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.

Sydney…

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?

SUSAN BELL

Over the years my approach to semiotics practice has developed into a kind of detective work drawing on discourse analysis, anthropology, and sense making as well as semiotics itself. I am continually searching to understand meaning. I can trace that back to a) being an avid reader throughout childhood and b) a persistent urge to explore. As a child of 10 or so, one of my great pleasures in life was to get on my bike and go exploring the small town in northern England where I grew up. I wanted to see where each road or path went, and to see how far I could go before I ran out of courage or time.

SEMIOVOX

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

SUSAN BELL

I briefly encountered Saussure’s theory of signification when studying Linguistics at The University of Reading, circa 1975.

Ten years later I was living in Sydney, working for a market research agency. One of my roles was to — unhappily — present the findings of advertising ‘testing’ commissioned by our clients. I hated these projects, because they seemed to me to bear no relation to the way in which communication actually works. The general assumption was that a TV commercial delivered a message to consumers, and if consumers didn’t understand the message that was somehow their fault. I now know that I.A Richards called this the ‘vulgar packaging theory of communication’.

From my brief encounter with Saussure, I knew there were theories out there to explain what was really happening when people encountered advertising, so I started to browse bookshops to build up my knowledge. (This was before the internet). My first find was Barthes’ Mythologies. I then came across a collection, edited by Robert Innes, called Semiotics an Introductory Primer. Here were essays by Saussure, Peirce , Eco, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and many others. This was what I needed to get started.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

SUSAN BELL

In 1989, I was lucky enough to have a paper accepted at a semiotics and marketing colloquium at the International Institute on Marketing Meaning associated with the University of Indiana. Umberto Eco and [American author and professor of marketing] Philip Kotler were keynote speakers. I spent three days absorbing insights and ideas from marketers, academic semioticians, and anthropologists from around the world, and came home with a toolkit of models and ideas.

When I started my own agency in 1994, I positioned semiotics — with discourse analysis — within my broader qualitative research practice, though in many ways it was always something of a side gig. Traditional qualitative dominated, then as now, because that is what this market wants.

In the mid-2000s, I developed a technique that I called Sensory Semiotics, which was all about how visual imagery and language create anticipation of sensory experiences. I also became interested in how Australians were coming to terms with how we feel about Christmas as a ritual, using semiotic analysis of magazines as data.

Then I attended Semiofest in London in 2012 — thank you Chris Arning! Meeting practicing semioticians there, and later in Shanghai, was inspirational. Although I still identify mostly as a qualitative researcher, this was the first time that I felt that there was a semiotics tribe that I could belong to. These days, most of my semiotic work is for international agencies who are part of this community.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

SUSAN BELL

• Be a fluid thinker, willing to open your eyes and your mind to concepts you have never considered before. At the start of a semiotics project, you do not know the answer. You also do not know exactly how you will get that answer. You need to be comfortable with that kind of uncertainty.
• Use frameworks and models — such as Codes, the Semiotic Square, Markedness, and the Peirce’s Icon/Index/ Symbol categorisation. The best semioticians are open to using whatever model they find useful.
• Be clear. Avoid the overly fancy language that some semioticians somehow feel compelled to use; clients in Australia will look at you strangely if you try.
• Be you. Each person brings their own unique set of skills to this whether that is love of literature, music, visual art, film, fashion, performance, or whatever.

SEMIOVOX

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

SUSAN BELL

• Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. I had read Saussure during my Linguistics degree., so I understood his theory as it applied to language. Mythologies showed me how the theory of signification applies to mass culture. Barthes wrote joyfully about all-in wrestling and the fringes of the men in the film Julius Caesar in a way that inspired me to see signification everywhere.
• Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics: The Basics. This is an easy-to-read, hugely comprehensive overview of the various theories, frameworks and models used in semiotics. Chandler helped me appreciate frameworks and models other than Saussure’s.
• [Sydney-based linguists] Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen’s Reading images : the grammar of visual design. Very few people know how to read images. Here’s a quote from the introduction: the book is intended to be “a usable description of major compositional structures which have become established in the course of the history of Western visual semiotics, and to analyse how they are used to produce meaning by contemporary image-makers”

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?

SUSAN BELL

“I am a researcher who has a specialty in semiotics, the science of signs.” I then give examples of complex and evolving cultural concepts like Christmas and luxury that people find difficult to express. The next step is to show that we can understand these complex ideas by applying semiotic theory and analysis.

SEMIOVOX

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

SUSAN BELL

I love to unravel complex concepts. What does luxury mean in Australia in 2025 — it’s a fascinating question! I get a sense of pride in knowing how to find that out. This needs exploratory detective work.

A nice little packaging analysis project can also be very rewarding. These projects are more like putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in their place.

I do discourse analysis as well, whenever I get the chance.

SEMIOVOX

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

SUSAN BELL

Raymond Williams’ original cultural theory of Residual / Dominant / Emergent cultures, and how they interrelate, was wonderful and insightful. It drives me crazy that this has been trivialised and whittled down to ‘RDE’ by some people who don’t understand the original theory — and then they turn it into facile trend spotting.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

SUSAN BELL

I use everything, but if you want me to choose, it is Peirce — despite everything I have said about Saussure and Barthes. I’m with Saussure in his definition of a sign as the relationship between a signifier and signified within a system of signs. I will often start a project by identifying all the binary oppositions that I can see. But I am not a structuralist. I find it dehumanising as it takes no account of cognition or human variability.

In Peirce’s theory, by contrast, humans interpret signs. The interpretation of a sign depends on both the context and the goals and experiences of the interpreter. And all of the other concepts and frameworks, like codes and code mapping still apply.

SEMIOVOX

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

SUSAN BELL

Read all the books. Go on the courses. Go to Semiofest. Follow your own passion whether that is poetry, music, film, fashion, art, or whatever.

MAKING SENSE series: MARTHA ARANGO (Sweden) | MACIEJ BIEDZIŃSKI (Poland) | BECKS COLLINS (England) | WHITNEY DUNLAP-FOWLER (USA) | IVÁN ISLAS (Mexico) | WILLIAM LIU (China) | SÓNIA MARQUES (Portugal) | CHIRAG MEDIRATTA (India / Canada) | SERDAR PAKTIN (Turkey / England) | MARIA PAPANTHYMOU (Greece / Russia) | XIMENA TOBI (Argentina) | & many more.

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.