Show a hundred people the brand’s logo for two seconds and ask them what they felt. No one will say, “I felt that the brand values”; they will say “premium,” “cheap,” “friendly,” or “old-fashioned.” Instantaneous reactions, formed before any conscious thinking.
These reactions are informed by something, an origin point of sorts, and it is not randomness. Every element of color, shape, and image used by the brand has a meaning that the audience will decode on a fundamental level, using rules of decoding that the brand has not established. This is why semiotic analysis is one of the most underrated tools in the brand’s arsenal, despite the word itself having a certain academic cachet.
As a practical matter, it entails one essential inquiry into every visual element the brand uses: what does it say to the people who see it?
6 Ways Semiotic Analysis Can Help in Visual Branding
Testing Beats Guessing
The good news is all of this is testable. Showing the assets to members of the target audience and asking what they thought said a lot about what the brand was saying, without having to guess at it. Asking them to articulate what they thought the brand stood for and what they associated it with will routinely deliver surprising insight into what the brand actually said.
Semiotics has the luxury of an extensive research tradition to draw on; it’s standard practice in any brand strategy services engagement. However, even a lightweight version of the approach beats nothing at all. Asking five target audience members who’ve seen the brand’s assets for their unguarded thoughts will surface issues the internal team stopped noticing years ago.
The Audience Reads Your Brand Before Reading Anything Else
Before anyone has processed the brand’s slogan, a complex set of reactions has taken place in the consumer’s mind, based on the visual elements of the presentation. Color has told a story of a potential price bracket; type has imparted a personality; images have located the brand in a social world, or in the wrong one.
The danger of this is that a brand can spend years honing the verbal expression of its proposition, only to undercut it substantially by failing to choose images or colors that contradict it. People respond to such contradictions instinctively, and visuals have proven superior to words in representing truth.
Show the audience a premium product in cheap-looking packaging, and they will believe the packaging. With semiotic analysis, brands begin their process exactly by slowing the instincts of the audience and studying, for each element, what it said alone, and what the combination said as a whole.
Every Symbol Is a Bet About Your Audience’s Knowledge
Logos, the icons used, and the imagery across the brand’s communications are all bets. The brand assumes that the audience will interpret a particular symbol in a certain way and builds its visual identity around these assumptions. A leaf as a logo element will communicate nature-friendliness; the use of a minimalist wordmark will be seen as a statement of quality; an illustrative mark will be assumed to be handmade and therefore warm. Some of the bets are successful, and some, unfortunately, are not.
People don’t write to brands to say the wrong icon made them feel the company wasn’t serious enough. They respond to those cues by deciding to buy or not. In every case, it is worth asking, for every symbol used in the presentation, which audience the mark is addressing, what it assumes about them, and whether that still holds for the target audience.
The symbol is layered in meaning for one generation and meaningless for another; it has the potential to be ironic, and it is essential to know whether it is a worthwhile risk to use it for the target audience.
Meaning Shifts, So the Analysis Isn’t One-Off
The implications of visual elements change as the culture changes; the things that were associated with a niche aesthetic five years ago have entered the mainstream and stopped being distinctive. Brands that operate on the principles of static identity, however, slowly become disconnected from the audience, unless they have the resources to respond to every evolution with an update to the brand’s fundamentals.
The better option is to periodically ask the essential semiotic question: what does our language say today to the people who need to understand it today? In some cases, there is little need to update, while in others, a small change can keep the meaning current. Ignoring the need for change entirely is the surest way to create a brand that has lost relevance without any particular signal to the contrary.
Studying these shifts is a specialization in itself; the field of cultural insights exists precisely because it has nothing to do with designing well. Design defines what the brand says, and cultural reading ensures the audience still hears it as intended.
The Category Has a Visual Code. Learn It Before Breaking It
Every category builds a set of associations that brands within it adopt. The banks go blue and conservative; organic food brands use brown paper and handwritten signs; in both cases, the visual language has been created by consumers as a way to separate real from sham. In all cases, however, brands have to make a choice between fitting in with the code and losing individuality, or breaking the code and losing the ability to be understood at all.
The most successful code-breakers know which elements to leave within the system and which to use to their advantage. The less successful ones break an element that the audience has identified as meaningless, and have to spend years convincing the public that they belong to this category at all.
The choice is much easier if it is deliberate, rather than accidental, and brands often drift, adding elements to their presentation until a full redesign is needed to reconcile the contradictions.
Colors Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean
People generally choose colors based on taste, then defend them as rational within their category. Semiotics has a much more interesting perspective.
Colors carry cultural meanings that vary from category to category, depending on the particular product and the audience. Green means healthy in food and eco-friendly in fashion; black means luxury in some categories and has other, more negative meanings in other cultures. The same color can carry completely different implications across categories; one shade of green can look warm on a food product and old-fashioned on a tech brand. Context defines the implication, which is why directly replicating the color palettes of successful brands often fails unless they operate in similar categories. That single shade was serving a purpose in the strategy of the competitor, and pulling it out of that context, the meaning is lost.
The easiest way to test this is to ask what meanings each color carries across the spectrum in the eyes of the target audience. In almost every case, the opinions of real people will differ substantially from the assumptions of the design teams, and inform a better choice.
End Point
Visual branding communicates, whether the brand intends it to or not, and audiences decode what they see using meanings the brand has not selected. Semiotic analysis serves to bring this process into focus: to ask what each element and combination of elements says to the people who need to hear it, to test these statements rather than rely on intuition, and to revisit the approach as cultural shifts render old meanings obsolete. Brands that embrace this process stop being surprised by the audiences’ responses, while the ones that do not keep receiving feedback in the only currency that matters: purchases and non-purchases, without any additional context.
