Semiotics, Marketing And Communication: Beneath The Sign, The

Description:
The objective of applied semiotic research is to study how manufacturers and consumers create and extract meanings in the market place. This book builds on solid academic foundations and offers a collection of semiotic studies conducted by the author for a variety of firms. Through these studies, Jean-Marie Floch shows how to use a semiotic approach to address such managerial issues as u How can one analyse and design advertising campaigns to best match the consumption values of various market segments? u What are the messages potentially contained in the visual identity of your company? u Does your logo express the way you would like your company, your products to be positioned in the mind of your target audience? u What are the possible sources of distortion between the discourse of a company, for example a pharmaceutical laboratory, and some of its key intermediaries (say, general practitioners)? u How do consumers live their journey inside the subway or inside an hypermarket? Can one build a typology of their expectations and draw implications for better designing commercial environments? This book provides a rigorous yet readable presentation of the key concepts and framework underlying a semiotic study. The author combines a clear analytical approach with a quality of illustration through real semiotic applications which makes the book essential and enjoyable reading for all those who want to better understand what semiotics is about and how it can be fruitfully combined with more traditional 'qualitative' studies.

Review:
'Floch is one of those rare individuals who can successfully link semiotic frameworks with day-to-day marketing practice. This book is a rich and personal account of how Floch's unusual blend of theoretical intricacy and pragmatic insights helped real companies face real challenges.' - Kent Grayson, Associate Professor, London Business School 'The writings of Jean-Marie Floch consistently reveal profound and glistening insights on meaning in the marketplace, at both theoretical and practical levels. This timely volume of English translations - on the sad eve of his death - will prove to a wider global audience that Floch's research is, and will remain, among the finest ever conducted at the complex intersection of marketing and semiotics.' - David Glen Mick, Ph.D., Robert Hill Carter Professor of Commerce, McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, USA 'From ethnography to qualitative-and quantitative-research; from the analysis of a huge corpus of advertising to the finest close reading of a logo, Floch demonstrates how semiotics can be applied to all creative, brand and design problems.' - Virginia Valentine, Partner, Semiotic Solutions 'Few people have captured the depth of the semiotic nature of human life and communication and its contribution to understanding the practices and consequences of marketing as well as Jean-Marie Floch. This is a worthy collection of his contribution to marketing and semiotics and it will stand as a marking of his legacy in the field.' - Soren Askegaard, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of Southern Denmark 'Principles and practice in perfect harmony. Floch flits from topic to topic, in keeping with Montaigne's injunction to leap and bound. The outcome is a spellbinding story about storytelling. This is seven league boots scholarship. You may not live happily ever after, but you'll be chilled and thrilled along the way. The final chapter on the IBM-Apple face-off is a masterpiece. Semiosis in excelsis.' - Stephen Brown, Department of Marketing, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University 'It is a really useful and inspiring guide for academic and professional marketers, interested in linking goods with meanings.' - Rene Algesheimer & Marcus Dimpfel, The International Journal on Media Management

Table of Contents:
Beyond the Text, No Salvation: The Semiotic Approach Are You a Surveyor or Daydreamer? Developing a Behavioural Typology of Railway Users A Star is Born: Defining Visual Recognition for Credit du Nord Refusing Euphoria: A Disagreement Among Pharmaceutical Laboratories and General Practitioners 'I Love, I Love, I Love': Automotive Advertising and Consumer Value The Contribution of Structural Semiotics to the Design of a Hypermarket IBM and Apple's Logo-Centrism Selected Bibliography of Semiotics

Author Biography:
JEAN-MARIE FLOCH is acknowledged as one of the world's foremost authorities on the application of semiotics to marketing and communication. He obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of A.J. Greimas, the founder of the Paris School of Semiotics and taught at the University of Louvain, ESSEC, ESCP, EM Lyon, IAE Aix-en-Provence, the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and the Ecole d'Architecture of Versailles. He worked as a consultant applying semiotics to marketing and communication issues in a wide variety of industries including pharmaceuticals and health care, banks, luxury goods, cosmetics, food, transportation, media, catering, retailing, clothing and textiles, and office furniture. While at Ipsos he created the consulting firm's influential applied semiotic research unit. He later worked for the Design Strategy Minale Tatersfield Group and Creative Business International. In addition to these activities, Jean-Marie Floch continued to develop his first passion for visual semiotics. Today he is generally recognised as one of the most influential scholars in the field of the semiotics of photography and plastic arts. Jean-Marie Floch died in Paris on April 10, 2001 at the age of 53.