Semiotic Offerings
We have developed 6 offerings which we believe encompass the full range of commercial applications:
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Brand Audit
What is it?
Brands are complex symbolic structures invested with all sorts of meanings. A Brand Audit gets under the skin of a brand, disentangling and making sense of visual, and other equities, which give the brand its meaning.
Why is it useful?
Helps brand owners increase or maintain brand relevance in a changing cultural climate. Gets to grips with the strengths, weaknesses and paradoxes of a brand. This helps future initiatives stay true to brand spirit whilst leveraging its most powerful equities.
How has it worked before?
- Mapped out future scenarios a public service brand to see how the campaign could flex to accommodate different targets
- Advised on how to modify subversion for a mature target on behalf of a soft drinks brand - providing the springboard for fresh initiatives
- Resolved contradictions inherent in the brand iconography, store merchandising and graphical identity of a shoe retailer
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Category Audit
What is it?
Category Audit charts competitive territory and orientating the brand within it. Meaning is relational and brands do not act in a vacuum but gain salience and traction by playing off their category counterparts.
Why is it useful?
Allows brand owners to see the competitive landscape with new eyes and make better informed decisions. Category Audit goes deeper than a competitive review, identifying patterns, formulas, themes across the category that highlight potential for white space and differentiation. It helps clients understand the competition better than they understand themselves.
How has it worked before?
- Interrogate the category codes of chewing gum for a confectionary manufacturer. Learnings gained led to rule breaking packaging which on launch went on to outperform the leader 2 to 1 in brand preference.
- Audited category codes of the SUV segment in Europe an automotive manufacturer. Learnings gained from the audit enabled the design and innovation team to successfully pitch for investment from HQ in Japan.
- Identified the repertoire of signifiers across categories from crisps to ready meals used to signal the emergent trend for gourmet health. This led to a stream of new product development initiatives in FMCG.
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Culture Scope
What is it?
Wide-ranging socio-cultural analysis which investigates culture for signs of change. Culture Scope highlights important themes by joining the dots between tangential parts of culture in surprising, counter intuitive ways.
Why is it useful?
Brands are often constructed out of cultural building blocks. When this cultural material is fresh and relevant the brand has positive 'cultural capital' when this becomes diminished, the brand suffers too. Often the category codes are stale and inspiration is needed from elsewhere. A look outside the category at the surrounding culture helps break category formulas and most critically helps keep brands culturally attuned.
How has it worked before?
- Reframed dandruff as a contemporary problem and a signifier of modern Japanese life – not lack of hygiene but stress and attrition. Helped devise a new discourse for an anti-dandruff launch in Japan.
- Scoped the world of health and well being for a US confectionary brand identifying eight big themes to feed into an ignition workshop.
- Identified new emergent forms of Japanese beauty revealing potential positioning areas for a personal care brand. Highlighted the key myths employed by competitor brands in order to generate learnings.
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Exposé
What is it?
Exposé delivers a specialist professional opinion on the past or potential performance of a particular piece of communication. Exposé involves a thorough textual analysis to tease out unseen or unintended meanings.
Why is it useful?
A semiotic analysis of this type is reverse engineering – it deconstructs work into its component parts to see how it works. Exposé helps client teams better understand the underlying reasons behind response.
How has it worked before?
Gives an added semiotic angle and support to agency thinking. It uncovers perspectives on a problem or category that have not yet been considered. It can prove to be that crucial competitive advantage.
- Revealed deep ideological messages about spirituality embedded within successful advertising for a detergent brand in Spain.
- Gave detailed pointers on how to deploy symbols within a campaign for a healthcare provider where there was room for misinterpretation.
- Revealed the discrepancy between US and Scandinavian interior design codes for a furnishing company as part of a catalogue revamp.
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Pre-Pitch
What is it?
Pre-Pitch is a quick and cost-effective semiotic contribution to the pitch team's armoury. Pre-Pitch delivers an injection of inspirational thinking or added ammunition during a time critical, high stakes process.
Why is it useful?
Gives an added semiotic angle and support to agency thinking. It uncovers perspectives on a problem or category that have not yet been considered. It can prove to be that crucial competitive advantage.
How has it worked before?
Gives an added semiotic angle and support to agency thinking. It uncovers perspectives on a problem or category that have not yet been considered. It can prove to be that crucial competitive advantage.
- Understanding the coding of mobile phone networks in the UK and communication strategies for signifying the notion of convergence for Fallon which led to them winning the Orange business.
- Understanding the cultural position of tea drinking and connotations of tea in UK society for MCBD which helped them win the Tetley business
- Understanding dominant and emergent communication around 'Clean' in the detergent category and broader US culture which helped BBH USA consolidate its position with Unilever USA.
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Semiotic Thinkpiece
What is it?
A succinct and inspirational piece of writing on a topic (no more than 2000 words) put together by the semiotics team. Thinkpiece draws upon several different sources for ideas. These include books, journals, online resources, and our network of experts and academics.
Why is it useful?
Most useful where a company or agency wants some fresh, thought provoking thinking on an issue. Potential topics for a think piece of this kind would be the significance of satin as a fabric, the coding of Latin America in the UK or the meaning of a certain colour within a category.
How has it worked before?
- A document on the future of luxury travel and the international jet-set for a premium hotel chain wanting to experiment in a new territory
- A document on the changing role of sunshine and use in the butter category for a dairy producer to feed into repositioning work
- A document on the coding of the broadsheet versus tabloid to ignite ideas for the repositioning of a national newspaper in the UK
N.B. Flamingo Semiotics was nominated for the best overall Paper at the 2006 ESOMAR Conference for their paper on sonic semiotics – understanding the role of music and sound in marketing communications where they argued for a more strategic employment of music as a means of building brand equity.
