APPLICATION OF BUSINESS SEMIOTICS IN MARKETING

 Semiotics is the detailed study of signs, symbols and visuals in a specific culture which when inserted in a brand defines its messaging, communications, packaging, and product. The use of semiotics in marketing is clarified by our cultural and social background, uncovering how we decipher messages intuitively. Our subconscious understandings depend on feelings, not academic information. To dig on the mark, marketing semiotics is an incredible asset to make brand communication, brand affiliations and add brand values to add on a positive effect in the market. Marketing is all about delivering the correct message, at the right time, to the right individual. Semiotics for business encourages you to do that. A brand of cultural anthropology which invests their resources at the use of signs and symbols as a method for delivering and passing on the meaning, semiotics is a crucial element in the study of marketing, advertising and branding. In simpler words, business semiotics bridges the gap between the brand and its consumer.

Semiotics helps in:

·       Improving brand messaging;

·       Communicating the desired call-to-actions;

·       Influencing the consumers' subconscious perceptions.

To understand the better functioning of business semiotics, there’s a need of defining the importance of business semiotics for brand development and its marketing:

·       Social Semiotics: Semiotics involves the study of business environment that includes culture, trends, customer behaviour, non-verbal symbolisms, and social etiquettes. This will help you to understand, predict and control the needs and response of the consumers. In other words, it helps you to position your brand according to the emotional stimuli of the targeted audience.

·       Innovation: The study of semiotics in marketing helps you to drive innovation in communicating the message to the target audience and persuade them to stick by the business. The business’ new products, brand and communication will build recognition in the minds of consumers through the application of semiotic elements that will direct them to its brand culture.

·       Music Semiotics: Music semiotic is a language in itself that enhances the visual message. Therefore, it can be said that one signifier enhances the other which creates a difference in the overall setup of brand semiotics.

·       Colour Semiotics: Colours create the first impression about your business message. It is an imperative form of semiotics that connects to the sensory stimuli of the humans to build a relation with your ideas, emotions and objects.  For example, Facebook uses blue whereas Instagram uses magenta. The colours semiotics has been specifically used to create brand identity and positive image for their users.

·       Overcoming language and illiteracy barriers: Involvement of different semiotics like visuals, signs, symbols, gestures, music, colours, and shapes helps in overcoming language and illiteracy barriers. Using techniques like metaphors, visual content, and so on assists the brand in influencing the psyche and response of the audience.

·       Create a culture than merely responding to it: Semiotics helps to create a new culture rather than just responding to it because it has the power to influence and upload a picture in the minds of the society. Brands can emerge themselves as the product leaders or follower brands out of which the leaders are the trendsetters. Apple, Rolex, Microsoft and Harley are the examples of product leaders. Their names announce the success of their brand establishment and semiotic research.

·       Trendsetters: The study of semiotics helps the brand followers to shift them to trendsetters. By observing the existent culture, they can draw out a parallel culture that has the probable chances of being accepted as the followed one.

Therefore, it can be said that semiotics in marketing includes examining social patterns, cultural acceptances, language, non-verbal signals, behavioural norms, social decorum, and traditions. It also incorporates seeing how the different tangible and intangible contexts can be used by a brand to communicate with its target customer.

To add to the subject, when you plan to reveal your brand’s name, logo, redesigned shop or new product feature, do consider what your complete bundle of signs and symbols mean to your customers.

1.      Is there collaboration between what your business semiotics and what your staff is communicating at the shops?

2.      How does culture impact the way various shapes, colours, and words are perceived?

3.      Are the various images and symbols used in your communications thoughtful and synergistic?

4.      Have you thought about how profound metaphors could impact the manner in which your content is comprehended?

5.      Do you anticipate any conflicts in the comprehension of meaning between what you seek to offer?

6.      Would customers be able to relate to your visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile stimuli with your products or services?

7.      It is safe to say that you are giving an inappropriate impression with the fluorescent pink packaging? Or on the other hand, using boring dark shades used for your logo?

Offering wrong signs can be very hindering to your brand image. It additionally discredits whatever purpose you may have to offer.

By grasping the principles of semiotic analysis in marketing, the chances of having a genuine effect on the customers’ lives may improve fundamentally. Doing so additionally causes us to maintain a strategic distance from the heart breaking indiscretions which may emerge from a helpless comprehension of how customers see and respond to different emotive stimuli.

Remember that consumers buy products that represent what they believe to represent themselves. The world is only a big symbol. In case you're trying to take care of an issue for your customer group, you're fundamentally attempting to create another symbol for them to identify you by problem-solvers.