Semiotics for sale

Abstract

In the discipline of retailing there is a lot of research coming from marketing and consumer behaviour. More relating to retail design, topics as store identity, store personality, image, brand personality, etc. are widely studied. In such studies, the link between the identity of a brand, or retail brand, with store personality has been established. Though designers benefit from this valuable input, research as such does not offer insight or skills in how to implement or translate such knowledge into a store design. Therefore, we asked ourselves if we could design a framework based on a well discussed - in linguistics - topic: the study of signs (semiotics). Our research question is ‘how can semiotics offer an added value to store design?’. We believe that, in an increasingly competitive market, one way to stand out in the crowd is to use signs in the design of the store to communicate with the consumer on a different level. We studied three ‘successful’ stores - stores that attract a lot of visitors and have a clear brand image -, ranging from a subtle use of signs to an obvious way of using signs: Apple, All Saints, and Shoe Class. We measured their store personality and analysed the stores semitonically with the theory of Peirce and Barthes. We have found that the measured store personality of each of the three stores, can be explained via semiotics.