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.

London…

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?

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

As a kid I was a detail-oriented perfectionist — I could get lost in quadratic equations, French grammar, geometric art patterns and precisely stacking a lasagna. Like many other semioticians I had a multicultural upbringing (Welsh and Brazilian parents). At university I studied Arabic & Islamic Studies and then Middle Eastern Studies to deeply explore another culture through its own language and belief systems. Area studies gives you the wonderful opportunity to mix and match disciplines; I took full advantage of this! In retrospect I guess I could say I was gathering as many lenses and tools as possible to understand other cultures (via language and religious studies), and to make meaning from material culture (I loved art, literature and design at school). I entertained so many career paths, from curator to archaeologist to costume designer, but all of this was motivated by using objects to tell stories about other worlds, eras, places, perspectives.

SEMIOVOX

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

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

I realised that I’d been practicing semiotics throughout my career without knowing it at the time. At my first agency, Butterly (brand strategy and innovation), we used to deconstruct the components of brand and product experience into essentially all the possible cues and signs that bundle together and ladder up into something culturally and personally meaningful for consumers. To put this into context, I was running co-creation fieldwork in Cairo for a non-alcoholic malt drink. We showed a visual of foam over a golden liquid as a possible expression of the sensory experience. My British lens read it as beer; Egyptian participants saw malt drink. It seems obvious, but it was a real “aha” moment in understanding how deeply cultural conditioning shapes perception.

My first encounter with the theory side was during my masters degree at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) which has an excellent History of Art department. I took a module in The Visuality of Islamic Art and learned that symbolic meaning starts with cultural beliefs around how vision works and the purpose of imagery in representing ideas and realities. I was so fascinated by the idea that, for example, the Western invention of perspective drawing privileges a static individual viewer. And that certain subjects are beyond the human capacity to portray (like the Islamic Prophet). Visuality feels like an overlooked intersection between history of art and semiotics, I wish we talked about it more!

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

Semiotics has always been on my radar, starting with a failed application to the Flamingo internship; luckily I still found my way into cultural insights, brand strategy and innovation. As I mentioned, at Butterfly I was taught to use deconstructed signs and cues to elicit meaning, anecdotes and interpretations from participants rather than merely preferences. I also worked with freelance semioticians and was blown away by their special powers. Later I moved to Crowd DNA, largely motivated by the opportunity to learn more about semiotics. As soon as I joined I made a beeline to Dr Jennifer Simon, the then lead of semiotics at Crowd, and she’s been my mentor and close friend since that day! I did a secondment in her team and then continued to work across qual-semiotics cultural insights projects.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

A refusal to interpret things at face value and a persistent questioning of reality! This would manifest in lots of ways like reading a lot, writing to make sense of things, getting a thrill from pattern recognition, connecting the dots between this brand’s new packaging and that meme and this trend, feeling unsatisfied by surface-level descriptions and summaries of what’s happening in culture and society.

To then be able to practice it effectively, you need to have both attention to detail and a big-picture lens. The best semiotic narratives make lots of easily missed observations in advertising, pack design, internet culture etc and then ladder this up to a very nuanced picture of what’s shifting in norms, values, attitudes and behaviours.

SEMIOVOX

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

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

• Dr Rachel Lawes‘ ​Using Semiotics in Marketing was my first how-to guide. It helpfully breaks the process down step by step, using case studies along the way and checklists of things to look out for. I found it accessibly written when I was starting out so it what I’ve recommended to others as a practical introduction.
• I found [American anthropologist] Chip Colwell’s Stuff a useful archaeological and anthropological explanation of how humans came to attribute symbolism and meaning to objects. The conclusion he comes to that this human habit has got out of hand in the form of extreme consumerism, so this non-commercial lens is a helpful reminder of the context that semioticians operate in. Meaning making has to be done with an awareness of our responsibility to produce purposeful meaning and not just further noise.
• A recent joyful discovery was John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Fifty years on this Marxist art historian’s work is still very relevant, as more than ever we need to examine the power dynamics behind image making and dissemination. Sadly his observations about how women exist as objects to be seen and the way that advertising produces envy of a future self are still very insightful.

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?

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

This is always evolving but I say something like, “Remember when you analysed literature at school and dissected poems and novels for what they meant? I do that but for contemporary visual culture to advise clients. If they want to design a healthy snack for example, I’ll look at all the ways that healthy products use colours, icons, graphics, flavours, textures and fonts to signal something good for you, and then use that to advise on what their packaging and advertising should look and sound like, or what the product should taste like.”

On persuading clients, honestly I need to earn their trust first! That way they’ll trust the process and see the value for themselves. If they don’t know me or semiotics but I’m convinced it’s the right approach, I’ll frame it in methods and theories that they do know to bridge the gap, e.g., a category/competitor analysis and triangulate with other methods like qual and social listening.

SEMIOVOX

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

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

When on the surface it doesn’t look like a semiotics project. It’s technically an innovation one or it’s all based on qual data, but the client trusts a semiotic lens on the analysis. The results can be pretty mindblowing when you filter qual insights through a semiotic square for example, or use a category decode to inform stimulus for innovation co-creation. Essentially when people experience the surprising insight and rigour that semiotics produces because the client hasn’t used it before, or not in that way.

SEMIOVOX

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

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

I’m frustrated by how hard it is to communicate across the humanities-sciences divide. My role is to use semiotics for product innovation but I have an extra set of hurdles convincing clients of its value. I recently went to a food science conference to talk about sensory semiotics and I heard and saw scientists reach for cultural concepts to explain the parts of their data that you couldn’t isolate and measure empirically. In the context, for example, of how someone perceives or describes a certain food or drink sensorially, it’s often necessary to reference the person’s cultural background or emotional state or the environment they’re in. This is all culture! It’s just so hard to explain this to someone who doesn’t have a humanities background.

Another frustration is when people only turn to semiotics after the fact as a diagnostic tool, for example to explain why people didn’t respond well to a certain pack design. This comes from the misconception that semiotics evaluates and reacts rather than shapes and informs. And that it deals with the micro only (colours, fonts etc) and not macro (cultural insights).

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

Saussure is a comfortable space to be in for everyday practice of semiotics because of the elegant simplicity of x sign has y meaning — it makes analysis and narrative-building simpler through these binaries. It also grounds semiotics in the wider space of cultural insights where it has a natural home and allows you to make the (over)simplification that meaning comes from cultural consensus (in a way that you don’t really have to explain).

If we’re trying to be more rigorous or expand the compatibility of semiotics with qual research or semiotics, it makes sense to go with Peirce (because of the triadic model). More so I’m using the cognitive definition of meaning perception with the science-y clients I mentioned. This is because I can use language that they’re familiar with from sensory science and behavioural science and I don’t have to explain culture, which is a win!

SEMIOVOX

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

MEGAN BOURNER-POWELL

Read books about it but also practice the exercises: It’s a field where the theory and method is extremely important but you’ll only get good through practice. Find small ways to integrate it into your studies or work, e.g., through analysing a couple of critical images in depth.

Get in touch with people in the community, they’re all wonderful. Join the Semiofest sessions that happen on Fridays once a month to hear directly from practitioners on how they’re applying it.

Immerse in adjacent disciplines like sociology and anthropology, and methods like futures, trends and cultural insights.

Practice the art of noticing your own culture (its unspoken norms and rituals) and being aware of your biased view of the world.

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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).