What Is a Brand? A Semiotic Analysis

Abstract

In this chapter, I define brands, deal with brand images, and explain how semiotics, the science of signs, is useful in analyzing brands. I deal with Saussure’s theories and his notion that a sign is composed of a sound-object or signifier and a concept that the signifier generates. He also writes about concepts only having meaning in terms of their not being like their opposites. I also discuss the difference between denotation and connotation, metaphor and metonymy, and differentiation in brands.

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 most important of all these systems. A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from Greek sēmeȋon “sign”). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them.

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1966: 16)

The basic unit of semiotics is the sign defined conceptually as something that stands for something else, and, more technically, as a spoken or written word, a drawn figure, or a material object unified in the mind with a particular cultural concept. The sign is this unity of word-object, known as a signifier with a corresponding, culturally prescribed content or meaning, known as a signified. Thus, our minds attach the word “dog,” or the drawn figure of a “dog,” as a signifier to the idea of a “dog,” that is, a domesticated canine species possessing certain behavioral characteristics. If we came from a culture that did not possess dogs in daily life, however unlikely, we would not know what the signifier “dog” means. … When dealing with objects that are signifiers of certain concepts, cultural meanings, or ideologies of belief, we can consider them not only as “signs,” but sign vehicles. (p. 8, 9)

Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: Dreams Visions and Commercial Spaces