Tag Archives: rebranding

Semiotics and Brand Development

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A brand is more than one iconic symbol, it’s a system of interconnected images, actions and signs that create a response in your consumers. While it is often put down to something as simple as logo design (which is anything but simple, in fact), identity and branding work extends beyond the creation of a company logo or trademark. The identity of any particular corporation, product or service encompasses a variety of materials including business cards, marketing materials, staff uniforms, advertisements, commercials, web presence, etc. All of this is created to establish an identity that the consumer comes to value beyond the direct benefits of the company.

A part of establishing the company brand, the identity work is important in conveying the principles, ideas and standards of the organization for which it is developed. Designers work together with strategists, copywriters, marketing directors and a host of other professionals to ensure that a brand identity is communicated effectively and efficiently from the client to the consumer. And in an age of social media and assumed shared interests, the communication is increasingly a multi-faceted conversation.

Most design firms and agencies create branding and identity work for their clients on some level, others specialize in identity and branding only. In any case, brand development involves deep thinking and a commitment to understanding the symbolic interconnectedness of the parties engaged with the brand. This is the art and science of semiotics. But why bother?  There are a number of simple reasons.

Understanding

Semiotics can help you dig into the underlying meanings in communication and establish a richer connection with consumers. On a practical level, a semiotic approach allows you to determine why an ad, a web page or a new product’s design is or isn’t working. It allows you to isolate components, but it also allows you to determine how they work or don’t work in relation to other elements.

Renovation

Over time symbols change and without constant care brands fall apart. A brand can keep making small changes, but ultimately, this process doesn’t work. Eventually you have to strip right back to bare bones and rebuild the brand completely. Semiotics can be used to deconstruct brands and categories, exposing truths that can be used to reconstruct them, and make them stronger.

Articulation

Semiotics can help articulate the problem you actually have, as opposed to the symptom you are trying to address. The approach allows you to move beyond intuition and get to the deeper issues behind what is happening with your brand.

Research

A semiotic approach can help you improve your qualitative work, by helping you redevelop your line of questioning, or listening for different things. Rather than focusing on traditional needs-based questioning and observation, a semiotics approach uncovers deeper issues and subconscious triggers that strengthen the meaning behind the brand.  There is a strong tradition in ethnographic research specifically of employing a semiotic approach.  Both methods are observational and interpretive. Ethnographic research aims to understand what consumers do and why they do it, rather than what they say. In other words, it assumes that human behavior is more complex than what people tell you. Similarly, semiotics assumes that how human beings interact with and understand the world is more than what they tell you.

Briefs

Ultimately, semiotics creates richer, deeper briefs and platforms that creative teams can actually work from. Rather than simply providing data, it provides avenues of expression that the creative team can build upon and use to explore a range of opportunities for communication. It can provide platforms from which to strengthen your communication, be that advertising or design.

Rebranding in a Recession: It begins within

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When the economy turns sketchy, the inclination of most company  heads is to cut back on marketing, branding, and advertising. After the last few years of elevated unemployment and decreased consumer spending it still holds true.  With a drop in expenditures on awareness campaigns, maintaining or revitalizing a brand often falls to the responsibility of a company’s greatest potential marketing tool, the employee, though this is rarely a conscious decision on the part of management.  When it is a conscious effort, it is typically a huge success or a dramatic failure, with little room for anything in between.

Re-branding during an economic downturn is nothing  new.  As concerns over an unstable economy grow, companies often feel compelled to reinvent themselves and build new interest in the hopes of generating revenue.  They also turn to employees to get out  the message.  This is particularly true of internal projects meant to garner greater productivity, commitment and support from employees  as a company deals with the ramifications of declining profits, lay offs, and employee ambivalence that matches or exceeds that of the  general public. It is frequently something of a catch 22 scenario, where employees are losing or have lost faith in a company and its leaders, even as the need for them to embrace a brand, to truly live it, is at a high point.  But, there are strategies to mitigate dismissal by the employees of an internal branding or a re-branding project during  economic uncertainty and looming lay offs.  Without embracing these  strategies, these projects will ultimately lead to failure, no matter how  creative it may be.

1. Deal with financial realities

As uncomfortable as transparent, open communication may be, leaders, particularly those at the upper-most levels, must relay information about the company’s financial position and forecast to the survivors, establishing priorities and expectations for future decision  making.  Employees must be made to feel that they are part of a  team, not expendable parties.  They must feel that the success of the  company rests partly in their hands, that they have a stake in the  game. Human beings have a remarkable capacity for embracing challenges.  We also have a remarkable capacity for getting involved when we believe we actually have something to lose beyond monetary gain.  Couching in terms that bring the financial realities to life draws employees in and helps develop intense loyalty even if things look gloomy.

If lay-offs have happened the remaining employees may feel that they will be next to lose their jobs.  Whether they believe it is a month away or two years away, the fear becomes ever-present.  The result is abandonment of commitment to the company and lowered productivity.  Additionally, some will feel guilty (sometimes angry) when colleagues have lost their jobs.  They will also view any attempt to get them excited about the company as being based on lies and deception.

2. Reposition the effort as the beginning of better days to come

Understand that people have lost friends and will no doubt have their own anxieties about the future. Get people refocused quickly on any brand message, internal restructuring, job/function changes and any other changes underway, or looming on the horizon.  Focus on the positives by acknowledging what has just happened – that it was necessary evil, but the new branding effort is an extension of brighter days ahead.  The key is that the problems that have existed, and in the eyes of those being hit they are problems to say the least, cannot be overlooked.  Acknowledging these means acknowledging the humanity, involvement, and importance of the employees.  It also makes the idea of better days ahead significantly more realistic and believable.

3. Make sure it is a bottom-up approach

No matter how good a job management does in making employees feel heard and included, they’re still suspect because it is management who pulled the trigger if cuts occurred (especially if those cuts were due to downward sales).  No one cares if they support it. Furthermore, if a company already tends to be structured in highly defined silo, these tend to become more “tribal” as conditions worsen.  This means that only managers with direct, frequent contact with mid and lower level employees have rational and emotional credibility. While an individual VP or Director may be believable, management as an institution is suspect – you may have a good manager in your department, but all the rest are heartless, opportunistic, and looking out only for themselves.  What matters is that the people who have a stake in the company on a day to day, put-bread-on-my-table kind of way are supportive.

4. Get top-down support 

While the re-branding effort needs to get the bulk of its drive from the base of the company, it is helpful to have a CEO or Chairman that champions the cause, particularly it he or she can tie it directly back any major changes in management and policy.  This, however is a tricky business and is dependent on the top brass being seen as taking a populist, no nonsense approach to the business.  If the head of the company is seen as simply carrying on a tradition of undirected change and business as usual, little real change occurs.  If the head of the company is seen as a having a dynamic, uncompromising, innovative approach to dealing with company woes, employees believe that change for the better is an attainable possibility and they will embrace a new  internal branding effort.  

5. Remember that logic and reason may take a back seat

The bulk of employees understand and can articulate the ramifications of lost revenue and brand disintegration, but that hardly eases the tension.  There is a tipping point at which reason and logic take a back seat as worry, fear, and cynicism assert themselves.  This means that any brand initiative needs to account for this heightened sense of emotional distress and recognize that employees will not be thinking about the well-being of the corporation if they do not see it tied to  themselves on a very personal level.  Making a financial case is irrelevant when people are in survival mode.  Consequently, while being transparent about the economic realities of the business is essential to a successful campaign, it is equally important to acknowledge emotional distress and react to it openly and honestly.