Playing with words
Does semantics play a role in strengthening the bond between a brand and its connsumers?
Sorab Mistry
Area Director, South East Asia - McCann Erickson

ISemantics becomes particularly useful when one is dealing with the expressive language that is employed by brands to talk to their consumers. The meaning that consumers derive from messages depends so heavily on their life contexts that there is inevitably a gap between the intended message and the delivered meaning. And as brands travel across contexts, they need to employ different languages to communicate with their consumers and there also tends to be a gap in translating the exact intended message and meaning.
It's interesting that we tend to think of words and their meanings as immutable and fixed. This belief essentially comes from our mental model that says that words have a one-to-one correspondence to things in the real world. But if this was true, why would different people come to different conclusions on reading the same text, or why would we find it so difficult to translate messages from one language to another. The south market invariably comes to mind in this context and while we might tend to start by seeing it as a geographically dispersed region, the real issue usually emerges as a socio-cultural-linguistic one.
The big question that confronts us then is whether reality is something out there, for which we use language to communicate or does language actually shape our very definition and grasp of reality? Eskimos have 23 different words for snow - so can they actually see 23 different kinds of snow?
Let me illustrate this with an example that's captured the imagination of everyone - the India shining campaign. For starters, Bharat Uday - the Hindi line and India shining - the English line, don't literally mean the same thing. If reality was really out there and not in the language then it should have been possible to describe it in precisely the same way, but we struggle for linguistic equivalence.
It's also interesting to note that there are subtle shifts in meaning. Bharat for instance is the mythical notion of India, once great and now believed to be in decline. Uday points to its grand revival, its awakening, its rising to recapture its lost gory. The emphasis is implicitly placed on our shared history and cultural heritage, and Bharat Uday conflates historicity and Hindutva with identity and progress.
India on the other hand is the concept of a nation state - modern and progressive, part of today's global discourse and shining is the confirmation that its looking good in other peoples mirrors, a confirmation more important to the educated, aware, mobile modern Indian. Shining is here a sign for success, especially for material success. Nothing shines like new money. It in fact builds in the anticipated consumer reaction and plays it back to the consumer.
Needless to say India shining is more aligned with the dominant modes and codes of India and, for once, language has actually been a great ally for it has helped customise the appeal to actually offer two different, and in many ways contradictory, appeals under the guise of one campaign targeted at different constituencies with different preoccupations.
The intended and delivered meanings can actually be quite different and semantics in this sense can actually be defined as the science of exercising control over the play between words and their meanings.
What this really points to, from a semantic perspective, is that the power in words is a culturally produced effect and not something in the meaning of the word itself. It's almost as if there are two kinds of words, "thin" words with only a literal or dictionary meaning and "thick" words where the literal meaning has got superscribed by cultural investments. Populating the discourse of the brand with "thick" words helps not only the brand speak a more evocative and expressive language, but also offers the brand an opportunity to expand the meanings, associations and representations that surround it.
Let's, for example, look at the health market. The dominant place that health occupies in our collective consciousness has ensured that the propositions of innumerable categories - from consumer durables to chairs to food products to mattresses - have been expressed in health terms and the landscape is populated with images like "100% germ free" and "with extra vitamins" etc. These "words," which were essentially signs, have lost their pull/power as consumers have got increasingly immune to their incessant and indiscriminate use. The whole category today is searching for new discriminators.
For example the "Andar se strong" tag line of Dabur Chyawanprash, which is an Ayurvedic health tonic, appears to offer no more immunity than the LG refrigerators claim "Mujhe Kutch nahi ho sakta" and in the bargain all such claims get discounted.
What is the way out of this linguistic jam, how does one express a brand's benefit in a credible, distinctive and expressive way? Will the natural trajectory of all claims and benefits be to follow the mimetic rivalry one sees in technology products, where the claims become bigger and bigger and simultaneously less and less credible, the distance between claimed benefit or advantage and evoked experience strained and the consumer connect largely tenuous?
This is where semantics steps in and helps each brand and category to unlock its natural language. Natural language is more myth than science - it carries the code required to penetrate the cognitive defences of its receivers unlike scientific language, which is essentially a carefully constructed argument (the proverbial product window is its most compelling evidence).
A category like Chyawanprash for instance needs to understand that in employing the category language (the reductionist language of Allopathy) it loses any chance of expressing its own benefit distinctively (holistic health benefit of Ayurveda).
The Dabur Chyawanprash campaign should be viewed as an attempt to unlock the natural language (culturally specific) of this category, thereby making it possible to speak about holistic health by pointing to all its orders, be it individual, social or cosmic, which inform the notions of health in our culture as opposed to the cause-effect and mind-body duality that constitutes modern western notion of health. The "Amitabh Bachchan Vir Ras" ad for instance includes notions of immunity and strength, courage and endurance, good sanskar and self-belief as vital signifiers of health, a mythical, archetypal notion of health that rishis and yogis were believed to possess. The brand thus speaks a "thick" natural language, rich with meanings, producing a wide bandwidth of associations, resonating with deeply held cultural beliefs, helping it rise and soar above the 'thin" narrow claims that crowd this category and importantly this being the natural language of the brand, makes it impossible for others to credibly imitate.
Semantics also makes us aware of the dynamic nature of our environment or context by pointing to the fact that language is never static but continually in flux. New events and ideas lead to new words being added - like, the web has sprouted its own vocabulary - and passage of time and changes leads to old words loosing their hold/power, as so many of yesterday's adjectives have. For instance, yesterday's flowery style of writing today seems full of redundancies and a luxury we can no longer afford. It's possible to characterise a brand issue in pretty much the same way by saying that the words (and the world these words evoke) the brand owns have lost their meaning or power, or have changed their meaning, or are no longer in use and so on and so forth.
Semantic could thus be characterized as a "sense" that alerts us to the live nature of language and the fluidity of its meanings, to the fact that there are always potential meanings available which are currently not being used up. This sense is especially useful when we want to alter any part of the brand-consumer relationship, increase access or relevance, make it more contemporary, youthful or desirable, strengthen the fit with life, or get rid of any gross negatives.
The absence of a "semantic sensibility" for instance shows itself in the whole arena of sales and marketing promotions which increasingly suffers from the absence of a "sticky" vocabulary as most of its call signs like Free, Extra, Off and Offer are loosing their power to seduce consumers. Likewise technology products' claims are finding it more and more difficult to penetrate as their proliferating sameness has reduced both their believability and ability to differentiate. As a result, while the absolute value being offered by brands per rupee is continuously on the rise, their ability to stick this value onto consumers is going down.
Some of the more powerful pieces of communication on air today, like Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola and Hutch, must be seen as semantic productions of difference through the deployment of a new vocabulary, which consumers are responsive towards.