Using Semiotics in Retail

Leverage Consumer Insight to Engage Shoppers and Boost Sales

Rachel Lawes

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781398603837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Retail Industry
• Index: Business

WINNER: Business Book Awards 2023 - Sales & Marketing Boosting retail sales is more important than ever. Stand out in a global, digital marketplace, grow customer loyalty and evolve your brand by leveraging the power of semiotics online and in physical stores. Practical, accessible and based on 20 years of global marketing experience, Using Semiotics in Retail shows retailers of all sizes how to upgrade and empower their marketing, today and for the future. Discover step-by-step how to recognise and design for emerging consumer needs and create meaningful shopper experiences. Learn how to surprise and delight consumers, increase engagement and make shopping easier for everyone. It features case studies and examples from Unilever, Freshippo, H&M, Google, Toyota and many more. Using Semiotics in Retail shares game-changing marketing insights in categories such as FMCG, fashion, technology and entertainment, drawn from China, India, Mexico, the US and the UK. The book is supported by online resources that include templates and interactive exercises. Using Semiotics in Retail equips readers with a set of powerful tools which readers can use straight away to create engaging and successful retail marketing.

Part One

Case studies: semiotics in real-world retail

01

Semiotics will change your career in retail or retail marketing

This is a book with big ambitions. If you are a retailer or a retail marketer and you want fast, actionable ideas that sell products, then this book has lots, all ready to use. That’s not the main reason for this book’s existence, though. Its larger purpose is to equip you with the ability to generate creative and timely solutions to retail marketing problems yourself, even in challenging and stressful situations.

There’s a set of tools that I use every day as a marketer, which I share with you here. It is sometimes thought of as a research method but in fact it is an entire point of view. It is a particular way of looking at the world around us, including physical stores, apps and everywhere that retailing and shopping take place. Because it is a distinct and complete point of view, it reliably generates original and refreshing insights, and this is something that can be passed on to you within these pages. Its name is semiotics, and it is how I get paid. I boost footfall, customer engagement, sales and profits for retailers and their marketers, and I do this by thinking up ready-to-use marketing actions that chime with the needs of consumers, and more importantly by passing on transferrable and reusable skills to the people who work with me.

In this book, I invite you to join me in an experience that I regularly share with my clients, who are the owners of the world’s largest brands. They are usually senior people and they work with me because I have provocative ideas that the next marketer or market researcher might not have. Often, they are very interested in the thought processes that lead to these ideas but, because they are busy, they want to get straight to the strategic-level thinking and not become bogged down in the technical details of semiotic method. This book is for them and also for you. In this type of situation, I will usually say to my client, ‘Let me show you what I can see when I look at shopping’ – or a specific category such as groceries or whatever the topic du jour happens to be. Using persuasive words and images, I show them a new vision of their place of business, brand or category. By doing this, they not only benefit immediately from insights, but they are also able to grasp what it means to look at the world from a semiotic perspective. From there, they can begin to adopt that stance themselves, so they can see what I see, first-hand. I can do this for you as well and we do not need to get too caught up in the machinery of semiotics to make it happen.

Here is the plan. In the chapters of this book, I will show you what I can see when I look at shoppers, customer experiences and the everyday practice of retailing. I’ll tell you some stories of the kind that stick in my clients’ memories and I’ll suggest activities and prompts that you can use to develop your own uniquely semiotic point of view, which you can apply to your own brand or retail outlet, now and in the future.

If you fall in love with semiotics along the way and you want the kind of technical instruction that will equip you to run structured research projects, using semiotics, there’s a book for that too. Using Semiotics in Marketing (Kogan Page, 2020) has everything you need to become a confident, independent researcher. In the meantime, I expect you want to cut to the chase. I promised you stories and a new world view, so let us begin right away with a rather shocking story that is about jam and also about death.

A semiotic story about retail: jam of death

Once upon a time, not too long ago, I was hired by a company that makes traditional and luxurious fruit jam, or preserve, to give it its proper name. The product was dense and rich; it had an exciting range of flavour variants, and the company had a very attractive brand story to go with the product, which concerned elegance and European history. The company had invested quite a lot of money in renting a shop. It was only a small shop, but it was in the picturesque Old Town that every historical European city offers its visitors. Then the company spent some more money designing the store interior. They knew they were going for classical elegance, so they made restrained design decisions. They used a lot of black on the walls and shelving, with the brand name picked out in delicate gold lettering, not too large. Black was used at the top of the walls to give the illusion of a gracefully vaulted ceiling. The floors were creamy stone tiles. The counters and cabinets were made of a pale wood with small brass details. Even the sales assistants were tastefully attired in black, giving them an air of dignity. Outside the store, an unusual arrangement in a window at the side showed the lovely jars of jam erected on plinths, flanked by curtains, softly lit and presided over by an antique portrait of someone who might have been the company’s founder.

It was all very careful. The problem was that the store simply was not succeeding as well as expected. People liked the product, and brand awareness was good. The brand story was working. But there was something about this shop that people didn’t like. The company called me, and I went with my camera to take a look. One of the central questions or prompts in semiotics, which is used in every project is ‘Where have I seen this before?’, because this is the question that customers ask themselves, consciously or unconsciously, when they encounter a new brand, store or customer experience. On examining the store, I had a pretty good idea where I had seen all of it before, and when I returned to my desk, I did not have much difficulty finding the visual evidence that confirmed my hunches.

As I compared two sets of photos side by side – those I took myself, and those which I gathered from visual research online – the answer to the question ‘Where have I seen this before?’ was staring me in the face. Unfortunately for the fruit jam company, it was the funeral parlour, the crematorium, the crypt and the columbarium. The store reeked of death.

Signs and symbols

In semiotics, there’s a lot of talk about signs and symbols: units of communication that mean something. Here are some of the semiotic signs that the jam company accidentally used in trying to create a place to sell luxury food:

• Funeral parlours, specifically the room where funeral services take place, are commonly arranged so that thick, pleated or gathered floor-length curtains in muted colours are the dominant feature of the room (to hide or reveal a casket at the right moments). The lighting is soft, and natural daylight rarely penetrates.
• Crematoria, as you can verify by going to Google Images now and searching for ‘cremation’, rely on two semiotic signs. The first is the urn, which happened to be exactly the same shape as the jars of jam. In the curtained window display of the store exterior, these urn-shaped jars were placed on pedestals under protective glass domes. Between them sat the other key semiotic sign of cremation: a large portrait of the deceased person.
• Stepping into the shop – if anyone were brave enough to get past the exterior, which suggested that the funeral of the man in the portrait might be in full swing – the customer entered what could accurately be described as a crypt. Crypts usually have stone floors and low, vaulted ceilings (because they are built underground). They rely on a colour scheme of mainly black and white, interrupted by natural stone and wood.
• You may know that funeral caskets tend towards a similar appearance. In the country where this shop was located, caskets are nearly always made of light-coloured pine or poplar. They have small brass fittings and are minimally decorated with grooves that make up simple square or shield shapes. These were the characteristics of the counter and cabinets in the exclusive jam shop.
• A columbarium is a room where funerary caskets are stored on shelves. The urn-shaped jars, with their minimalist, undecorated labels, and the sombre shelving, perfectly recreated a columbarium in the store.

You can perhaps see why the company wasn’t selling as much food as it hoped. Luckily, by asking ‘Where have I seen this before?’ and following up with research to find out, I quickly found some practical solutions to get the brand back on its feet. I returned to the brand story, which featured elegant European designs of history and found that the brand’s own country and specific time period offered a wealth of design options that were elegant and dignified but also joyful, celebratory and appetizing. Recommendations included:

• A specific palette of colours in which black was used sparingly to contrast with rich jewel tones and sugary pastels.
• Pictorial designs for counters, cabinets and tables. In the time period being referenced, furniture makers loved to decorate wooden surfaces with painted scenes, often depicting the countryside.
• Designs for staff uniforms. The outfits of rural people and the serving classes were simple compared with those of the aristocracy, but used fresh colours, floral patterns and flowing shapes. They did not dress like modern-day funeral directors.
• A range of ways to display food. Apart from the jars of jam themselves, food was conspicuously absent from this store, yet the historical period at hand is remembered for its elaborate and decorative work with pastry and other foods.
• A visual library of patterns, motifs, decorative objects and dressings for shop doors and windows that were all on-brand to make the store appear premium and at the same time charming and inviting.

The company found these recommendations straightforward to activate. Uniform rows of shelving that made up the columbarium were removed and replaced with wooden fixtures in creamy colours, decorated with romantic and bucolic illustrations. The fixtures were designed to include open spaces, allowing daylight to pass through, brighteni...