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Persuasive signs: the semiotics of advertising. (Book Reviews).

Article Excerpt
Ron Beasley and Marcel Danesi

Berlin: Mouton de Gruyer, 2002 193pp, hard cover [euro]88

ISBN 3-11-017341-7

In chapter 7 of the fourth edition of the ESOMAR Handbook of Market and Opinion Research, Mary Goodyear discussed various qualitative research techniques, including semiotics, which is said to look beyond the consumer into the cultural context of buying behaviour (see review IJMR, 41, 2, 1999).

This research technique is also referred to by Wendy Gordon in her stimulating guide to qualitative research, Goodthinking, where semiotics is defined as the theory of signs in language used in research 'to identify and evaluate the true meaning behind consumers' linguistic responses and to decode their cultural frames of reference ... by providing a deeper understanding of consumers' motivations' (see review IJMR, 42, 2, 2000).

Semiotics received a brief mention in the voluminous Marketing research: state of the art perspectives (see review IJMR, 44, 1, 2002), where it is described as the 'study or science of signs, specifically related to human communications and understanding'. Such signs include gestures, music, language, food, clothing, possessions, advertisements and brand usage. Large samples of such stimuli may be content-analysed 'to...