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Using semiotics to build powerful brands
for children
Virginia Valentine, Semiotic Solutions
If you want to know where your brand is going, look at the signposts. Semiotics does exactly this, deconstructing
our views of ourselves and the rest of the world to find out exactly what makes us tick.Virginia Valentine
introduces us to this fascinating subject area and shows us how it works, both in theory and in practice.
A
N YO N E W H O markets to kids or
researches the youth market will be
aware that children live in a culture of
their own, created by, and for, this age group.
This culture is by definition different from the
adult world around them. It has therefore
become a research holy grail to find ways to
understand this world and track how the chang-
ing cultural context influences young people’s
responses to brands.
While semiotics cannot pretend to lay claim
to such mystic powers, it is certainly true that,
because of its cultural emphasis, it provides a
focused and proven set of tools to see the
relationship between children and their develop-
ment and the culture that structures the way
they think and feel. Perhaps most importantly, it
also gives us a basis on which to build brands
that can engage and excite this most culturally
determined of markets.
All of us are constructed by our culture –
no one more than kids
It is a tacit, unstated belief of most market
research methodologies that we, as individuals,
stand in the centre of our world, looking at the
culture that surrounds us. Engaging with its
manifestations, seeing, hearing, touching,
smelling, taking in the world around us with all
our senses.We then understand what is going on
and react to cultural stimuli from our own
experience and our individual point of view.
As in Descartes’ famous dictum, ‘I think,
therefore I am’. In other words, people construct
© World Advertising Research Center 2003
Semiotics
their culture from their own thoughts and
feelings.
Semiotically it doesn’t quite work like that. In
semiotic terms, culture presents us with a mirror
image of how we, its creators believe (con-
sciously or unconsciously), we want to see
ourselves, a constructed picture of ‘me’. We can,
of course, accept or refuse that picture – or
maybe negotiate with it to adjust it a bit more to
our liking. That is the dynamic of consumer
choice. And the longer we get in the tooth, the
more ‘cultural capital’ (a term used by the soci-
ologist Pierre Bourdieu) we amass to be able to
make such choices based on a whole set of com-
plex equations. For instance, the fact we buy the
dress in a sale for half price might make up for
the fact it isn’t quite the style or colour we had
in mind. So we’ll accept the cultural ‘picture’ of
a canny shopper rather than that of the fashion
icon we were hoping for. Or maybe, if we are
lucky, we can see a hybrid image of ourselves as
both of these cultural typologies.
Figure 1 The cultural context of children
Merchandising
Magazines
Toys
TV Fashion
Child
Movies www
Technology Music
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Semiotics

Semiotic Action Plan 1

Semiotics can help you crack the codes of those brands that strike a powerful chord with kids and young people. Analysing
brand communications can show you the cultural assumptions and taken-for-granted beliefs that lie behind the use of cer-
tain signs and symbols, particularly those that recur again and again.
You can, of course, use a semiotician to do this, but even a lay analysis amongst the brand team will show you patterns
that reveal the presence of codes. Look at the largest body of material you can gather together (ads, print, websites, retail
outlets), note the patterns and ask yourself, ‘Why? What is being encoded here? What are the meanings it is assumed the
young consumer will take out?’.
Once you can answer that question you will have gone a long way towards cracking the code.
The key thing to remember here is nothing semiotic happens serendipitously. All creators (and those whose job it is to
approve the creation) make choices (consciously or unconsciously) according to the image they are trying to construct. If
you look at communications with that in mind you’ll see with a semiotic eye.
It is salutary here to invoke another comment from the Byfield article quoted in this article, ‘Those who hold up a mir-
ror through the use of “trendy young things” in advertising are seen as patronising and meet with disapproval’.
The semiotic mirror is much deeper and more subtle than that. What you need to look for are signs and symbols that
encode kids’ deep-seated assumptions and beliefs, not their external trappings. As Sheila Byfield says,‘Companies which have
truly made the effort to understand what it is like to be young nowadays are highly regarded’.

So far as children and young people are con-
cerned, they do not yet have the depth and range
of agency to be able to see so many ‘pictures’
and make these choices. It is a much more
simple unconscious decision – accept or refuse.
And the mechanics of that decision comes from
the very culture they are absorbing.
It is, in effect, the constructed images of self
within their own culture that determines how
kids ‘see’ themselves and how they will want to
be seen by others. They look, as it were, into a
cultural mirror to find out who they are. From
this, several things flow that are key to the semi-
otics of youth marketing.
PART 1
Developing a ‘brand mirror’ for today’s kids
The images of self that kids see when they look in
the cultural mirror are encoded in a myriad of
different ‘languages’
Words, pictures, fashion, colour, slang, music …
all the signs and symbols of cultural artifacts
contain coded messages about the assumed
beliefs and attitudes of the receiver. People like
us think like this, see the world in this kind of
way, share these values, laugh at these kind of
jokes. This is as true of brands as of any other
medium.
Let us take the example of Nike. Nike adver-
tising encoded messages of empowerment
through sport, often using black sportsmen and
sportswomen. It is a cultural stereotype taken for
granted, based on some truth, that black sport-
ing achievements represent a triumph over
economic and social disadvantage.
Kids are also powerless in society. The very
concept of ‘pester power’ (or the ‘nag factor’)
indicates how they need to manipulate the situ-
ation to achieve their ends. The Nike advertising
therefore struck an empathetic chord, construct-
ing an image of the seizure of power from the
adult world. In many ways this proved to be a

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Semiotic Action Plan 2
If you are trying to enlarge the brand franchise to go
older or younger, a trawl of the cultural context of the
wider market will show the different coding systems at
work across the age cohorts. Very often slightly older
kids will reject a brand because they think it ‘babyish’.
Nine times out of ten this is due to a communications
failure to pick up on changes in the cultural context.
Primary colours, organised and regulated patterns,
soft words with gentle y-endings (happy, pretty, jammy,
jolly, etc.) all encode nursery, four-year-old products.
Seven-year-olds are into the strong colours, and
rebellious chaotic designs that signify their growing
independence.
self-fulfiling prophecy, as any mother (or quali-
tative researcher amongst mums) will confirm.
The demand for expensive trainers in a sector
vanguarded by Nike (unrefusable in the light of
kids’ need for peer approval) is certainly a form
of seized power.
‘If everyone else in our group wears Nike and
Reebok, I won’t wear other brands. They will
make fun of me like hell!’ (17-year-old girl,
Hong Kong)
Sheila Byfield, Mindshare, quoted in the
International Journal of Advertising and
Marketing to Children, Volume 3, Issue 4
Culture feeds back into itself, particularly in the
intense cultural universe kids inhabit
Staying with the example of Nike: along with
other factors such as rap, Nike advertising
contributed to the rise in awareness of and
desire to be part of black culture. In the UK, and
possibly in other predominantly Caucasian soci-
eties, this has changed the speech patterns of a
Semiotics
generation and the knock-on effect will be far
greater
than that. The urban culture may well have
changed for ever (see Semiotic Action Plan 1).
The rate of change in the culture they identify with
(magazines, toys, fashion, music, etc) reflects the
pace of development among children’s age cohorts
Cultural contexts change every few weeks with
very young children, slowing to periods of
months as they get to school age and gradually
to a year or more as they reach adulthood (as an
aside, it’s only when we get to 30-plus that we
can start to think in decadal cohorts) (see
Semiotic Action Plan 2).
Social changes are always manifested through
culture
If the codes are changing, it is a sure sign that
society has moved into a different gear or is ven-
turing into new territory of beliefs and value
systems. Young people arguably have antennae
permanently attuned to such changes. It behoves
brands to keep up, or, better still, stay ahead of
the changes (see Semiotic Action Plan 3
overleaf).
In summary then, a Semiotic Action Plan for
developing powerful kids’ brands would include
the following:
• Analysing the largest body of material you
can find to look for patterns.
• Gather together brand communications and
those of the competition.
• Once you’ve seen the patterns, ask yourself –
why?
• Why did the people who created these pat-
terns think they encoded an image of self that
the young market wanted to ‘see’?
• Then you can check out these assumptions in
consumer research.
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Semiotics
Semiotic Action Plan 3
Continuous monitoring of the cultural world of the
youth market can pinpoint changes as they happen.The
arrival of new, emergent codes indicate a different way
of thinking about product, brand or a whole category.
This is important for two reasons.
On the one hand, existing brand communications can
be analysed to see if they still fit with the cultural shifts,
and, if not, how they need to be tuned. And, on the other,
the new codes can prompt incisive and relevant ques-
tioning for conventional consumer research projects.
Importantly, cultural developments amongst kids can
happen at both the same, and different, speeds across
the global marketplace. Anything to do with children’s
media – music, comedy, ads, fashion, etc – will tend to
follow a similar pattern everywhere. There are notable
exceptions, such as the Japanese cult of Kawaii (cute-
ness) which gives rise to the unique gingham, pig-tailed,
white socked ‘Heidi’ look favoured by young Japanese
women, but, by and large, the codes are the same.When
it comes to patterns of behaviour, however, local social
conditions play a much more deterministic cultural role.
For example, Sheila Byfield’s finding that, in Mexico, fears
for personal safety restrict teenagers from practising the
global norm of hanging around outside with mates in
coffee bars, tea houses, clubs, concerts – or just street
corners – illustrates this perfectly.
Semiotic analysis will show you where the trends are
following a similar path, indicating opportunities for
global brand communications – and where anomalies of
behaviour demand a much more local approach.
• Look at the cultural context (magazines,
toys/games, films, TV programmes, other
brands) of the age groups above and below
your market as well as the core grouping.
• Check that your brand communications are
not positioning the brand culturally too
young. A little older usually works.
12 Advertising & Marketing to Children January–March 2003
• Continuously monitor cultural development
to check for emergent codes.
PART 2
How semiotics helped create Peperami’s
cultural icon
In 1994, Peperami won a gold medal at the IPA
Advertising Effectiveness Awards. In his sub-
mission, the planner, Justin Kent, wrote that, as
part of its research programme, the agency had
commissioned a semiotic analysis which, as he
said, ‘put the brand on the couch’. This psycho-
brand-analysis, he reported, had discovered that
Peperami had a ‘truly schizophrenic personality
… in a world of its own, with its own rules and
its own agenda’. Almost with ‘extra-terrestrial
origins’.
The following case history shows the semiotic
analysis and qualitative programme that
Semiotic Solutions followed to understand the
rules of the Peperami brand and how the find-
ings contributed to the creation of the ‘bit of an
animal,’ known and loved by a decade of young
consumers [Semiotic Solutions carried out the
semiotic research programme in conjunction
with the invaluable contribution made by Gill
Ereaut].
Semiotic analysis – the importance of
context
All brands are only ever understood in context:
the brand communications themselves, the
competition, the peripheral contexts that help
to make up the meanings (for instance, the
meanings of fragrances are influenced by
fashion and beauty, etc.) and the over-
arching context of the product role in popular
culture.
For Peperami, therefore, our analysis spanned
all of these contexts (see Figure 2).
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Semiotics

Figure 2 The brand-context of Peperami Figure 4 Two food paradigms

Ads Packs Kid’s media Proper food Improper food

Serious Playful
Meat Sausages
Grammar Slang
Deli chilled Order Disordered
Lager Making things Deconstructive
cabinet
Peperami Hierarchical Democratic
Ready-made Soft drinks Regular Carnival
foods Ritualised Spontaneous
Grown-up Child-like
Confectionery Snacks
Encoded by masculine Encoded by feminine
semiotics of power semiotics of sensuality,
pleasure and playfulness
An important semiotic point: confectionery
was included not simply because it was seen as a
competitive product but also because even a ‘Meatness’ (see Figure 3) contains all the
cursory semiotic ‘look’ at the brand showed that deep-seated sexual and social connotations
the green flow-wrap pack owed far more to of meat. Associations with male power, auth-
sweet snack codes than meat snacks. By the ority and the masculine semiotics of serious
same token, lager became a context partially food.
because there was a plan to move into pub sales, ‘Snackness’, on the other hand, had culturally
but perhaps even more because lager codes were been associated much more with what one
clearly a huge influence on young men’s atti- might call ‘improper food’: grazing, little bits of
tudes and cultural space. what you fancy; the whole plethora of connota-
From the analysis we discovered that tions which now define a substantial part of our
Peperami was semiotically made up of two general eating habits. Peperami, arguably, was
meaning systems – ‘meatness’ and ‘snackness’. one of the brands that helped to effect that
change. However back in the early 90s, proper
and improper foods were polar opposites of
each other (see Figure 4).
Figure 3 Psycho-social connotations of ‘meatness’ Peperami, of course, had a foot in both these
‘Meatness’ camps. If we could see how it managed to rec-
Sexual potency Social rule oncile the contradictions of ‘meatness’ and
‘snackness’, proper and improper food, we
Symbolic hunter Roast (red) meat values
(nearer the fire higher
would have the real semiotic core of the brand.
Superior animal the value) Luckily, semiotics gives us a formula for
Sexual prowess Meat-centred meals doing just that.The ‘myth quadrant’, adapted by
(plate shape) Semiotic Solutions from the work of the
Masculinity Symbolises social order structural anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss,
(mealtimes, feasts, etc.)
Blood
authority
[Structural Anthropology 11, 1977], shows us
Red/raw meat Roast beef of England
how contradictions can be reconciled to pro-
duce a powerful myth for the brand.

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Semiotics
Figure 5 The Peperami myth?
Grown up
Current
semiotics
Meat snacks
Proper food
food
Snacks
Improper
X
food
Norm
Childlike
The Peperami myth we came up with is
reproduced in Figure 5.
Using the paradigms of proper and improper
food, we combined the horizontal axis of snacks
and meat with the vertical axis of grown-up and
child-like. In the top right and bottom left
quadrants we could see the cultural norms,
remembering from our analysis that meat was
grown up and serious and snacks were playful
and childlike.
In the top left quadrant we found the brand’s
conventional product position of a ‘meat snack’.
Fine, but although this was perfectly rational it
did not move the brand on, and it certainly did
not provide a basis for creating exciting and
code-breaking, anarchical advertising.
The real clue to this lies in the bottom right
hand corner where we find ‘childlike meat’. To
understand how this really works we need to
return to the meanings of ‘meatness’, particu-
larly those of sexual potency (see Figure 6).
Normally of course these elements are associ-
ated with men. However if you think of them in
the context of children, the picture you get is of
the teen and pre-teen boy, just on the edge of
puberty – all noise and physicality, filled with
14 Advertising & Marketing to Children January–March 2003
Figure 6 The meanings of ‘meatness’
Sexual potency
Norm
Symbolic hunter
Superior animal
Sexual prowess
Masculinity
Meat
Blood
Red/raw meat
Opportunity
virtual testosterone. The nascent man in the
naughty boy.
Culturally this image had also begun to
appear in all sorts of quarters: the comic vio-
lence of early 90s movies, the onset of the lager
lout; in effect, the characteristics of this ‘child-
like meat’ were an emergent cultural code.
And we summarised the semiotic character of
the brand at the end of the analysis thus, in
Figure 7.
It must be remembered that, at this point, we
had not talked to any consumers, simply per-
formed a semiotic analysis on advertising,
packaging and cultural meanings. However, to
take these findings on we did, in fact, go to a fur-
ther qualitative stage.
The findings of the consumer research
absolutely ratified the semiotic analysis and
added some very important learning.
Figure 7 The conclusions of semiotic analysis
Peperami –The Fantasy Superhero
The nascent man in the naughty boy
Unreal violence
Comic male power
Schwarzenegger
Donatello
Michaelangelo
Peperami
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• In discussion people (children and adults,
male and female) all entered the brand
through the green snack-pack rather than the
product. Semiotically that showed us that
the snackness was more important than the
meatness.
• Everybody (even quite small children)
claimed to really like the product for its spici-
ness.
• Ethnographically we observed that people ate
the Peperami product in quite a violent way,
tearing at it, biting aggressively.
And so, in our final presentation of this brand
psychoanalysis, we were able to confirm the
semiotic finding that Peperami had ‘shrunk the
male power symbolism of meat to fit the snack-
pack’. (The innuendo of the thin phallic symbol,
a ‘little willy’ wrapped in its plastic ‘condom’,
was lost on no-one in the groups.) Beyond that,
we could add the all-important consumer
understanding that the lost power symbolism
had been replaced in people’s minds by its hot,
spicy taste and aggressive bite. All the ingredi-
ents for ‘a bit of an animal’.
Peperami: ‘a bit of an animal’
Semiotics
Semiotics and qualitative research –
a powerful programme for brand
development
As the Peperami case history above dem-
onstrates, semiotics can reveal the symbolic and
cultural rules that the brand is playing by. It can
track how the culture is changing and how new
codes are emerging that can help to put the brand
at the forefront of the fast-moving youth market.
The Peperami story also shows how an inter-
active programme of semiotic analysis and
qualitative research can give you an important
two-way perspective on the brand.
From the outside in – semiotic analysis of
advertising, packaging, cultural contexts, etc.
And from the inside out – qualitative research
amongst consumers.
In practical terms, it has always been our
experience that the best way of working is to
carry out the semiotic analysis first. In this way
you can go to the consumer forearmed with
hypotheses about the symbolic and cultural
rules the brand is playing by.You will know how
the cultural contexts are changing and whether
there are new emergent codes that are changing
the rules and providing new contexts that could
be developed into new directions for the brand.
And you will have some clear idea about the
connection between the culture of the brand and
the culture of its market. It is then a question of
testing, refining and developing these hypothe-
ses in highly focused consumer research,
because effectively the semiotics analysis will
have done most of the diagnostic work.
In essence, the semiotic analysis will write you
a cultural discussion guide, a map to lead you to
the fundamental consumer relationship with the
brand and its ability to create emotional rela-
tionships and meet the needstates of the young
consumer.
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The Peperami research showed precisely how
this interactive relationship worked. As Justin
Kent wrote in his winning submission to the
APG awards for Creative Planning of
Outstanding Advertising, a second award for
this powerful campaign (1994):
‘It appeared that Peperami had this eerie abil-
ity to bring out the child in people of all ages
– their regressive streak – but in a humorous
and harmless way. Children and young adults
alike would refer to the brand as being bizarre,
mischievous, anarchic, impulsive, rebellious
and manic … It was also clear, thanks to the
semiotic work we did earlier, this bizarre, but
incredibly intimate relationship had evolved
from the product itself and its schizophrenic
(cultural) identity crisis rather than from
some weird youth phenomenon that had
nothing to do with the product.’
And, as a semiotic footnote to this highly suc-
cessful saga, Peperami’s bit of an animal also
changed the culture that created it. After the
anarchic sausage (in the same genre as Tango’s
frenzied orange hit) UK kids’ advertising would
never be the same again.

Virginia Valentine ginny@semioticsolutions.com

Virginia Valentine is the founding partner of Semiotic Solutions, the first UK agency dedicated to applying the
semiotic approach to solving marketing problems. Virginia is a fellow of the Market Research Society, lecturer,
broadcaster and regular speaker on the international conference platform. She has won many industry awards
and her most recent paper, ‘Repositioning Research’, was a double winner at the Market Research Society
Conference 2002.

16 Advertising & Marketing to Children January–March 2003