Marketing Semiotics

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Everyday consumers engage with brands, perceiving quality, identity, and symbolic relationships. The concept of brand meanings plays a crucial role in "brand equity," which represents the financial value of intangible benefits that exceed the actual use of products, influencing a firm's financial performance. Thus, managing brand equity necessitates a focus on brand meanings, or semiotics. This book employs structural semiotics, extending the principles of structural linguistics to analyze verbal, visual, and spatial sign systems, illuminating the cultural codes and discourses surrounding brands. It argues that semiotic research should be foundational to brand equity management, as brands depend on sign systems to differentiate themselves from commodities and competitors while engaging consumers. The text includes numerous global business cases demonstrating how semiotics has been effectively utilized to refocus, reposition, or expand brands into new products, customers, and markets. Drawing on two decades of academic and consulting expertise, the book offers practical guidance for navigating technological and cultural changes, distinguishing brands in competitive landscapes, and addressing the inevitable erosion of brand meaning over time.