that journey. However, as a semiotician, it’s a rather more patient and stoic pursuit. Most of the impactful work I’ve done has come from painstaking analysis and synthesis that had no shortcuts and, in the end, it resulted in an incredibly rewarding joie de vivre.

SEMIOVOX

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

NIMESH NAMBIAR

Sebeok’s book, mentioned earlier, remains the most influential text to me about the field — even though it’s not directly practical. These three books paint a beautifully complete picture:

• Roland Barthes’ Mythologies is a treasured classic. I will never look at wrestling, steak, the Citroën, or Romans in movies the same way thanks to his brilliant deconstructions. Barthes gives us a toolkit to semiotically breakdown almost anything at will. It felt like I was acquiring a superpower when I first read it.
• Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality. The book is a brilliant journey through the brilliant, eccentric mind of Eco, and it made me understand and appreciate Dubai, where I’ve lived for some years now. I could easily apply Eco’s Disneyland-esque examinations to Dubai’s indoor ski resort in the desert, the palm-shaped island, the golden photo frame of the city, and the dominance of “excess” as a language. The only difference is, unlike America (which Eco wrote about), Dubai is intentional about its hyperreality.
• Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. I read this novel after watching Tarkovsky’s film adaptation, but I must say, as a semiotician, the book opened my eyes like no other. It asks: What if there’s no shared code at all, what if the sign won’t even acknowledge that it’s a sign? It’s an immersive and contemplative fiction, but one that teaches you about signs by taking to you a space where they completely collapse.

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?

NIMESH NAMBIAR

My answer would depend on the context and the background of the other person. The most curious aspect about semiotics is that it can apply to almost any domain.

If you’re a geneticist, I would say semiotics, more specifically biosemiotics, reframes what you already know as a mechanistic process — e.g., instead of protein synthesis as transcription and translation, let’s look at it as the cell interpreting an mRNA message. Which opens up a different way of looking at the whole process.

If you’re a full-time gardener, I would say semiotics is a tool that may help you read the flower’s interaction with the pollinator – rather than looking at the flowers’ colours and scents in isolation — as a system of signs composed to mean something specific to a bee’s umwelt (its worldview defined by the signs it can perceive and respond to).

If you are a brand strategist or marketer, I would say that semiotics helps develop a kind of a cultural Pantone, a vocabulary for the transient, the implicit and the unsaid. The analytics can show you all the patterns. Semiotics looks deep into culture as a system of meanings — within which your brand or category fits and performs.

SEMIOVOX

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

NIMESH NAMBIAR

My biggest draw is the process itself. You can be completely agnostic to the topic you’re studying yet find it interesting once it starts to unravel itself as you peel through the layers of its related signs and systems. Almost anything can be interesting when we put it under the semiotic lens. The vastness and universality of semiotics’ application potential make it almost impossible to dislike as a practitioner.

SEMIOVOX

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

NIMESH NAMBIAR

While there is a growing acceptance of semiotics as a discipline in the industry, there are still those who believe it is a vague field of dense, academic nature, sharing fuzzy borders with linguistics and sociology, with limited application in business contexts. I’ve found semiotics to be incredibly versatile and quite underrated as a tool in commercial scenarios, even under today’s agile business conditions. Also, in commercial practice, the academic rigour isn’t always necessary, in my opinion.

As AI rapidly changes how we create content and communicate, we’re becoming too focussed on outputs. How meaning itself is constructed is getting undermined — semiotics provides the foundational framework for keeping humanness at the centre. (I find Peircean taxonomy, particularly “Index,” exceptionally relevant here.) Semiotics can also become more efficient as AI simplifies the more painful, slow analytical processes, while the practitioner can invest more time in looking for the deeper cultural meanings, contextual judgment, ethicality, and taking the spontaneous leaps (“abductive” leaps, as Peirce would say) that connect a sign to the lived experience.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

NIMESH NAMBIAR

Like most commercial semioticians, Saussure’s concepts — binary, codes, semiotic square, and so on — have been my proverbial bread and butter. But Peirce holds a unique stature in my mind… partly because I had my early semiotics lessons from the Peircean viewpoint through Sebeok. I also believe the future is predominantly Peircean and so we need more of him in commercial practice, because of his infinite semiosis and especially index, which I believe will be an important way to decode how we relate to culture as our lives get more and more digitised and automated.

SEMIOVOX

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

NIMESH NAMBIAR

I would recommend them to watch John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi horror movie They Live. Learning to do semiotics is like finding those sunglasses. Everything starts to look different — fashion, signages, corridors, sports jerseys, garbage trucks. It may make you wistful, estranged, or euphoric. And you can never unsee it.

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