Open Happiness?

Communication is about meaning,… but not just in a passive sense of perceiving messages. Rather, we live in lives filled with meanings and one of our life challenges is to manage those meanings. But this process of managing our meanings is never done in isolation. We are always and necessarily coordinating the way we manage our meanings with other people. So, I concluded, communication is about the coordinated management of meaning.
— W. Barnett Pearce

With brands increasingly striving to achieve an “emotional connect”with their consumers,  the task entrusted to “strategic consultancy companies” is often to decode the nuances of concepts like luxury, freedom, confidence, happiness etc and identify a slice of it for the brand to ‘own’ for itself symbolically in the semio-sphere of meanings.

Often the fresh slice of meaning to be identified for the brand lies somewhere between the “meaning potential (i.e. the meanings that have already been introduced into society; Halliday)” and “affordance (i.e. meanings that have not yet been recognized Gibson 1979)”.

The key challenge in researching and identifying the fresh slice and nuance in such broad ideas is that the meaning attached to these concepts is a function of both the minds among who meaning is being studied (where the meaning potential already resides) and the cultural context and systems of knowledge within which the process of signification takes place (where the affordance lies and has to be searched out).

Hence, this paper argues that, the research approach should be anchored in mixed methodologies that combine innovative qualitative research among consumers as well as semiotic analysis and the recommendations be based on a synthesis of both.

One innovation in qualitative research that the authors have successfully used is mobile ethnography to capture consumer experience “in-the-moment”.  This used a specially created app that resided on consumers’ mobile phones and enabled them to record and upload their “in-the-moment” thoughts and feelings around the concept being studied.  When combined with a semiotic understanding of the  concept, the mixed methodology can open up new slices of meaning for the brand to adopt into its symbolic space, along with a set of product innovations to support it.

Hamsini Shivakumar – Linkedin profile: in.linkedin.com/pub/hamsini-shivkumar/10/275/35b

Anila Shivrastava – Linkedin Profile: sg.linkedin.com/pub/anila-khosla-shrivastava/9/b25/b6b

OPEN-HAPPINESS- Semiofest 2013 presentation – Copyright: Hamsini Shivakumar and Anila Shivrastava