The Effective Use of Semiotics in Marketing Communication to Create Product Relevance Through Naming Strategy

Abstract

Marketing communication effort employs various tools to garner brand identity and its relevance to its audience to increase sales. However, marketing communication tools such as advertising are often expensive, and other promotional tools are not necessarily beneficial in the market segment that is specification dependent where product from competing vendor offers the same function. As such brand identity is the sole differentiator between vendor in the category. One way to mitigate the issue is to use structural semiotics that puts attribution of the product right in the name of the product or brand itself, creating direct correlation at a glance. In this research, using phenomenological approach on a focus group study, it is found that semiotic use in naming strategy is very much preferred by the audience to easily identifies products that suits their needs. This in turn reduce cost of marketing communication effort but still create product relevance to the target audience.