Lakhasly

RS | DICTIONARY OF ADVERTISING AND MARKETING CONCEPTS

attitudes, candidates, goals or states of mind" (p. 3). Since Packard wrote his book, in 1957, the advertising industry has developed many new ways of understanding our thought processes and new methods of attempting to shape our behavior.

S

Semiotics

Semiotics is defined as the science of signs, which meansit focuses upon the role of signs in society and, in particular, how people find meaning in various aspects of life. If advertisers are to communicate with their target audiences effectively, they must know how these target audiences think and the way they interpret signs and symbols.

One problem is that we know that people don't always interpret advertisements the way the people who create the ads expect them to. A number of years ago I met the president of an advertising agency in Britain who told me that people in his agency were very interested in semiotics, just as many semioticians are very interested in advertising.

Ferdinand de Saussure and C. S. Peirce are the founding fathers of the science of semiotics, which deals with signs (the term "semeîon" means sign) and how people find meaning in them. A sign is anything that can be used to stand for something else. Thus, if we look at a print advertisement with a male and female model and textual material in it, everything in that advertisement can be considered a sign: the bodies of the man and the woman, the clothes they are wearing, their facial expressions, the colorof their hair, the style of theirhair, their body anguage, the content of the textual
DICTIONARY OF ADVERTISING AND MARKETING CONCEPTS 1 S

material, the typography used in the textual material, the satiality of the advertisement. ad infinitum.

In Saussure's book, Course in General Linguistics, he called his science semiology-literally, words about signs. In one of the foun- dational descriptions of the science of signs, he writes (1915/1966, New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 16):

Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the mostimportant of all these systems.

A science that studies the life ofsigns within societyis conceivable: it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall callitsemiology (from Greek semeion "sign"). Semiology would show what constitutes signs,what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right toexistence, a place staked out in advance.

This statement opens the study of all kinds of communication to us, for not only can we study symbolic rites and military signals, we can also study soap operas, situation.comedies, and advertisements and commercials-and almost anything else-as "sign systems." He also explained what signs were: "The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image..... call the combination of a concept and a sound-image a sign, but in current usage the term generally designates only a sound-image" (pp. 66-67). He divided signs into two components, a signifier(or "sound-image") and a signified (or "concept"), and pointed out that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary; these points were of crucial importance forthe development of semiotics. He offered another idea of consequence-namely that concepts have no meaning in themselves. The meaning of concepts depends on the way they are different from their opposites.
S DICTIONARY OF ADVERTISING AND MARKETING CONCEPTS

As he explained (p. 118): Concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.... Signs function, then, not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position.

Later, he added, "Everything that has been said to this point boils down to this: in languages there are only differences" (p. 120). The most important difference, it turns out, is the bipolar oppo- sition: hot and cold, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, hero and villain. As Saussure wrote, "The entire mechanism of language... is based on oppositions" (p. 121). It is the very nature of language that makes us see things in terms of oppositions, and thus, con- cepts, for Saussure, mean something by not being their opposite. When we see an advertisement or a commercial, or any text, our minds function, automatically and involuntarily, to sort out the various oppositions: hero or villain, beautiful or ugly, something to buy or something to ignore.

The second founding father of semiotics, and the thinker who gave the science its name, semiotics, was Charles Peirce, who made an important distinction between three different kinds of signs: icons, indexes, and symbols. Icons signify by resemblance; indexes signify by cause and effect; and symbols signify on the basis of con- vention. As Peirce wrote:

Every sign is determined by its objects, either first by partaking in the characters of the object, when I call a sign an Icon; secondly, by being really and in its individual existence connected with the individual object, when I call the sign an Index; thirdly, by more or less approximate certainty that it will be interpreted as denoting the object, in consequence of a habit (which term I use as including a natural disposition), when I call the sign a Symbol. (Quoted in J. J. Zeman, "Pierce's Theory of Signs," in T. A.
DICTIONARY OF ADVERTISING AND MARKETING CONCEPTS IS

Sebeok, Ed., A Perfusion of Signs, 1977, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 36)

The following chart offers examples of each kind of sign in Peirce's theory:

Icons

Indexes

Symbols

Signify by:

Resemblance

Cause and effect

Convention

Example:

Photograph

Fire and smoke

Cross, Flags

Process:

Can see

Can figure out

Must learn

We can see that there are differences between Saussure'sscience of signs and Peirce's, although both deal with signs and both theo- ries have been very influential. Peirce also said a sign "is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect orcapac- ity," which means that meaning is always created by individuals (quoted in Zeman, p. 27). He also argued that the universe is "per- fused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs" (epigraph in Sebeok, p. vi). This suggests that since everything in the universe is a sign, semiotics is the "master" science!

Semiotics has been of considerable use to scholars dealing with advertising, since it helps us figure out how people find meaning in advertisements and commercials, and it is useful to people in the advertising industry who are interested in the same topic. There are a number of semiotic analyses of advertising, such as Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride (though he doesn't mention semiotics or use semiotic concepts, his analy- sis is semiotic in nature) and Judith Williamson's Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. When you see the term "meaning" being used in a book's title, there usually is a connection with semiotics.
S DICTIONARY OF ADVERTISING AND MARKETING CONCEPTS

Semiotics argues that we are always sending messages to others about ourselves, and others are sending messages about themselves to us. Semiotics has the goal of understanding the full significance of these messages and messages we get from advertisements and com- mercials, and how all these messages are interpreted or "decoded" by other people. One problem with signs is that they can be used to lie, which means that blonde you see may be a brunette and that man you see may be a woman and that woman you see may be a man. It is because we know that signs lie that we must become suspicious of all signs and of the advertisements and commercials that employ them so artfully.

This Cavin Klein adver- tisement for underwear exploits the male body the way many adver- tisements exploitthe female body:to sell products-in this case, underwear. It is only in recent years that the male body has been presented in advertise- ments as an object of sexual desire or lust.