What We Do

Via semiotic analysis, consumer research, and brainstorming workshops, we help brands accomplish the following.

Elevate, Differentiate, and Future-Proof

Your brand can’t win, within a crowded and ever-changing category (and wider culture), unless you communicate its positioning — ideas, values, higher-order benefits — via highly relevant, engaging, differentiated, and future-proof language and visual cues.

Our semiotics-powered audits, consumer research, and workshops will help you:

  • Identify your brand’s “tribe” — and potential areas for expansion via positioning
  • Reposition and elevate your brand, in order to break through category clutter
  • Counteract the natural depletion of brand meaning among consumers
  • Get ahead of cultural and category shifts, by disrupting conventions
  • Ensure that your brand isn’t sending mixed messages to your target audience
  • Enhance crucial aspects of your brand’s heritage, while jettisoning irrelevant ones
  • Communicate your brand’s core identity consistently across global markets
  • Optimize communications across all channels, from print and digital to video and social
  • Fine-tune a new campaign to which consumers aren’t responding as expected
  • Rationalize your portfolio of sub-brands — to find space between them

The ultimate goal is a set of brand positioning guardrails, to guide future marketing briefs.

Identify White-Space Opportunities

In order to successfully innovate or extend a brand into new segments, it’s critical to unlock category and culture codes that surround the opportunity.

Our semiotics-powered innovation audits, consumer research, and workshops will help you:

  • Identify ways to scale a brand, by extending it into new segments or adjacencies
  • Locate white space offering the best opportunities for game-changing innovations
  • Surface and dimensionalize new, emerging functional and emotional benefits
  • Understand category conventions, in order to disrupt them
  • Spot opportunities across global markets

Inspire Breakthrough Packaging

For many brands, marketing is less important than the at-shelf encounter. It’s vital that your packaging leverage formats, colors, language, typography, and graphic design cues that instantly communicate not only the product’s functional benefits, but the brand’s emotional benefits too.

Our semiotics-powered packaging audits, consumer research, and workshops will help you:

  • Identify your brand’s “tribe” — and potential areas for expansion via packaging
  • Evaluate and evolve your logo, color schemes, typography, and iconography
  • Ensure that your packaging isn’t sending mixed messages to your target audience
  • Get ahead of cultural and category shifts, by disrupting packaging conventions
  • Enhance crucial aspects of your brand’s heritage, while jettisoning irrelevant ones
  • Rationalize your portfolio of sub-brands — to reduce consumer pain in the aisle
  • Spot opportunities across global markets

The ultimate goal is a set of pack design guardrails, to guide future design briefs.

Optimize Retail Experience

Semiotics offers valuable insights and inspiration regarding the following aspects of the in-store journey: approaching the aisle, navigating to a category, focusing on a brand, examining a pack.

Our semiotics-powered packaging audits, consumer research, and workshops will help with:

  • At-shelf brand engagement
  • In-store signage and media
  • Store/aisle optimization
  • Category understanding
  • Online user experience

In addition to our audits, which provide high-level, comprehensive views of brands, categories, and cultural spaces, we conduct semiotics-powered shop-alongs, ethnographies, blogging research, and other qualitative research. If you prefer, we can consult with your research agency.