Qualitative semiotics: Can we research consumer meaning-making?

Abstract

The notion of “meaning” is central to marketing because it is only through the making of meaning that “added value” can be created. The marketing profession has several models of how such meaning is created, but Peircean semiotics can shed further light on the activity of meaning-making itself and the stages that are involved in this process. This article explores the differences between Peircean and Saussurian semiotics and discusses how these two semiotic traditions construe meaning creation. In particular, it applies the Peircean semiotic model of meaning-making to the notion of concept formation, and the classificatory aspects of this process. This enables convergences to be identified between qualitative research methodologies and semiotics. This, in turn, opens up the possibility of a new kind of qualitative research that understands, and explores, how individual consumers form their concepts. It does this by identifying the semiotic structures that are involved in this process. It will be argued that the resulting framework of “Qualitative Semiotics” has the potential to take semiotics beyond the remit of cultural analysis and to refocus it on processes of individual consumer cognition.