Obtaining more value from semiotics
Semiotics and Semioticians today

It is a real pleasure to be part of Semiofest, I am genuinely ‘gutted’ (to use Antipodean parlance) I can’t be with you. I’ve been interested in semiotics since I wrote my Thesis at Oxford entitled “Racism its roots and present propagation”. I love everything about semiotics. I’m here today to share with you how I think we might have a bolder, brighter and greater future. I’m also aware of my own skill as a semiotician, like Madonna I have more enthusiasm than genuine talent. Equally that doesn’t seem to have stopped me so if I can do it…welll…

I am very lucky in that most of my work is with CEO’s, Boards of companies and A list Actors in Hollywood. As a result I enjoy the pleasure of seeing my advice actioned at a senior level.

My personal context, what I’d call personal semiotic, is that I work in the US, Australia and NZ. Unlike Europe, business is very, very, very suspicious of anything that looks intellectual or out of the ordinary. Business embraces what is useful. As a result I’ve had to learn how to communicate the benefit of semiotics at a senior level in a way that is very utilitarian. Many of you will be more erudite semioticians than I and you might shudder at the short cuts I have to take to ‘get things over the line’. But if you will entertain me briefly I hope you can learn from what I share, just as I hope to learn to be a better semiotician from you.

The Opportunity

Commercial semioticians tend to focus on research and research buyers when there is a broader market out there. The challenge with research as a buying point is that they often (not always) have little pulling power in the organisation. You don’t see case studies that start : Apple owes its success to semiotics. If we are lucky we are celebrated amongst other semioticians or given an occasional mention by the advertising business. This is a crying shame.

Business, organisations and companies today have a massive challenge – they don’t know how to manage the meaning of their company with multiple stakeholders – not only brands but in particular the share market, internal stakeholders, trader partners and multiple others. Social Media has given them less control over “their Meaning Business” (my book is called “The Meaning Business”) and they are at a loss as to who, what and how to centralise this meaning.

In other words there is a “meaning ecosystem” of symbols, signs and behaviours they no longer know how to master, their efforts become lack lustre and they know they don’t know what they don’t know. They are looking for someone to give them a holistic view of how to manage meaning.

Enter the commercial semiotician.

Semioticians can help make sense of this meaning ecosystem. In fact I genuinely feel semioticians are the only people who can provide a meaning model.

However it seems to me that many commercial semioticians focus on marketing/research or academia – the result is we neglect to engage with the people who can make semiotics more famous, give us more value and more freedom for greatness. In my paper I will set out why I think this is, why we need to change our own semiotic language to get noticed and how to enrol a more senior audience.

Linkedin profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jakepearce