What is missing in marketing, its secret black hole, can be best understood as shown in the diagram opposite.

There are three positions on this triangle. In the bottom left hand corner we have our raw perceptions; these are how we experience the world. At the top of the triangle are the symbols that we use to understand and to navigate the world – these can be words, concepts, and, importantly for marketing purposes, brands. The latter should be treated as symbols because they stand, as shorthand, for the sets of values that we associate with them. In the bottom right hand corner, we have communication. This is either normal forms of communication – where we use spoken or written words to communicate with each other – or, in the marketing sphere, where we use words, images, symbols, and branding devices (such as logos) to convey meaning in a commercial context.

The central argument of this article is that the marketing profession focusses almost all of its efforts (and money) on movement ‘B’ (from symbols to communication) whilst entirely ignoring the importance of the other dimension: movement ‘A’ from our raw perceptions to symbols. It is of considerable interest why we do this. Some of the reasons are linked to marketing theory, but there are other, deeper seated reasons rooted in Western culture itself.

If we look at the marketing reasons first, our industry is dominated by the belief that brand owners, and their creative agencies, are the sources of meaning. In their model of meaning-making it is the brand owner who adds value to the brand and their creative agencies help them in this task. Consumers are often positioned, as a result of this, as passive ‘receivers’ of branding messages. They have no active role in the meaning-making process and are framed simply as potential ‘landing grounds’ for the creative activity of the brand. At one level, and quite paradoxically, it is accepted that the consumer can sometimes play an interruptive role in meaning-making, but this, significantly, is only acknowledged if they misinterpret an intended brand message. If a meaning is ‘correctly’ communicated to the consumer, then the brand owner is able to pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Mention of semiotics demands that we make a key distinction between the two kinds of semiotics that exist in academia. These are:

• The semiotics of Saussure

• The semiotics of Peirce

Saussurian semiotics has been, until recently, the most popular in academic circles and it is the one that has been promoted most strongly in commercial research. Saussure argued that signs should be seen as cultural artefacts. Different cultures give meaning to different objects (or events) in ways that are entirely arbitrary. It follows from this that the meaning of a sign is culturally dependent. So, a red light may mean ‘stop’ in one culture, but it may mean something entirely different in another. For Saussure, semiotics is a study of how signs operate within culture.

This approach has many merits, and, as we shall see, consumers do read the signs they encounter in their own culture. This has a considerable impact on how they make meaning. But there are also several drawbacks to Saussure’s approach, which have been highlighted in the literature. Saussure is unable to give any account of how signs are created in the first place. For him, they simply exist in our culture and Saussure provides no account of how they are created. Secondly, and following on from this, he cannot explain how signs change their meanings. It is obvious that signs do evolve their meanings and yet Saussure cannot explain how this happens because, for him, our signs are fixed by our culture. Thirdly, his account also excludes the role of the individual. This means that his form of semiotics cannot attempt to understand how individuals form meanings and this limits his form of semiotics in a commercial environment. Lastly, Saussure also assumes that each person is able to learn, quite magically, the cultural codes that surround them. He gives no account of how this might happen, and this is a glaring weakness of his approach. We seem to be able to learn the meaning of the signs within our culture and we must in some way do this ourselves. Has anyone ever explained our cultural codes to you?

The full extent of Peirce’s semiotic theory need not be discussed in any detail here. But we must identify how it differs from the conventional model of perception, dominant in marketing, that simply assumes that we see things in the world and interpret them. Peirce maintains that this model of perception is entirely flawed. Instead of assuming that we observe something which is known, and then interpret it, he argues that we should begin by acknowledging that we do not know what it is. This hardly ever happens in our day to day lives because we have already gone through the semiotic process of understanding what something is. But if we are going to understand the activity of sign formation, we should assume that we do not know the identity of things around us.

Critically, this means that when we observe something for the first time, we experience what Peirce calls a ‘vague’. We do not know exactly what something is, but the human mind makes a guess as to what kind of thing it is. This means that we observe something, not as an individual thing, but rather as the member of a putative class of things. In consumer world, for example, we might encounter a new bottle in the supermarket and guess that it is a kind of beer. Importantly, at this initial stage, our minds classify things on the basis of what they have encountered before – this is where our reading of culture signs plays a key part.

In Peircean language, what we do is to ‘posit’ the existence of a putative identity (which he calls an ‘icon’) when we encounter something for the first time. This identity is indeterminate, and we guess what it is on the basis of how it is similar to other things that we have encountered before. This ‘guess’ may prove to be correct, or it may turn out to be mistaken, but this identity is what we run with at this initial stage.

In the second stage of sign formation, we begin to learn how this putative identity interacts with the rest of the world. We learn, for example, where this beer is found, who drinks it, what it tastes like, and how expensive it is. Peirce calls all of these qualities ‘indices’ of the identity and this stage—where indices accrue to the identity— is called the indexical stage in sign formation.

How can we apply model of meaning-making to branding? When we encounter new products, or when we walk into a pub, shop, or café for the first time, Peirce argues that, without knowing it, we immediately classify these things as members of classes. We do this on the basis of our previous experience and our existing perceptual classes. In so doing, the identity that we create is always, in some way, a qualification of our existing knowledge.

It is of enormous significance, therefore, how we initially frame a putative identity. We are likely to work with it for some time as we qualify it and try to find out what sort of thing it is. This is precisely why first impressions are so important in human interactions.

In marketing, this means what is key to meaning generation is how the consumer initially frames a brand. What sort of thing do they think it is? This is, of course, critical if a brand owner is trying to position a new product as a ‘healthy’ fruit juice, a ‘premium’ lager, or a ‘youthful’ carbonate. Getting the consumer to frame it in the right way initially, with the right kind of icon, is a critical task. The next stage is one of providing a brand with a set of indexical associations that qualify it and make it unique. It is the task of advertising to provide a brand with these indexical associations, although, of course, how the brand is encountered by consumers in their day to day experience will also create additional indices. For example, who uses a brand, where it is sold etc will create indexical associations that may be beyond the control of the brand owner.

One of the great strengths of Peirce’s model is that it provides a completely new way of understanding consumer thinking. In conventional market research we make little attempt to understand how consumers form their concepts, or their meanings. We assume that these meanings are simply present in their minds and they have been determined by their interpretations of the world. But the trouble with the interpretation model is that it is a ‘black box’ – we cannot follow how consumers have reached these interpretations.

In contrast, Peirce provides us with a clear three stage process that enables us to identify both how consumers form their concepts and where they are on their journeys from perception to symbol formation. This means that it is possible to identify several aspects of the meaning making process: what identities have been formed by consumers; how do different consumers see the same brand in different ways, and which parts of a brand have been included (or not included) by them in its meaning. Moreover, it is also possible to identify whether sublation has taken place; is it a true identity or is it no more than a name with a set of associations?