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.

Berlin…

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?

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

Analyzing texts, pictures, and clothing, and looking for hidden messages in everyday things has always been fun for me. 

As a teenager I wore many buttons with alternative slogans and signs, such as peace signs and anti-nuclear symbols. I often wondered how these signs came to be and why they were used for certain messages. I also found the dress codes of the various subcultures in the Eighties — the New Romantics, punks, rockabillies, etc. — exciting. In order to distinguish oneself, it was important to understand these codes. 

At school, I was very interested in rhetorical figures such as metaphors and symbols in fairy tales or German Romanticism, as well as the meaning of colours.

SEMIOVOX

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

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

When I worked for a French market researcher in Berlin during my first degree, we once had a semiotician — brought in as an additional expert perspective — involved in a project on cigarette packaging. I had encountered Saussure, Propp, and Jakobson in my studies of Romance languages, but I didn’t know that packaging and advertisements could be read as texts. I found it exciting to see how colors, photos, fonts, layouts, etc., can send messages through brands and products.

I then took a postgraduate course in semiotics at the TU Berlin. The course was interdisciplinary and diverse, with classes in linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, music theory, and more. While I learned many interesting things here, I found little that was concrete about applied semiotics, and we didn’t spend much time on analyses of everyday phenomena and signs in contemporary culture. It was all very theoretical. Worse, I found it confusing that even within a single discipline you had different schools that, for example, defined the same kinds of signs differently.

Although I wanted to work as a commercial semiotician, it was a niche profession in Germany back in 1999. In my coursework there was almost nothing in the direction of semiotics and marketing.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

Following my studies, I did an internship at the Institut Sorgem in Paris, where I gained experience in applied semiotics and was recommended books that helped me in my methodology. I tried to get as much as I could from different schools of semiotics — and thereby learn about the different approaches.

Since 2000, I’ve worked as a project director and semiotician for Happy Thinking People (now called Human8). I’ve particularly enjoyed collaborating with a freelance French semiotician, as our different cultural backgrounds — and semiotic approaches — are complementary. I’ve also learned a lot about cultural and category codes through seminars, workshops, and working with semioticians from the UK. Semiofest is a great opportunity for that sort of thing.

I find the combination of academic training in Berlin, as well as experience with French- and UK-inspired semiotics and projects for a wide variety of clients to be exciting and horizon-expanding.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

Like a detective, a semiotician follows leads — which can sometimes come to nothing — and eventually finds a pattern that helps solve a “case.”

One should keep an open mind, endeavoring to look beyond the obvious and the superficial, thinking ‘out of the box’.

Given a new semiotic task, one should ask oneself the right questions in order to select the most useful semiotic approach.

It’s crucial to present our complex findings as simply and comprehensibly as possible, and to help clients use our analysis to derive action-oriented recommendations. 

SEMIOVOX

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

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

• Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz’s Semiotics: A Graphic Guide. A comics-style overview of the discipline’s schools and pioneers, it’s informative, understandable, and entertaining.
• Georges Péninou’s Intelligence de la publicité combines theorizing on the semiotics of advertisements with analysis. Though it was published in 1972, it offers a still-relevant decoding of rhetorical figures in advertisements.
• Rachel Lawes’ Using Semiotics in Marketing: How to Achieve Consumer Insight for Brand Growth and Profits is a very good overview of the benefits and methods of semiotic analysis in all areas of marketing.

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?

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

Semiotics helps the client to understand ‘hidden messages’ as well as uncovering influences or trends that consumers themselves may not be aware of or struggle to articulate. It provides a macro-perspective, and can identify emerging codes and possible ‘white spaces’ within any category. 

By exploring cultural context, a semiotic analysis can also deliver the backdrop for a holistic and in-depth consumer understanding.

SEMIOVOX

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

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

I love international projects where I get to discuss cultural similarities and differences with other semioticians. One memorable project via which I experienced this sort of thing was a study of ‘premium-ness’ in cooking, hosting’ and tableware across multiple global markets. 

I also find it super-interesting to analyze a brand in its marketing mix over time, typically for the purpose of repositioning. You dive deep into a brand, learn something about its codes within the context of bygone culture — and if you can then develop contemporary concepts with the clients, you get creatively involved in the rebranding process — which is really rewarding.

SEMIOVOX

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

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

Although clients here in Germany do occasionally request semiotic analyses, the discipline remains relatively obscure here… so it’s difficult to sell a semiotics project proactively. As a stand-alone method, it still has the reputation of being too complex and academic for some clients. Even at this late date, one often has to do some convincing. 

More frustrating, even if client understands the ‘added value’ of semiotic analysis in conjunction with qualitative studies with consumers or experts, budget reasons often prevent us from including semiotics.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

According to Saussure’s sign theory of the signified/signifier, meaning is created through interaction with other signs and is relatively static. Peirce has a more dynamic approach, since for him a third dimension (‘interpretant,’ which is to say the sign’s context) is crucial for the formation of meaning. Certainly in my own work, I always consider context — e.g., brand, category, adjacent categories, and where it makes sense, the cultural context — which, after all, influences the creation of meaning. 

SEMIOVOX

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

ANTJE WEIßENBORN

• Approach social issues, culture and communication with openness and curiosity.
• Don’t feel confused about the ambiguity of signs. Try to work with other semioticians to see if you come up with similar decodings.
• Deal with the basics of semiotics without being distracted by the sometimes complicated theory.

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