The 'Notness' principle - a semiotic model of meanings

‘We all lose our shape in the end. But square-shaped or pear-shaped, these rocks won’t lose their shape. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend’

(because a man, of course, is likely to turn out to be her worst friend!)

Oppositions & paradigms, contradictions & myths

Oppositions & Paradigms

Semiotics shows how we understand what is going on by splitting the world about us into pairs of binary oppositions.

To recap:

LIGHT is NOT DARK

LAND is NOT SEA

NATIVE is NOT FOREIGN...etc

Then the brand examples above demonstrated how when you start to look at the oppositions you find that they divide into paradigms of associations.

For detergents, the basic oppositions were clean/dirty, culturally referencing images of godliness/evil but, then, as the market progressed, another opposition was added—science/nature

And so we arrive at this long-standing model of detergent brand meanings

CLEANLINESS          vs         DIRT

GODLINESS                vs        EVIL

SCIENCE                vs        NATURE

And certainly, many detergent ads of the 70s & 80s presented the science of research and development as the god of cleanliness, triumphing over the evils of nature with its nasty habit of making itself dirty.

Setting down these paradigms of oppositions is the first step in implementing ‘notness’ in the development of brand strategies.

The following example is taken from Monty Alexander's paper The Myth At The Heart Of The Brand

"As an example, let us use scotch whisky. For the purposes of this paper, we will consider a (fictional) mid-market, old-established, declining whisky brand, called Black Sporran.

Let us further suppose that its owners are searching for an exciting new, younger positioning in the marketplace.

So we can list each of the properties and perceptions of Black Sporran, and at the same time we can also list its opposite to form a notness paradigm

        smooth                                        rough                        

        dark                                                light                                

        heavy                                        light                                

        formal                                        informal                        

        drunk neat                                        drunk diluted                

        serious                                        fun                                

        ‘sacred’                                        ‘profane’                        

        respectful                                        flippant                        

        older men                                        younger men/women        

        sincere                                        ironic                        

        strong                                        mild                                

        deserved                                        undeserved                        

        reward                                        stimulus                        

        private                                        social                                

        ‘traditional’ label                                ‘modern’ label                

        men’s club                                        cafe bar                        

        heritage                                        instant                        

        authentic                                        phoney                        

        pedigreed                                        illegitimate                        

        hierarchic                                        egalitarian                        

        upper class                                        lower class                        

        cliché Scotland                                real Scotland                

        national                                        international                

It is interesting in this particular listing—and in the light of the whisky company’s declared objective of going for a younger market sector—to see just how many opposites of the traditional world of scotch whisky-drinking are also discriminators of today’s younger end of the drinks market.

This phenomenon seems to be true of a number of market sectors. ‘Forward progress’ in a market often means moving towards its notness paradigm.

But surely, a light, informal, fun, modern label, illegitimate whisky is a contradiction in terms?

Quite so. And this is where notness demonstrates the most awesome part of its power—developing strategies through creating brand myths.

Contradictions & Myths

In order to fully understand how myths work, we need to step back into theory for just a moment.

Human beings use binary oppositions to try and understand the world around us. The story of creation demonstrates this perfectly. In the book of Genesis, God separates heaven from earth, the light from the dark. The earth is then divided into land and water, the water then divided into rain and sea. He goes on to create the opposites of animals and man and, finally, man and woman. In fact the universe is described as an almost infinite process of binary opposition. This provides the model for our way of thinking.

The problem is that the universe itself isn't quite so neatly defined. Nature (on which the whole of our understanding is based) is a continuum; a flux.

Let's take the example, liquid/solid. Yes, there are fully liquid and fully solid things—but there are also things which appear to be neither.

                        LIQUID        FOG                SOLID

Because it doesn't fit into neat boundaries, fog in culture is seen as mysterious or threatening. If we want to create an atmosphere of menace in an ad, we might very well set the scene in a foggy landscape.

                        LIQUID        HONEY        SOLID

Same thing, only this time because it tastes sweet, culture defines honey as mystic, therapeutic.

Both fog and honey are contradictions and we have developed a special mechanism for understanding—and resolving—them. We turn these contradictions into myths.

Think again of fog and honey.

Fog always wreathes the Transylvanian castle of Count Dracula (himself a mythic figure, hovering between the oppositions of life and death) . And honey is the food of the gods, reconciling the contradiction between the earthly form of gods and goddesses and the heavenly Olympian world they inhabit.

The great French anthropologist and founder of structural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss, developed the modern theory of myth.

 

In his words:

‘The purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction’

Put simply, his argument is that

(a) all cultures try to account for apparent contradictions in the

world around them by making myths

(b) in almost all languages— whether ‘primitive’ or

‘sophisticated’—myths follow similar structural lines in dramatising these contradictions into story form, in order to resolve them.

Successful brands resolve contradictions by creating myths

Translating this definition into modern marketing language means that a brand’s myth is the belief by consumers that the brand offers them a way of resolving a problem or situation that hitherto represented some kind of contradiction. Or, from the perspective of the marketer, that the brand holds the power to reconcile a cultural opposition.

For a simple example of this definition of brand myth, we might look again at Persil. Here, the brand reconciles the cultural opposition between

        the ‘efficiency’ and detachment of a factory-produced, high-tech

        scientific washing agent on the one hand, and

        the ‘caring'  of a nurturing mother-figure on the other

From this contradiction, we could define the Persil myth by an expression such as

        caring efficiency

which became embodied in the mythic figure of 'The Persil Mum'.

Our own practical experience, working in semiotic analysis, indicates that brand myth—the power to resolve contradictions in this way—is not just an attribute of one or two unusually outstanding, or apparently ‘magical’  brands.  Virtually every consistently successful brand today embodies its own particular myth.

The more contradiction the better

The power of the brand myth seems to stand in direct proportion to the dynamism of the contradiction it resolves: ie the stronger the oppositions, the stronger the myth—and, consequently, the stronger the brand positioning.

It thus follows that the weaker the opposition (which often erodes over time, as a result of socio-cultural change or the growth of new technologies) then the weaker the myth - and, consequently, the weaker the brand in the marketplace.

We find this to be borne out in practice. Companies with ‘ailing’, ‘declining’ or ‘dying’ brands are often companies (from a semiotic perspective) whose brand myths have fallen behind, or out of tune with, the dynamics of the contemporary culture within which they and their consumers live.

We have developed the Lévi-Strauss formula into a technique for identifying and evaluating brand myth; and for indicating the reasons, if and when it is losing power within its culture. We then use the same techniques to help put things right - either by revitalising an obsolescent myth, or formulating a completely new one.

The problem of myth identification can be more difficult than might appear from the over-simplified example of Persil. Well-established brands are complex animals and may sometimes incorporate more than one myth - or at least more than one way of expressing that myth.

Certainly there is a whole hierarchy of oppositions, with which to refine— and ultimately define—the expression of a brand’s ‘root-myth’. And it is the task of the analyst to work his/her way up that hierarchic pyramid, in order to find the opposition that expresses the myth most distinctively and evocatively.

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The myth quadrant

Figure 1 shows the basic diagrammatic structure for working on the analysis of myth.

Figure 1

Hierarchy of oppositions of myth

OPPOSITION 1

                           Cultural                            Cultural

                             norms                        contradictions

OPPOSITION 2---------------------------------------------------OPPOSITION 2

                           Cultural                          Cultural

                        contraditions                    norms

OPPOSITION 1

Two simple axes at right angles to each other: one vertical, one horizontal. The axes mark the boundaries of four corresponding corners, or quadrants:

        The vertical axis runs between one pair of opposites (opposition 1)

        the horizontal axis between another (opposition 2)

        Two facing corner quadrants represent cultural norms

        the other two represent cultural contradictions.

The myth stands or falls by the strength and dynamism of these various oppositions, and the subtleties of their interplay between the four ‘poles’ and the four quadrants of the diagram.

If the two pairs of opposites are well selected, then two of the quadrants diagonally facing each other will clearly represent accepted beliefs and attitudes (cultural norms). 

Conversely, the other two corners will represent cultural contradictions.

One or both of these will be the myth quadrant.

If no cultural norms emerge, then - consequently - no contradictions will appear. This means that the chosen pairs of opposites were not relevant enough, or appropriate enough, or powerful enough, or interactive enough to generate them.

Fairytale myths

Figure 2 shows a simple example of the diagram in action: in a myth of the fairytale.

Figure 2

Example of a myth of the fairytale

GOOD

                           Snow White                    Seven

                           Sleeping Beauty                 Dwarfs

                          Cinderealla

BEAUTIFUL----------------------------------------------------UGLY .........

                           Wicked                         Giants

                        Stepmother                          Ogres

                                                        Goblins

BAD

Good is the opposite of bad (opposition 1)

Beautiful is the opposite of ugly (opposition 2)

Most western popular culture, equates

        good with beautiful and

        bad with ugly

Therefore the

        good /beautiful and the

        bad /ugly 

are the quadrants of cultural norms

This is why, in our fairytales, the heroes and heroines are almost invariably

        good and beautiful

        (like Snow White, Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, etc)

and our villains are

        bad and ugly

        (like giants, ogres and goblins).

However (for all kinds of psycho-social and historical reasons) there have been times and situations when the popular imagination needed to invent the concept of beautiful badness or ugly goodness.

So the bad /beautiful and the

        good /ugly 

became these quadrants of cultural contradictions 

And their attributes became the two myths within the fairytale diagram.

Popular culture fulfilled these mythic slots by inventing characters to represent them, for example

        the wicked stepmother (bad but beautiful) 

        the seven dwarfs (good but ugly).

Powerful enough creations, both in image and positioning, to resolve their intrinsic contradictions. So powerful, in fact, that such mythic, ambivalent characters are usually the most memorable characters of the stories in which they occur

It is this power and memorability of myth-as-reconciled-contradiction that gives it its commercial importance and value. Translated into the world of marketing, the contradictory corners of the diagram (ie the potential myth quadrants) represent the communicational windows of opportunity.

Provided their contradictions can be creatively resolved, then at least one of those two quadrants is going to provide a strong brand and/or advertising positioning myth, or a viable myth on which to base a new product proposition.

Notness in Action

The paradigm shift in phone behaviour

Several years ago in the work we did for British Telecom, the extraordinarily successful ‘Good To Talk’ campaign was developed from a strategy built on a perfect example of ‘hidden’ oppositions.

BT’s business objective was to grow the personal call income. However, the company knew that they were almost at saturation on the number of calls a subscriber would make—there are, after all, only so many reasons for picking up the phone.

They therefore wanted to develop non-purposive talking, growing the income by extending the phone call through 'chatting'.

Semiotic Solutions carried out a cultural and semiotic analysis of chatting in British society and discovered dozens of different words for chat, among them

SMALL TALK

Applying the principle of notness, we realised that, if, culturally, we knew about ‘small talk’, we must know about

BIG TALK

Furthermore, small talk was defined as ‘idle’, not serious and all the words carried connotations of woman-talk. Not-ness could therefore explain the meanings and place of Big Talk through these oppositions.

SMALL TALK         BIG TALK

Feminine                Masculine

Idle                        Work

Trivial                Serious

Unofficial                Official

That was it. Big Talk was official, serious masculine forms of language (government, serious papers, documentary programmes etc.) and it was setting the agenda. Small Talk lived in its shadow. Chatting was unofficial feminine speak and, as such, it was marginalised.

If BT was to grow the personal call market through extended calls, Small Talk had to get out from under and become a valued activity.

But this could only happen if BT showed that society really valued women’s phone usage.

Effectively we needed a myth to reconcile the contradictions between women’s phone usage and ‘important’ communications.

So let’s look again at the two paradigms of oppositions revealed by the semiotic analysis

SMALL TALK         BIG TALK

Feminine                Masculine

Idle                        Work

Trivial                Important

Unofficial                Official

Turn these into a myth quadrant and see the cultural norms and contradictions.

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SMALL TALK

Womanspeak/Emotional

                Cultural Norm                        Cultural contradiction

   TRIVIAL--------------------------------------------------------------------IMPORTANT

                Cultural contradiction                Cultural Norm

BIG TALK

Manspeak/Rational

Focus Groups with consumers then added another dimension to the Big Talk/Small Talk story. We discovered that men hated using the domestic phone, but that they felt they owned it—whether or not they actually paid the bill. Women loved the phone, but were deprived of ownership culturally—and practically. Big, monolithic BT sent the phone bill to the ‘head’ of the household, usually a man—who then used the bill to berate his wife precisely for ‘chatting’.

Women. BT’s best customers were being made to feel that chatting on the phone was wrong—and BT was actually colluding with this.

However, the final piece in the jigsaw slotted into place when, under some close questioning, men admitted to really admiring the way women used the phone to create emotional ‘neighbourhoods’ and to keep families together.

Chat was an integral part of this, along with the wordless little sounds of ‘listening’: ‘phatic’ empathetic noises, rather than emphatic sentences or purposive words.

Small Talk could get out of Big Talk’s shadow if BT showed that society really valued these emotional caring dimensions of the women’s phone usage. So, if we now lay onto our structural myth diagram, the actuality of consumer response, we can see the myth of Important Small Talk

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SMALL TALK

Womanspeak/Emotional

                        1                                        2

                (Cultural Norm)                        Women's caring phone-chat

                Silly chit-chat                                It's good to talk

   TRIVIAL--------------------------------------------------------------------IMPORTANT

                        4                                        3

                Men's 'uncaring'                        (Cultural Norm)

                mode of communication                Official language

BIG TALK

Manspeak/Rational

The Good To Talk campaign empowered women to use the phone for longer chatting—and it gave men permission to communicate in a warmer, more caring way.  The advertising strategy was a brilliant interpretation of the myth by the agency, AMV.

The subsequent campaign featuring Bob Hoskins and focusing on the way women continually demonstrate that ‘it’s good to talk’ worked a cultural step-change in British phone usage

Most importantly of all it created a cultural space ready and waiting to be filled by the mobile phone

Mobile phones—Small Talk steps out of the shadow

Mobile phones have made Small Talk culturally respectable: one could really say that the power-base has been reversed and that chatting, phatic noises and informality is now the norm of phone-talk. Leaving Big Talk to Casualty’s A&E department.

It’s interesting to chart this in advertising terms. BBH’s ‘chatting’ to the dead and famous in “Who would you like to have a One-to-one with” was a marvellous example of levelling with small talk. Like Kate Moss and Elvis “We’d go down his Mum’s and have a cup of tea”

And you can’t get much more ‘phatic’ than “Whassup”.

But it goes even deeper than that. Statistics show that pinpointing the location of the speaker is the opening gambit of most mobile conversations. From the ubiquitous “Hello, I’m on the train” to the habit of young people everywhere to ask of each other “Where are you”. The psychological neighbourhood is network-wide.

And Small Talk has, in fact, now got its own language—text-messaging. Phatic, designed for chat and for informality and, above all, simply for keeping in touch (with or without purpose—who cares!) txt is the new lol ; ) IYKWIM.

People Like Us/People Like Them

—a word about notness in cross-cultural research

Consumers use the principle of notness to group themselves spontaneously into communities,

These groupings we describe as 'People Like Us', but really we are defining ourselves as 'NOT People Like Them.

Importantly the boundary between them and us is symbolically signposted. In other words we are much clearer about who it is we are not, what it is we don't approve of, the styles we don't like and the ethos we don't want to be part of than we are about what it is we do like.

If we apply this principle to research we can see that finding a common 'enemy' may produce a much more powerful global market driver than trying to find common ground.

In the detergent market the common enemy is dirt and disorder, although attitudes and beliefs about what constitutes cleanliness may differ widely.

Young people across the world are brought together in badging and styles that unites them in their differentiation from other groups.

The anthropologist Anthony Cohen describes the importance of researching the place of products or brands at the boundaries of culture, rather than in the middle

people become aware of their culture when they stand at its boundaries, when they encounter other cultures, or when they become aware of other ways of doing things.

Or, as a teenager in a focus group once said to me

"You recognise it by its not, not by its yes"

I couldn't have put it better myself.

References

Alexander Monty, The Myth at The Heart of The Brand, ESOMAR Seminar, The Big Brand Challenge, October 1996

Alexander Monty & Valentine Virginia, Cultural Class—Researching The Parts Social Class Cannot Reach, MRS Conference, 1989

Cohen Anthony P. The Symbolic Construction of Community, Horwood, Chicester 1985

Lévi-Strauss, Claude  (1977) Structural Anthropology, Peregrine

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