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.

Santiago de Compostela / Montevideo…

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?

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

Semiotics and Cultural Mediation inhabited me as early as I can remember. When I was four, I told my parents that my baby brother, Mateo, spoke a secret language — called Kops — and that I was the only one who could understand it. So I “helped” them translate his needs.

Soon after, my grandparents gave me a globe for my birthday, and I spent my childhood learning all the capital cities and flags of the world by heart. It wasn’t about geography per se — it was about systems of meaning. I loved how a list of entities within a category (it could’ve been dinosaurs, but it was countries) unfolded into a whole world of correspondences: places, designs, monuments, languages, dishes, anthems, plants.

That childhood obsession turned into a lifelong interest in inventories — not just as collections, but as cultural machines. I’m now working on two conceptual/theoretical frameworks rooted in semiotics: Everyday Internationalism and Geocultural Identities, the latter with fellow semiotician and friend Sebastián Moreno Barreneche. Both of these use those national/de-national inventories to understand how we make sense of the world we live in.

Had my parents owned a supermarket, I might’ve become a stock manager. But they were both lawyers, so I had to satisfy my system-building instinct elsewhere. I found semiotics.

SEMIOVOX

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

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

In practice, my first semiotic encounter happened before I even knew the word. At 16, I travelled to Germany as a “sporting” journalist during the 2006 FIFA World Cup. I wrote for a satirical magazine — not about football itself, but about the intercultural shock of discovering the globalized, first-world West from the perspective of a Latin American teenager traveling alone through Europe for the first time. Every situation felt like raw cultural material — and I instinctively translated it into Uruguayan codes.

After high school, I studied two degrees simultaneously in Uruguay: one more practical (Corporate Communication, at a private university), and one more vocational (Linguistics, at a free public university). They both led naturally to semiotics: one as a strategic lens, the other as a conceptual toolkit. I loved the Humanities and Social Sciences in their broadest, most interdisciplinary sense. That’s when I realized I could develop semiotics as the “border of all disciplines” — not the imperial umbrella Umberto Eco warned us about, but rather a bridge between fields. Reading Eco actually pushed me to apply for the MA in Semiotics at the University of Bologna, in order to engage with his intellectual legacy from the source.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

While finishing my BA in Communication, I started working at a PR and strategic consultancy in Montevideo, specializing in corporate storytelling for diversified companies. One client had business units as different as building schools, transporting goods and people, repairing water and electricity networks, and installing road safety devices. They felt chaotic, unclassifiable — impossible to narrate. Using semiotic methodologies, we helped them find the hidden thread. It wasn’t about what they did — it was about how they did it, and for whom. Their true expertise? Winning public bids. That was the core pattern. Whatever the service, if it could be bid for, they’d win it. Once we reframed the narrative accordingly, everything made sense. We built their verbal identity around that strategic truth.

Later, verbal branding became a key area of work for me — especially with remote projects and B2C marketing. I combined ethnographic insight, discourse analysis, and even critical readings of quantitative data to create words that work: naming, slogans, pitches, unit definitions, brand narratives, stakeholder adaptation, digital presence. Verbal branding sits at the crossroads of strategy and poetry. It demands a semiotic mindset because it’s not just about messaging — it’s about decoding the culture around the message. For 15 years, I worked as an external Brand Language Consultant for a digital agency — bridging language, logic, and emotion every single day.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

Curiosity. Openness. Teamwork. Honesty. Patience. And, perhaps most importantly: the ability to acknowledge one’s own limitations — both personal and methodological.

A good semiotician must be willing to get surprised, to get confused, and to live new experiences every day.

In South America, we have a word for professionals who obsess over complex ideas, methods, or codes no one asked for: vendehumo — literally, smoke-sellers. Many people think semioticians are just that. But as Peirce reminded us: “The smoke is a sign of the fire.” So maybe what we’re really doing is learning how to point toward the fire — even when all we have is smoke.

SEMIOVOX

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

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

• Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The first true handbook of marketing — and still valid in most of its passages. Everything that came after it is, in a way, just an appendix in the history of communication studies. Aristotle already laid out the dynamics of persuasion, ethos, audience, and meaning-making. We’ve just been remixing ever since.
• [French novelist] Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language. A brilliant example of how to disseminate semiotics through fiction — funny, compelling, and deeply human. Binet shows how police investigations and spy missions are themselves institutionalized forms of semiotic decoding. This book reminded me that semiotics can — and should — reach broader audiences.
• Fernando Andacht’s Signos reales del Uruguay imaginario. A foundational book for understanding my own national identity through a semiotic lens, written by the most renowned Uruguayan semiotician. I particularly love the timespan of the corpus: the book was published in 1993 and it perfectly captures the cultural scent of those years. I recognize my childhood memories in the TV shows, ads, political campaigns, and public debates analyzed. It’s not just theory — it’s memory, made meaningful.

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?

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

I use three different models to describe semiotics, depending on the audience and context.

• The Engineering Analogy: Semiotics is to communication, marketing, and culture what math is to civil engineering: the abstract but necessary layer where all solutions are validated. You can’t build a bridge without math. Well, human bridges work the same way. If you want to connect your brand or business with your customers, employees, or stakeholders, you need to understand how meaning is truly constructed. What do people really think of you — beyond what they say? What emotions are triggered by those thoughts and experiences? What actions will close the gap?
• The Contradiction Frame: Semiotics helps businesses identify and manage their contradictions through better storytelling. Every company, project, or person is full of contradictions — and many times, it’s those unresolved tensions that block better decision-making. What I do is help uncover, reframe, and even turn those contradictions into insight, innovation, and creativity.
• The Curiosity Hook: I usually say: “As a semiotician, I’m a professional of curiosity.” The client asks: “Okay… and how do you sell that?” I answer: “Well, you just asked. You got curious. So now you know — my method works.”

SEMIOVOX

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

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

The ones related to nationhood, identity-making, and belonging as markers of cultural difference. I don’t mind the format — what matters is the question behind it: who are we, and how do we know it?

It could be academic (my PhD thesis explores Kosovo’s soft power through international sports and cultural platforms). It could be branding (like exploring what images of Brazilian-ness a beach sandal brand wants to evoke, as I did once). It could be literary (I just finished a book of short stories dealing with Uruguayan ways of life). It could be journalistic (I am reporting in a featured article how ordinary people here in Santiago de Compostela experienced the biggest blackout in Spain’s history last Monday). It could even be lived —like discovering the semiotics of blended Latin American and Spanish identities while working as a waiter in a bar, just two weeks ago. I enjoy any project — scholarly, commercial, poetic, or mundane — that helps decode how identity gets shaped, for ourselves and for others. Semiotics is my toolbox for that inquiry.

SEMIOVOX

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

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

I’d love to see better integration between academic semiotic training and applied semiotics in business. Right now, they often feel like two entirely separate worlds — and that disconnect creates tension. On one side, you have scholars who avoid the industry because they don’t understand it or don’t respect it. On the other, practitioners who don’t engage deeply with theory because they never studied semiotics properly. Those of us who live with one foot in each camp end up feeling like we’re in costume all the time — switching outfits, switching language, switching frameworks. It’s exciting, but it’s also exhausting.

I also believe applied semiotics could — and should — grow beyond its current role as a tool for cultural insight or qualitative research. It’s already becoming a method for understanding the symbolic world of clients, but that’s not enough. Semiotics should also be used for producing and negotiating new meanings. There’s no reason it can’t be applied to creative development, artistic production, or policy design — not just to uncover meaning, but to shape it. In fact, some of my recent work has involved policy writing, and what my clients valued most wasn’t the analysis itself — but the recommendations, the strategic, actionable part. That’s where semiotics shows its full power: not only in interpretation, but in transformation.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

Both, depending on what you need them for. It’s like the positivistic-inspired phrase that appears on the Brazilian flag: “Order and Progress”. Saussure gives you order. Peirce gives progress. If you need to thoroughly understand the toolbox — to distinguish between the uses of drills, hammers, and screwdrivers, and the different types of nails and bits — then Saussure will better help you grasp the inventory. But if what you know for sure is that you need to hammer a nail into the wall — and nothing else — then Peirce will give you the tutorial on how to do it, even if you don’t have a hammer and can only use a rock. I believe this pretty much sums up the broader distinction between French-speaking structuralism and English-speaking pragmatism: The former maps the system in the abstract; the latter explains how to create within it, in the act.

SEMIOVOX

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

JUAN MANUEL MONTORO

• Enjoy the adventure — but be prepared for the hardships.
• Never stop reading influential authors, but always keep an eye on real, ordinary people. Many of them already know what the books are trying to say — they just say it differently.
• Ask every question you have.
• Play with semiotics instead of putting it on an altar.
• And don’t let yourself grow to hate a passion just because it’s hard to turn into a job. Manage your expectations. Don’t expect to make a living from semiotics right away — but don’t give up on it either. It might take time, and in the meantime, you’ll need income. That’s normal.

So: be patient. Don’t get lost. Stay curious. Connect with other semioticians as much as you can — and join us at Semiofest. You’ll realize you’re not alone. You’re just early.

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 | TATTOO YOU (semioticians’ tattoos).