Semiotics provides an organized approach to studying how consumers appropriate and ascribe meaning to products, services, people, places, brands, etc. Semiotics is basically the study of signs and symbols and their relevance to various objects. One way to delineate between objects, signs, and symbols is as follows:

• Objects are essentially any person, place, thing, or idea towards which an individual can take actions. For instance, a consumer may aim to be more "green". Signs and symbols enrich objects.
• Signs are the components of an object necessary to communicate some particular meaning. For instance, unadorned cardboard packaging may suggest "being green" or "sustainability"; it might also suggest "generic" or "counter-cultural".
• Symbols also convey meaning about an object but require that individual make some inference in order to understand the intended meaning. The recycling logo communicates that a product contains recycled content and/or is recyclable if a person knows and recognizes the symbol. Without an appreciation of the symbol, it is just noise.

Understanding and being able to combine the signs and symbols relevant to some meaning desired by the designer (e.g. "sustainable") would allow him/her to communicate this meaning through a value offering. Hoshino (1987) proposes that all value offerings have some amount of semiotic structure. That is, a value offering is composed of a "concrete form", "denotative meaning", and "connotative meaning".

• Concrete form refers to "material [composition], technology, design, color, brand names, and so on". It is the object (Hoshino 1987, pp.45).
• Denotative meaning is a basic or functional meaning aimed at what a product does and what consumer need(s) it addresses.
• Connotative meaning is "deep or hidden meaning" and addresses consumers’ underlying or psychological goals and desires.

Signs and symbols convey meaning. These layers of meaning build upon one another in a structure that moves from concrete form to denotative meaning and finally to connotative meaning. The sum of these layers is how a value offering is culturally construed. For instance, the concrete form of a bottle of household cleaner may be composed of a plastic bottle, an informative label, various chemicals, some plant-based ingredients, and brand logos of Green Works and Clorox. The denotative meaning of the bottle of cleaner is that it is a general purpose cleaning agent that is made of more sustainable and less toxic materials. The deep meaning of the bottle is that it provides a means to have a strong, eco-friendly cleaner that is readily discernable as such to the consumer and others who might see the bottle.

The Clorox brand suggests an effective and quality cleaning product while much of the rest of the product suggests eco-friendliness or sustainability. From the top-down, Clorox Green Works may be an embodied example of a mainstream product that finally “gets” sustainability. Designers for the brand strike a balance between presenting subtle symbolic cues in the product to suggest sustainability (e.g. soft tones and images of plant life) and more direct signs (e.g. presence of a Sierra Club logo and easily readable notations of “PETE” and “99.20% natural”). The result is a line of products that seems to communicate its intended meaning of “greener cleaners” quite well, evidenced by its reported success in its first six months on store shelves (Neff 2008).

Green Works appears to be a reasonably good example of a product that conveys its intended meaning. Many products do not succeed in this endeavor. While not directly related to the context of “green” and “sustainability”, the concrete form of a bag of low-fat potato chips may be composed of deep-fried potato slices, a particularly sized foil bag, and brands of Lays, WOW, and Olean. The denotative meaning of the bag of low-fat chips is that it provides a tasty snack composed of healthier ingredients with fewer calories. The deep meaning of the bag is that it provides a means to have one's cake and eat it too, possibly at the expense of digestive problems.

Where Green Works may be heading for success, WOW chips provide an example of how the intended meaning of a product or value offering may not always be realized. A semiotic conceptualization of how meaning is structured is one approach that may be able to increase the probability that the intended meaning is the received meaning. A semiotics-based process for product design progresses from "interpretation" to "production" as follows:

1. Observation of signs - look for potential sources of meaning in relevant products, consumption communities, media, etc.
2. Interpretation of meanings - begin forming and testing "hypotheses" about the meaning conveyed by particular signs.
3. Collection of units of meaning - as signs become better understood, catalog them in a consistent manner.
4. Production of meaning - begin planning and combining various stored signs with the goal of conveying an intended meaning.
5. Production of sign - Render the stored signs into a customer-ready value offering. This new combination of signs can become a sign itself.

Following this process, it at least becomes feasible to understand and positively use the meaning that consumers ascribe to value offerings. The delineation between signs and symbols provides a basis to observe and categorize existing sources of meaning in the marketplace. Semiotic structure encourages the observer/interpreter to go higher and/or lower in terms of meaning complexity. Doing so may spur the discovery of additional or other meanings embedded in a particular value offering. As these meanings and relevant signs/symbols become better understood, it becomes possible to make some real progress in designing a product that conveys an intended meaning. A firm armed with an understanding of existing signs/symbols and appreciation for observation likely can amass a vocabulary of design cues to convey meaning in an effective, integrated, and subtle manner.

References

Hewitt, John P. (2003), "Symbols, Objects, and Meanings", in Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism, eds. Larry T. Reynolds and Nancy J. Herman-Kinney, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 307-325.

Hoshino, Katsumi (1987), "Semiotic Marketing and Product Conceptualization", in Marketing and Semiotics: New Directions in the Study of Signs for Sale, ed. Jean Umiker-Sebeock, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 41-55.

Fournier, Susan (1991), "A Meaning-Based Framework for the Study of Consumer- Object Relations", Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 18, 736- 742.

Mick, David Glen (1986), "Consumer Research and Semiotics: Exploring the Morphology of Signs, Symbols, and Significance", Journal of Consumer Research, 13, September, 196 - 213.

Neff, Jack (2008), “Green Works”, Advertising Age, November 17, 2008, S-2.