Abstract:
The paper is an attempt to show how semiotic study can be used to
understand aspects of communication in food product advertising design. I
will bring up some of the most common concepts and ideas in semiotics and
see how they can be understood in such a context. I will also use some
theories to analyze some underlying values and concepts like the complex
interplay between sign systems, connotation and denotation, meaning and
form. To apply semiotics in food product adverts has provide me with a set of
invaluable tools for analyzing issues like identity, metaphors and
representations.
This approach studies how meanings are made in a set of two adverts
and is not only being concerned with communication but also with the
construction and maintenance of reality. By studying and applying semiotics
to advertising we can become more aware of reality as a construction of the
roles played by ourselves in representing or constructing it. Semiotics can
assist us to understand that information or meaning is not “contained” in the
world around us, books, products and items. Meaning is not “transmitted” to
us – we actively create and represent it according to a complex interplay of
codes of which we are normally not aware. Semiotics therefore studies not
only “signs” in every day speech such as symbols, paintings or pictures,
traffic signs or mathematic symbols, but everything which “stands for”
something else.
The two adverts to be analyzed do not physically represent the
products themselves; they provide an important iconic representation of both
the product advertised and what the product should stand for. Thus, the
analysis of these adverts strongly focuses upon the advertisements’
photographic imagery, and the ways in which this imagery generates the
appropriate signified concepts (or emotional overtones) which promote the
image of the product.
Therefore, the paper analyzes individually the two adverts in terms of
their status as signs, metaphors and representations, whose associative
meanings not only give a favorable impression of the product, but are also
compatible with and complementary to the context in which they are situated;
thus illustrating Umberto Eco’s claim that the medium and message may be
“charged with cultural signification”.[2]
