Big semiotics: Beyond signs and symbols

Rachel Lawes

This article is for marketers who use semiotics. It argues that semiotic analysis is not complete until signs and symbols are meaningfully connected to society, culture, and ideology.

What this article is about

This article is about semiotics—the study of meaningful signs. Top-down semiotics or big semiotics as I characterize it here is a stage or phase of semiotic analysis in which signs are interrogated in terms of their social and epistemological context. Meaningful semiotic signs are exchanged among consumers and brand owners as a form of social currency and so it is to be expected that they seem to reveal something about the society that uses particular coins. At the same time, those signs contribute to, helping to disrupt or maintain, certain versions of reality which are...

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