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Marketing semiotics
serban silviu

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 Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics
Volume 2(2), 2014, pp. 61–71, ISSN 2329-4175

FROM M ARKETING TO SEM IOTICS:

THE W AY TO M ARKETING SEM IOTICS

SILVIU ŞERBAN
silviuserban2000@yahoo.co.uk
Spiru Haret University

ABSTRACT. Starting with the 1960s, among the schools of marketing thought the
studies related to consumer behavior have begun to come into focus. But as con-
sumer behavior refers to the study of how someone acquires products, the notion of
meaning becomes pivotal. From here it was not only a step to the involvement of
semiotics in marketing researches. Formulated as discipline at the beginning of the
twentieth century, semiotics comes close to marketing through the writings of Roland
Barthes at the same time with the development of consumer research in marketing.
This paper describes the way that marketing traveled from the first schools of
thought to the consumer behavior research and the implication of semiotic paradigm
on meaning in the marketplace.
JEL Codes: M31; P46

Keywords: schools of marketing thought; consumer behavior school; meaning; sign;

semiotics

1. From Marketing to Consumer Behavior

Since ancient times, with the advent and development of trade, marketing has
always been an intrinsic part of commercial exchange. As in other fields with
a pronounced applied nature, such as medicine, architecture, engineering, in
marketing, whose essence consists of “mutually satisfying exchange relation-
ships” (Baker and Saren, 2010, pp. 3–4), there is also a transition from the
empirical status of art to the scientific one based on a theoretical framework
(Baker, 2003, p. 3). A widespread model of the evolution of marketing has
its origin in Robert J. Keith’s paper, published in 1960, “The Marketing
Revolution.” Keith takes as case study the company where he works, Pills-
bury Company, and concludes that the marketing approach is the final stage

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of an evolution whose two other preceding eras are production and sales. With
this new perspective, the focus moves to the consumer and his/her needs.
We need, in fact, to build into our company a new management
function which would direct and control all the other corporate
functions from procurement to production to advertising to sales.
This function was marketing. Our solution was to establish the
present marketing department. This department developed the cri-
teria which we would use in determining which products to market.
And these criteria were, and are, nothing more no less than those
of the consumer herself. (…) If we were to restate our philosophy
during the past decade as simply as possible, it would read; ‘We
make and sell products for consumers’ (Keith, 1960, p. 37).

The need of guidance to consumer is also emphasized by another important

article in “the rediscovery of marketing” (as Baker titles it in Marketing
Theory, 2010, p. 9), published in 1980 too. Theodore Levitt, in “Marketing
Myopia”, believes that the decline or slowdown in major industries arises not
by the saturation of market but through an error related to marketing man-
agement. Lewitt takes as an example the American railroad industry and
shows that while in the nineteenth century it replaced the other types of
transport on land because of its efficiency, at the beginning of the twentieth
century its decline began as a result of the development of internal combus-
tion engine and the building of trucks and cars. The failure, considers Lewitt,
resulted from the neglect of consumer needs and the preoccupation only with
the production goals.
The view that an industry is a customer-satisfying process, not a
goods-producing process, is vital for all business people to under-
stand. An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs,
not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill. Given the cus-
tomer’s needs, the industry develops backwards, first concerning
itself with the physical delivery of customer satisfactions. Then it
moves back further to creating the things by which these satis-
factions are in part achieved (Lewitt, 1960, p. 12).

In one of the first paper through which the concept of marketing is extended
beyond the limits of the exchange of goods, services and money, Philip Kotler
and Sidney Levy wrote:
Marketing is that function of the organization that can keep in con-
stant touch with the organization’s consumers, read their needs,
develop “products” that meet these needs and build a program of
communication to express the organization’s purposes. Certainly
selling and influencing will be large parts of organizational market-

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 ing; but, properly seen, selling follows rather than precedes the
organization’s drive to create products to satisfy its consumers
(Kotler and Levy, 1969, p. 15).

The orientation, first of all, to the satisfaction of consumers needs led gradually
within the marketing theories to the emphasis of consumption rather than
production or sales. The researchers who studied the history of marketing
theories accentuate this change of paradigm that happened in the 1950s and
1960s and entailed the emergence of a new field in marketing research,
consumer behavior. William L. Wilkie and Elizabeth S. Moore describe the
evolution of theoretical ideas in marketing as covering, after a pre-marketing
era before 1900, four stages: 1) “Founding the Field” (1900–1920); 2) “Formal-
izing the Field” (1920–1950); 3) “A Paradigm Shift – Marketing, Management
and the Sciences” (1950–1980); 4) “The Shift Intensifies – A Fragmentation
of the Mainstream” (1980–present) (Wilkie and Moore, 2003, p. 117). The
authors observe that within the third era there happened a change of perspec-
tive into the theoretical field towards a management approach of marketing
which inter alia fostered more orientation to the consumer. Alongside the
emergence of the quantitative and behavioral sciences, this perspective con-
tributed to the development of marketing theories to new directions, includ-
ing consumer research. “In contrast to the planned introduction of marketing
science, the emergence of consumer behavior within marketing appears to
have been a natural response by the field to the pressing needs for insights
about the mass consumer marketplace, insights for use in new product
planning, advertising, retailing and other marketing decision areas” (Wilkie
and Moore, 2003, p. 126). The new domain of consumer behavior will focus
on finding answers to questions like “Why do customers buy?”, “How do
people think, feel, act?”, “How can customers/ people be persuaded?,” and
key concepts of consumer research theories will be subconscious motivation,
rational and emotional motives, needs and wants, learning, personality,
attitude formation and change, hierarchy of effects, information processing,
symbolism and signs, opinion leadership, social class, culture and sub-cultures
(Shaw and Jones, 2005, p. 245).
Over time the consumer behavior has been studied from a great number
of perspectives, but three of them may be considered as central: motivation
research, behavioral science and interpretivism (Kardes et al., 2011, p. 14).
One of the first attempts to explain the consumer behavior was due to Ernest
Dichter who used the Freudian psychoanalysis to justify the motivations to
buy. As Dichter explained in his The Strategy of Desire: “Whatever you
attitude toward modern psychology of psychoanalysis, it has been proved
beyond any doubt that many of our daily decisions are governed by moti-
vations over which we have no control and of which we are often quite

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unaware” (apud Berger, 2010, p. 57). While motivation research perspective
sets the causes that stimulate consumption to the level of unconscious mind,
the behavioral perspective considers that consumers act rationally. Methods
that are used are, firstly, quantitative, studying representative groups of con-
sumers, then enlarging inductively the results to greater groups (Kardes et al.,
2011, pp. 15–17). By contrast, the interpretivist perspective uses the quali-
tative research methods, and consumers are seen as “non-rational beings and
their reality as highly subjective.” Researchers are those who interpret this
subjective reality. Their results are not capable of high generalizations, but
“they provide in-depth, detail-rich descriptions of consumers’ experiences that
can be very useful in developing further questions and understanding con-
sumers on an abstract level” (Kardes et al., 2011, pp. 17–18). The semiotic
approach is among the qualitative methods grouped under the general title of
interpretivism.

2. Symbols and the New Consumer

Without specifying any proximity to semiotics, Sidney Levy, in a paper
published in 1959, is the first researcher who speaks about symbols in mar-
keting in the wake of the changes intervened in the American society, where
more people wanted “more leisure, more money, more possessions, more
pleasures”.
The less concern there is with the concrete satisfactions of a sur-
vival level of existence, the more abstract human responses become.
As behavior in the market place is increasingly elaborated, it also
becomes increasingly symbolic. This idea needs some examination,
because it means that sellers of goods are engaged, whether will-
fully or not, in selling symbols, as well as practical merchandise. It
means that marketing managers must attend to more than the
relatively superficial facts with which they usually concern them-
selves when they do not think of their goods as having symbolic
significance (Levy, 1959, p. 117).

There happens a modification of emphasis related to the standards according

to which the consumers buy goods, the concrete value being replaced with a
symbolic and abstract one. The new consumer doesn’t buy strictly in terms of
economical standards. “Consumers still talk about price, quality and durabil-
ity, since these are regarded as sensible traditional values.” But at the same
time, they know that other factors affect them and believe these to be legit-
imate influences” (Levy, 1959, p. 118). And these factors are represented by
the package color, television commercials or newspaper and magazine adver-
tisements. The logic of buyer comes no longer under the reasonable question
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“Do I need this?,” but under the ones dominated by desires and pleasures,
“Do I want it?,” “Do I like it?”. Beyond the practical utility of goods, they
are bought for their symbolic function, for their personal or social meaning.
Levy refers to symbol into a general perspective:
It will suffice to say that in casual usage symbol is a general term
for all instances where experience is mediated rather than direct;
where an object, action, word, picture or complex behavior is
understood to mean not only itself but also some other ideas or
feelings (Levy, 1959, p. 119).

Goods are, firstly, “psychological things”. They have a symbolic value for
buyer, contributing to the way that consumer thinks about himself/ herself.
Under the new conditions, the manufacturer will have to take into account
this value and to understand that “he is selling symbols as well as goods”
(Levy, 1959, p. 124).

3. The Paradigms of Semiotics

When Levy introduced the symbol as a research topic in studies of market-
ing, the science of signs (symbol being just a type of sign), i.e. semiotics,
had already constituted its theoretical foundations by means of two research-
ers who had worked independently of each other, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Their
writings generated two different theoretical frameworks that were turned into
two traditions which inspired further researches in marketing using the
semiotic perspective (Mick and Oswald, 2006, p. 31). The Saussurean tradi-
tion underlies the structural linguistics and defines a two dimensional sign as
a relationship between a sound image, signifier, and a concept, signified. The
connection between these two components is arbitrary and conventional
(Saussure, 1959, pp. 65–67). Peirce’s semiotic model includes three elements:
the representamen (the sign), the object (which the representamen refers to)
and the interpretant. The American philosopher establishes a complex typology
of signs using three trichotomies, of what the most known is the second,
according to which the signs may be Icon (“a sign which refers to the Object
that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it pos-
sesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not”), Index
(“a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really
affected by that Object”) or Symbol (“a sign which refers to the Object that
it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which
operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to the Object”)
(Peirce, 1955, pp. 99–103). Starting from Peirce’s triadic model, the American
semiotician and philosopher Charles Morris defines three levels of semiotic
65
research: syntactics, which studies “the formal relation of signs to one another,”
semantics, which studies “the relations of signs to the objects to which the
signs are applicable”, and pragmatics, which studies “the relation of signs to
interpreters” (Morris, 1938, pp. 6–7).

4. Barthes’s Mythology and Consumption

The one who not only brought semiotics to the attention of researchers, but
also made a first conjugation of the science of signs with advertising and
consumer behavior, was the French semiotician Roland Barthes. Starting from
the Saussurean distinctions between langue and parole, signifier and signified,
syntagmatic and paradigmatic, Barthes extends semiotics beyond the lin-
guistic system, making it applicable also to other non-linguistic phenomena,
like garment, food or cars systems. For instance, in the garment system the
langue (costume) is made “by the opposition of pieces, parts of garment and
details, the variation of which entails a change in meaning” and “by the rules
which govern the association of the pieces among themselves,” while the
parole (clothing) includes the individual way of wearing (Barthes, 1967, p.
27). At the same time the syntagmatic aspect refers to “the juxtaposition in
the same type of dress of different elements,” while the paradigmatic aspect
involves “a set of pieces, parts or details which can not be worn at the same
time on the same part of the body, and whose variation correspond to a
change in the meaning of the clothing” (Barthes, 1967, p.63).
An essential concept that Barthes relates with the advertising and the power
to influence consumers is the myth. In Mythologies, published in 1957, the
myth is considered a type of speech and is analyzed within Saussure’s
semiology. Similar to the Saussure’s sign, consisting of signifier and signified,
the myth is characterized by the same terms, but with the difference that it is
part of a second order semiological system.
But myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a
semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order
semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative
total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a
mere signifier in the second (Barthes, 1988, p. 187).

The definition of myth as a second order sign is illustrated by Barthes in the

next figure:

66
The myth becomes, in relation to the linguistic system (language-object), a
second order language or metalanguage.
It can be seen that in myth there are two semiological systems, one
of which is staggered in relation to the other: a linguistic system,
the language (or the modes of representation which are assimilated
to it) which I shall call the language-object, because it is the lan-
guage which myth gets hold of in order to build its own system;
and myth itself, which I shall call metalanguage, because it is a
second language, in which one speaks about the first (Barthes,
1988, 188).

The myth “steals” the first order meaning and converts it into a second order
meaning. In other terms, the myth operates on an existing meaning and
changes it into another new meaning. In Eléments du Sémiologie (1964),
Barthes speaks of a second type of sign in the second order of signification,
the connotation. Considering the sign as a relationship between signifier and
signified, Barthes shows that there are two possible insertions of a sign as
simply an element into another binary relation. If the sign itself becomes a
signifier in the second system, then this new second order relationship defines
connotation. If the sign of the first relationship is signified in a second
relationship, we are dealing with metalanguage (Barthes, 1967, pp. 89–91).
The French semiotician applies the notions defined in Mythologies and
Eléments du Sémiologie within his largest semiotic study dedicated to the
fashion system. Analyzing women’s clothing as it is described by fashion
magazines, the author shows right in the Preface of his book that, out of its
semiotic structure, the fashion system rests on a number of myths which have
no other goal than the encouragement of consumption.
Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly? Why does it
interpose, between the object and its user, such a luxury of words
(not to mention images), such a network of meaning? The reason
is, of course, an economic one. Calculating, industrial society is

67
 obliged to form consumers who don’t calculate; if clothing’s
producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing
would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its
dilapidation; Fashion, like all fashions, depends on a disparity of
two consciousnesses, each foreign to the other. In order to blunt
the buyer’s calculating consciousness, a veil must be drawn around
the object – a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings, a mediate
substance of an aperitive order must be elaborated; in short, a
simulacrum of the real object must be created, substituting for the
slow time of wear a sovereign time free to destroy itself by an act
of annual potlatch (Barthes, 1990, pp. xi–xii).

The fashion system works in the same way as the apparatus described in
Mythologies. It converts the artificiality into a sign of the apparent natural-
ness and usefulness, stimulating de facto the acceleration of consumption.

5. Semiotics in Marketing and Consumer Research

The explicit presence of semiotics in consumer research appears in Morris
Holbrook’s study “Beyond Attitude Structure: Toward the Informational
Determinants of Attitude,” published in 1978, Rebecca Holman’s dissertation
“Communicational Properties of Women’s Clothing: Isolation of Discrimin-
able Clothing Ensembles and Identifications of Attributions Made to One
Person Wearing Each Ensemble” (1976) and Trudy Kehret-Ward’s disser-
tation “Developing the Ability to Relate Scarcity and Communication Value:
How Children Come to Use Products as Linguistic Units” (1981) (Mick,
1986, pp. 201–202). Influenced by Charles Morris’ semiotics, Holbrook
“focused on the pragmatic effects of advertising copy experimentally manip-
ulated to differ in both semantics (factual versus evaluative content) and
syntactics (level of psycholinguistic uncertainty)” (Holbrook, Hirschman,
1993, p. 12). Then, following the Saussurean and Barthesian tradition, Hol-
man’s study investigates “syntactic and semantic levels of consumer semiosis
from pure, descriptive and applied perspectives, by examining the clothing
system as a code and particular clothing ensembles as messages” (Mick,
1986, p. 202). Finally, similarly to Holman, focusing on artifactual commu-
nication, Kehret-Ward’s dissertation invokes “Saussurean perspectives to study
how children perceive products as conveyors of information about themselves
and others” (Mick, 1986, p. 202).
In a long paper, David Glen Mick, James E. Burroughs, Patrick Hetzel,
and Mary Yoko Brannen review most of the trajectories on which marketing
semiotics researches were developed to 2004. The writings are analyzed and
grouped within a theoretical framework inspired by Grant McCracken’s study

68
“Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and
Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods” (1986).
According to McCracken (1986), marketing gatekeepers such
advertisers and fashion designers begin by selecting key meanings
residing in cultural categories (e.g. gender) and cultural principles
(e.g., manliness). Second, they transfer the meanings to consumer
goods through advertisements, clothing designs, and so forth. In
the third stage, consumers appropriate these meanings into their
lives through various rituals such as grooming and gift exchange
(Mick et al., 2004, p. 3).

This model is adapted and expanded by “integrating the marketing planning

and design phases with the subsequent consumer stages of acquisition and
consumption”. Thus, the new model will refer to both potentializing mean-
ings (“marketers’ known or apparent efforts to set up imminent meanings
and to guide targeted or ideal consumers toward them”) and actualizing
meanings (“the concrete efforts of everyday consumers to activate or generate
meanings, regardless of whether these meanings are what the marketer poten-
tialized”) (Mick et al., 2004, p. 4). The authors gather the marketing semiotics
researches in four big categories: 1) Potentializing and actualizing meanings
in the object (e.g., product design); 2) Potentializing and actualizing mean-
ings around the object (e.g., packaging, brand names/ logos, advertising); 3)
Potentializing and actualizing meanings of being and buying there (e.g.,
physical retail and acquisition environments, Internet, credit/ cards, money);
4) Actualizing meanings through experiences, ownership and usage (e.g., en-
tertainment/ leisure, clothing, food and vehicles, plus more general constructs
and processes such as desire, memory and identity).

6. “Pleas” for Future Marketing Semiotics Research

The relationship between semiotics and marketing has not always been proper.
In a study dedicated to the disambiguation of the semiotic perspective in
marketing and consumer research, David Glen Mick accentuates that “the
wide-ranging and rapid growth of applications has also led to a number of
continuing misconceptions about semiotics that threaten to turn this emerg-
ing spire of insights into another tower of Babel” (Mick, 1997, p. 246). After
the author identifies the fundamental balderdashes about semiotics and estab-
lishes a “modicum of verity”, he moves to suggesting a number of pleas that
any marketing and consumer behavior researcher who wants to use the
semiotic approach should follow (Mick, 1997, pp. 253–254). First, the use of
semiotic perspective in a “flippant manner” must be avoided, each researcher
being committed to be quite precise about the definition of concepts and
69
principles used and the semiotic tradition whose they belong to. Second,
researchers must be more stringent in applying semiotics and avoid getting
ambiguous results. “Further rigor is achieved through stronger efforts to show
that semiotic concepts and approaches are applicable across multiple persons,
stimuli and/or conditions.” Third, since many researchers use qualitative data
and subjective text analysis, and acquired results cannot be provided with
proper means of verification, it is recommended that qualitative data and text
analysis to be combined with managerial and consumer responses. Finally, a
fourth plea that Mick proposes says that semiotic consumer researchers must
“demonstrate more convincingly that the application of semiotics in their work
has led to truly incremental insights.”

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