Does taking semiotics into account in brand symbolic communication reduce the gap between the sender’s intention and the receiver’s perception?

Abstract

This paper aims to find out how semiotics can be used to reduce the gap between a brand’s communication intention and its perception by consumers. To achieve this, an exploratory qualitative study was carried out on two commodity samples, five companies for the first sample and ten customers of each of these companies for the second sample. Data, collected throught semi-structured interviews, was analysed using thematic contentanalysis. The results show that, in some cases, there are gaps between the brand’s communication intention and the customer’s perception, and that the latter varies among customers
and brands. These results underline the need for companies to work closely with customers and immerse themselves in their culture when designing the brand.