George rossolatos seminar on branding, brand equity, brand semiotic models and research methods part 5

George Rossolatos MSc, MBA, PhD
//disruptiVesemiOtics// email: georgerossolatos123@gmail.com
http://uni-kassel.academia.edu/georgerossolatos
Ref.ppt Date
Danesi’s Brand Semiotics: The poetic logic
• A brand is a logical construct, a name evoking an unconscious system of thought
• The logical reasoning used is hardly ‘rational’ ; it is based on the poetic sense built into words
• Brands are essentially metaphors (Vico), they are part of a ‘social logic’ as unconscious system of reasoning
and inference that is tied to the rhetorical value of brand names.
• Poetic logic is evidence that we use our imagination in tandem with our senses to understand the world
• BRANDS ARE FIRST AND FOREMOST IMAGINARY CONSTRUCTS, YET OF PRACTICAL
RELEVANCE AND CARRYING VALUES THAT MAY BE LOGICALLY ARTICULATED
• It is no wonder that brand names have become metonymically sign-posts for entire product categories
• Anyone got any post-its? ---- Do you have small pieces of paper for note-taking?
• Google it --- Look for information about topic X by using a web-based search–engine
• To hoover --- To clean carpets
• Pass me a Kleenex ------ Give me a tissue
•
•

Ref.ppt Date
Danesi’s Brand Semiotics: The connotative index
• Brands may be viewed as signification systems, that is culture-specific meanings and
attendant mental constructs that are evoked by a brand.
• Brands as signs enter into relations with other signs in a culture and gain their ‘value’
from them.
• The connotative index: The higher the number of connotations a brand generates, the
greater its psychological force
• Also see Keller’s richness of brand associations BUT
• RISK OF DILUTING BRAND DNA AND CORE BRAND PROMISE
Danesi’s Brand Semiotics: Brands as texts
• Text: A ‘putting together’ of signifying elements (words, sounds, images, etc.) to produce a meaningful
message .
• The form brands are given in advertising campaigns is called their textuality
• 4 levels of textuality:
• Surface text: It identifies a product and presents a situation or image, while unfolding as an
action sequence.
• Subtext: The generation of sensations through synesthetic effects that are produced from the
interaction between two or more signs(e.g., an ice-cube rubbing a neck)
• Intertext: Connotations that emerge from signs that are employed in ads by virtue of their
intertextual embeddedness (e.g., familiar representations that carry conventionalized meaning due
to their recurrent portrayal in films)
• Metatext : The creation of different kinds of texts for each medium which results in an overall text
or ‘metatext’
• Note: This notion also surfaces in the relevant literature as transmedia storytelling

Ref.ppt Date
Floch’s Marketing Semiotics
• Floch pioneered in the application of Greimasian structuralist semiotics in marketing
theory and research
• His main work Marketing Semiotics (2001) that exemplifies his approach which is
complemented by Visual Identities (2000), even though not furnishing a coherent
branding theory, is interspersed with insightful conceptual and methodological
remarks borne out of his active involvement in applied marketing semiotic research.
Floch’s approaches to branding research
• Expanded Greimasian semiotics to the visual territory (logos, ad signs)
• Applied Greimasian structuralist semiotics to services (banking, metro), retail
(Carrefour), fmcg’s (pharmaceuticals), durables (Citroen)
• Adapted the semiotic square’s binarist rationale to both depth and surface
structure readings
• Multimodal reading grids of packaging and advertising elements (effets de sens)
• Universal axiological mapping by projection on the veridictory square

Ref.ppt Date
Criticism of Floch’s adaptation of the structuralist depth grammatical
binarist rationale to visual surface discursive structures
• Floch, by analyzing mostly print ads in the pharmaceutical category of psychotropic
medication found that “this discourse had not been put together in a haphazard way, but
according to a very specific encoding, the awareness of which enabled us to avoid taking
for granted the incorporation of such details as the stable nature of a line, the dissymmetry of
a form, the graphics of a design or the contrast of two values” (Floch 2001).
• By drawing on recurrent stylistic patterns Floch identified twelve distinctive visual categories
in psychotropic drug advertising, such as “clear vs dark”, “shaded vs contrasting”
• However, binarist pairs in the visual sign are not as clear-cut, as Sonesson argues.
• “Oppositions may be in absentia, or true oppositions, or in praesentia, or contrasts.
Thus, in pictures there is no obvious equivalent to the system of (constitutive)
oppositions present in the phonological and semantic organisation of verbal
language”
• Over-reliance on the binarist model
• As against Rastier’s criticisms of the binarist semiotic square (developed in
collaboration with Greimas)
• By implication, not taking into account advances in structuralist semiotics in the
connectionist territory
Floch’s Marketing Semiotics
• According to Floch (2001), the first principle is that “the thrust of semiotics is the
description of conditions pertaining to the production and apprehension of meaning”
• The second principle (the so-called immanence principle) is that “semioticians look
closely at the system of relations formed by the invariants of these productions and
apprehensions of meaning by analyzing specific components known as signs” (Floch
2001).
• “Semiotics seeks to work from texts, to work on and in that very place where signs
signify” (Floch 2001)
• According to Floch, textual semiotics lies at the heart of marketing research

Ref.ppt Date
Floch’s adaptation (?) of Greimas’s generative
trajectory of signification
• Based on the generative trajectory of signification a brand acquires meaning by
passing through different levels or structures, viz., depth, semio-narrative and discursive
structures.
• “Semio-narrative structures consist of the entire set of virtualities the enunciating
subject has at its disposal; it is that supply of values and programmes of action from
which he or she can draw in order to tell his or her story or speak of any given topic”
(Floch 2001).
• Discursive structures “correspond to the selection and ordering of these virtualities.
They relate to the choice of a specific referential universe” (Floch 2001).
• Despite positing the generative trajectory as generic marketing semiotic blueprint,
Floch progressively distanced himself from the generativist rationale of the trajectory in
favor of surface structural reading grids, while viewing depth structures as effets de sens
(effects of meaning) of verbo-visual surface structures.
•Piecemeal adaptation of Greimas’s generative trajectory of signification; wavering
between early and mid-period Greimasian theory.
Limitations in Floch’s structuralist semiotic
approach
• Adaptation of Greimas’s (Propp’s) semio-narrative typologies and modalities
without taking into account the particularities of branding discourse as genre
• Significant differences from the literary genre, which was the primary field of
application of Greimasian semiotics
• Extrapolation of universal value territories from a specific brand/category
perspective (CRF/retail)
• Not taking into account competition in most of the analyses

Ref.ppt Date
Floch’s Marketing Semiotics: CNS
• Floch imports directly in his applied marketing semiotic analyses Greimas’s canonical
narrative schema
• The canonical narrative schema constitutes an a priori model for the organization of a
narrative’s structure into four phases,
• contract, competence, performance, sanction
•The four phases of the canonical narrative schema are intertwined in a relationship of
logical presupposition and accompanied by four requisite modalities (see Greimas and
Courtés 1979).
• In order to accomplish a performance, an actant must be equipped with the
deontic modality (i.e., having-to-do [devoir-faire]), but also with wanting-to-do
[vouloir-faire] and being capable-of-doing [pouvoir]; in order to be capable of doing
one must possess the epistemic modality (i.e., knowing-how-to-do [savoir-faire])
•The completion of a narrative action is deemed successful if it leads to sanction,
whereby a receiver (destinataire) recognizes the message of a sender (destinateur)
as truthful/veridictory.
The original conception of CNS

Ref.ppt Date
Criticisms of Floch’s adaptation of the CNS in the analysis of
advertising discourse from a brand generativist POV
• Brand discourse varies markedly from literary discourse in terms of motivation and
intentionality behind the text’s manifest structure, as well as in terms of discursive style.
• The invariant functions and characters that were discovered by Propp and adopted by
Greimas may not be uncritically assumed as deductive principles for the semio-narrative
reconstruction of an ad film.
• This is further complicated by the incidence in the ad film not only of verbal, but
also of visual (and sonic) modalities
• The point of the non-universally relevant functions offered by Propp has also been
stressed by Rastier (2005c): “l’inventaire des fonctions doit s’adapter aux discours
(juridique, politique, etc.) et même aux genres”.
•Not taking into account the motivated structure of an ad filmic text has repercussions
alongside the generative trajectory’s strata.
Criticisms of Floch’s adaptation of the CNS in the analysis of
advertising discourse from a brand generativist POV
• From a brand equity point of view that is concerned primarily with differential brand
associations, the CNS is not sufficient in accounting for how associations may be
projected in a differential fashion.
•In order to account for the way whereby a narrative schema in the context of brand
discourse hangs together as string of narrative programs we must complement the
actantial syntax that is driven by the acts of determinate actantial figures and a
determinate set of actantial modalities furnished by Greimas with a transformative
syntax that is incumbent on rhetorical operations and figures.
• while taking into account issues of multimodal rhetoric

Ref.ppt Date
Floch’s major contribution regardless of the abandonment of the
generative trajectory: Emphasis on brand discourse as semi-symbolic
sign system
• Assuming as point of departure the famous ‘commutation test’
• “Commutation is […] the relation of reciprocal presupposition between the expression
plane and the content plane” (Floch 2001)
• It is only in the process of looking for such correspondences between the two planes of
signification that “we begin to take note of the actual visual or aural qualities that
constitute the aesthetic of a given brand” (Floch 2001: 8-9), while a brand’s textual
structure emerges through distinguishing between core or invariant and peripheral or
variable signifying elements.
•“This kind of coupling between the expression and content of a language constitutes a
semi-symbolic system” (Floch 2001: 75; also see Floch 2000: 46 and Broden 1996: 21).
• The commutation test is of paramount importance in maintaining brand coherence, but
may not account for the need for consistency among variable surface ad textual
manifestations which mandates the adoption of a diachronic outlook in a competitive
setting.
Floch’s semi-symbolic structures
 “This encoding was produced by coupling the category ‘euphoria’ versus ‘dysphoria’ which underlies
the overall content of the advertisements examined with the twelve visual categories that constituted
the expression categories of values and colours, of composition and of techniques or ‘styles’. As a
semantic category, euphoria versus dysphoria has to be viewed as the articulation, the minimal
structuring of the universe of thymia, that is of the field that accounts for such notions as well-being,
pleasure, tranquility and calm on the one hand and sadness, anxiety, pain or dread on the other. THIS
KIND OF COUPLING BETWEEN THE EXPRESSION AND CONTENT OF A LANGUAGE
CONSTITUTES A SEMI-SYMBOLIC SYSTEM” (Floch 2001: 75)
 Semi-symbolic vs. symbolic and semiotic systems (Hjelmslev)
 Symbolic systems: Languages whose two planes are in total conformity
 For each element of the plane of content there is one element at the plane of expression
 Semiotic systems: Languages where no conformity exists between the two planes
 Semi-symbolic: Correspondence between the two planes not at the level of individual signs, but at the
level of categories (second and third levels of reduction/articulation)
 “Semi-symbolic systems are signifying systems characterized by a correlation between categories
concerning the plane of expression and the plane of content” (Floch 2000; e.g., chromatic category and
thymic category or ‘bright colors’ being correlated with ‘euphoria’).
 AND I WOULD ADD STRUCTURES THAT ARE DEFINED BY FLUID IMAGINARY RELATIONS
BETWEEN THE TWO PLANES, RATHER THAN STRICTLY SYMBOLIC ONES. SEMI- REFERS
TO THE OSCILLATION OF THE CONCERNED EXPRESSIVE UNITS’ SEMANTIC CONTENT
BETWEEN THE IMAGINARYAND THE SYMBOLIC.

Ref.ppt Date
Semprini’s approach to brand image research
• Built on and advanced Floch’s structuralist semiotic approach to branding and advertising.
• More integrated approach to how brand identity is constructed
• Combining semiotics with systems theory
• In line with Greimas’s generative trajectory of signification, offered a 3ple structure of
brand identity along axiological, narrative, surface levels.
• Also taking into account marketing discourse, rather than applying structuralist semiotics in
a theoretical vacuum.
Semprini’s approach to brand image research
• For Semprini (1992), a brand is essentially an inter-subjective contract between sender
and receiver in perpetual motion.
• Brands constitute semiotic constellations in virtually infinite configurations.
• Brand meaning, however, is not exhausted in the relationship between sender and
receiver, but depends on the concurrence of a constantly shifting competitive landscape
which is compounded by cultural transformations that impact on the value-systems of a
brand’s audiences.
• These factors contribute to what Semprini calls by allusion to the 2nd law of
thermodynamics the “entropy of the brand”.
• Hence, “brand identity is the result of continuous interactions and incessant exchanges
amongst three sub-systems that we call encyclopedia of production (sub-system A),
environment (sub-system B), and encyclopedia of reception (sub-system C)” (Semprini
1992: 40).

Ref.ppt Date
Semprini’s approach to brand identity
• Semprini’s structuralist semiotic heritage emerges quite compellingly in his account of
how a brand identity system may be constructed.
• Evidently writing under the influence of Floch, but also drawing implicitly on basic
Greimasian postulates, Semprini contends that a brand identity system is made up of
a multiplicity of discourses in a hierarchical ordering.
• A brand discourse is made up not only of discrete elements, but also of differential
relations among elements.
• In order to account for these relational structures among the elements making up a
brand identity system, Semprini proposes a three-level structural system that bears
considerable resemblance to Greimas’s system of signification as a multi-level
generative trajectory.
Semprini’s brand identity system
(example of Levi’s identity)

Ref.ppt Date
Semprini’s approach to brand identity
• This perspective on brand identity distinguishes amongst three different levels of brand
meaning, in terms of depth/surface level signification, namely the base or axiological level,
the narrative level and the surface/discursive level.
• At the heart of a brand identity system lies the intermediate level of brand narrative. “At
this level, the base values are organized in the form of narratives. A narrative grammar
allows for the ordering of base values in relations of opposition” (Semprini 1992).
• The discursive level allows for the endowment of abstract base values with concrete
manifest representations, such as fleshing out the values of mastery and virility by
situating the Marlboro brand myth in a rough and difficult environment.
• “The discursive or surface level is where base values and narrative structures are enriched by
figures” (Semprini 1992).
• In other terms, the surface level is where a brand personality is invested with concrete
features, such as a face, a bodily posture, a profession, a context of action and all the
contextual elements that allow for a brand’s identification and differentiation.
Semprini’s adaptation of Floch’s axiological brand
map
• The fundamental building blocks consist
of practical and utopian values.
• Practical (or base) values= functional
aspects of a brand’s ownership and usage
(comparable to Keller’s primary brand
associations)
• Utopian (or existential) values= abstract
values (comparable to Keller’s secondary
brand associations)
• By projecting these fundamental values
on a Greimasian semiotic square, Floch
came up with their opposites in the form of
critical and ludic values.

Ref.ppt Date
Limitations in Semprini’s brand semiotic approach
• Uncritical adaptation of Floch’s universal axiological framework.
• Largely non category-wide competitive salient set as analytical groundwork
(e.g., extensive analyses of Benetton, Marlboro ads in a non-competitive
context).
• Regarding the mode of exposition of the interlocking levels in a brand identity
system, what is still missing is a demonstration of the proclaimed
fundamental value of accounting for the modes of connectivity amongst the
elements of the three levels.
• Not demonstrating how transitions among the levels of the trajectory are
effected
• each level has a unique morphology and syntax.
Typologies of brands as signs
Author/Year Theory Product-based Non-product based
Keller 1998 primary and
secondary brand
associations
primary brand
associations pertain
to tangible aspects
of brands (e.g.,
ingredients and
direct usage
benefits)
secondary brand
associations pertain to the
intangible aspects of
brands, such as user and
usage imagery
Nöth 1988 3 prototypical frames
whereby brands as
signs may be
examined
utilitarian:
associated with
features related to
practical use-value,
such as durability,
reliability,
usefulness.
commercial: signifies a
brand's exchange value or
its price. Socio-
cultural: relating a brand to
the social group or culture
with which it is typically
associated.
Floch 2001 practical (base) vs.
utopian brand values
practical values
relate to basic tasks
that are fulfilled by
products
utopian values reflect
abstract values with which
brands may be invested
Danesi 2006
(Barthes)
denotative vs.
connotative function
of brands
denotative function:
Gucci shoes are
protective gear.
connotative function: Gucci
connotes elegance and
artistry

Ref.ppt Date
Peircean semiotic approach to brand identity: Brand
Triangle (Lencastre & Corte-Real 2010, 2013)
• Descriptive approach to branding that draws on Peircean triads
• Three basic pillars:
identity: the sign or a set of signs understood in the strict sense of signs which are legally
protectable as brands which identify the brand itself and the brands that it potentially
covers.
object: marketing actions understood in the literal sense of actions aimed at establishing a
given exchange relationship of a product in a market of the main product and other
potential products covered by the brand.
response: brand associations understood in the broad sense of cognitive, affective,
conative or behavioural reactions that individuals have to any component of its identity or
object.
• Descriptive approach to branding that draws on Peircean triads
• Three basic pillars:
identity: the sign or a set of signs understood in the strict sense of signs which are legally
protectable as brands which identify the brand itself and the brands that it potentially
covers.
object: marketing actions understood in the literal sense of actions aimed at establishing a
given exchange relationship of a product in a market of the main product and other
potential products covered by the brand.
response: brand associations understood in the broad sense of cognitive, affective,
conative or behavioural reactions that individuals have to any component of its identity or
object.

Ref.ppt Date
 Core, Actual, Augmented Identity
 The core identity is the sign used for most immediate identification of all its products (e.g.,
brand name).
 The actual identity corresponds to the way or ways the core identity is expressed
graphically or the means whereby the core identity may become legally protectable.
 All other signs that may be afforded protection as legally recognised brands and which
complement the actual identity.
 Core, Actual, Augmented Object
 The core object is the brand’s most direct presentation of its activity and its main market, in
other words, its main exchange relationship.
 The actual object concerns other exchange relations that are important to sustain a
brand’s main exchange relationship.
 The term augmented object refers to all the marketing tools used to place each of the
brand’s offers in their specific markets.
Sociosemiotic analysis of airlines’ logos (Thurlow and
Aiello 2007)
 Sociosemiotic reading of how symbolic/cultural capital is created through
aesthetic/design patterns of airplanes’ tailfin logos.
 Corpus: 561 logos from globally operating airlines.
 Three levels of analysis
 Descriptive text analysis: Identification of expressive inventory through content
analysis.
 Interpretive text analysis: Reconstruction of the ‘latent’ grammar of visual design
by consideration of how meaning potentials are established, with a focus on the
role visual perception and cultural signification play in creating visual meaning in
tailfin design.
 Critical text analysis: Consideration of the link between the semiotic strategies
used for generating (or leveraging) symbolic capital and the power relations
which appear to frame the practices of global corporate branding.

Ref.ppt Date
Aiello 2007): Descriptive text analysis
 “This analysis of the primary visual
content revealed a strikingly limited
visual lexicon.”
 “As social semioticians point out, visual
meaning is best thought of as the
manipulation or exploitation of
resources rather than the application of
codes (Jewitt and Oyama, 2001).”
Aiello 2007): Interpretive text analysis
 Logos largely maintained a balance between ‘national pride’ and global cultural capital by
drawing on national emblems, yet redesigned in such a fashion as to enhance their global
appeal.
 Key mechanism whereby this ‘glocalisation’ was achieved: Kinetic stylization
 darting, gradation, diagonalization, tapering and, for Air New Zealand, brush stroking.
 “Rebranding also entails an increasing abstraction of logos whereby specifically national
semantic content is visually diluted (e.g. the geographic compass location for Northwest,
the localized crane motif for JAL, the national colours for Gulf ).”
 “In the case of Georgian Airlines, the rebranding involves a total change of tailfin design
which drops the Georgian flag altogether in favor of a generically consistent (i.e. the spiral)
but nationally ‘insignificant’ pattern. This diminishing of national specificity seems to be an
even more strategic move to re-evalute the visual currency in pursuit of greater profit
margins and extended, global reach.”

Ref.ppt Date
Aiello 2007): Interpretive text analysis
 Logos largely maintained a balance between ‘national pride’ and global cultural capital by
drawing on national emblems, yet redesigned in such a fashion as to enhance their global
appeal.
 Key mechanism whereby this ‘glocalisation’ was achieved: Kinetic stylization
 darting, gradation, diagonalization, tapering and, for Air New Zealand, brush stroking.
 “Rebranding also entails an increasing abstraction of logos whereby specifically national
semantic content is visually diluted (e.g. the geographic compass location for Northwest,
the localized crane motif for JAL, the national colours for Gulf ).”
 “In the case of Georgian Airlines, the rebranding involves a total change of tailfin design
which drops the Georgian flag altogether in favor of a generically consistent (i.e. the spiral)
but nationally ‘insignificant’ pattern. This diminishing of national specificity seems to be an
even more strategic move to re-evalute the visual currency in pursuit of greater profit
margins and extended, global reach.”
Aiello 2007): Critical text analysis
 “Micro-level analyses are able to show how globalism is being worked out in practice.”
 “This is what Fairclough (2003) refers to as ‘textualization’ – the process whereby social
and economic realities are represented and established discursively. It is also the socially
constructed, discursive nature of ‘globalization’ which makes it so suitable for analysis by
social semioticians and critical discourse analysts.”
 “The synergistic relation between the perceptual and the cultural in visual imagery appears
nicely to parallel the global/local synergism of the ‘transnational imaginary’ (Wilson and
Dissanayake, 1996).”

Ref.ppt Date
Semiotic criticism of the cognitive psychological account of
the formation of brand associations (Bauters 2007)
 Offering a ‘holistic’ context of interpretation of Finnish and Italian beer brands’ labels
that takes into account the interpreter, the social context, the history of the studied
brands as signs and the role of emotions in a decision making process.
 Interdisciplinary approach that blends social psychological perspectives (Mead,
Moscovici, Damasio) with semiotic ones (Peirce, Tarasti, Kress & Van Leeuwen)
 The signification of the object changes constantly, but so does the ‘meaning’ of the
cognizing subject (as sign)
 The outcome of the signification process depends on the shifting hierarchical
structure in the mass of multiple associations.
 This hierarchy changes, thus bringing about different interpretations at different
times when the interpretant still perceives the same sign.
 Among these are the Interpreting Mind’s former experiences (memory) and the
social network that affects the Interpreting Mind.
 The influence of the social network can be named societal semiosis.
 The Interpreting Mind belongs to the semiosic process.
The role of social networks/community in bringing about consensus about
interpretations or how target groups form common interpretations of signs
(Bauters 2007)
 Social psychological theories could gain from the Peircean approach the idea that an individual
is essentially social in nature and belongs to triadic processes.
 The interpretation or the creation of meaning in any artefact requires “collateral experience”.
 The individual is not able to proceed in its semiosis all by him/herself, but needs interaction
with society.
 It is not possible to separate the semiosis that goes on within the person and that which
goes on between the person and the Umwelt.
 Peirce’s philosophy of mediation highlights the idea of semiosis as the main element from
which one can begin searching for the dynamics between signs, groups and individuals and
the investigation of meanings, attitudes and belief formation.
 “Otherness and meaning are given together in our experience of our self as being embedded in
a network of relations – more specifically, enmeshed in the ‘semiotic web’” (Colapietro 1989).
 To belong to a group means that at least some of the values, habits and partially the world-
view/lifestyle are agreed among the individuals
 Habits, norms and attitudes which grow through the process of intertwining with the Umwelt.


Ref.ppt Date
Major gaps in the marketing semiotic literature
• No coherent models available, focusing on brand equity, rather than branding in
general
• Structuralist semiotic perspectives have been largely employed for analyzing
descriptively (interpretively) ads, rather than focusing on ad texts as sources of brand
equity
• Binarism still dominant in a theoretical landscape that favors connectionist
approaches
• Lack of quantification of qualitative phenomena

Ref.ppt Date
Major gaps in the marketing literature
• Focusing on the encoding stage of brand texts, rather than decoding.
• Adopting a brand textuality perspective in addressing and managing brand
associations.
• Adding rigor to the employment of semiotic perspectives in marketing research.
• Projecting brand equity in a category-specific context by mapping out a
category’s semic microuniverse, its expressive inventory and modes of
connectivity among expressive elements.
• Focusing on operations of semantic transformation and modes of connectivity,
rather than expressive elements, a significantly under-researched area
• with an emphasis on rhetorical relata

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George rossolatos seminar on branding, brand equity, brand semiotic models and research methods part 5