Semiotic Buddha: Quest for Enlightenment

Semiotics is an emerging buzz-word in the marketing research circles in India. I am fascinated by this mysterious colourful box (not a black box) of semiotics. While attending a semiotics workshop at IIML, Noida last week I was delighted to see that Indian researchers are open to embracing the semiotic mind-set. It was also heartening to see that Indian brand managers are also seeking semiotics as a strategic input in brand-building. However, not many of seem to have a clear idea about this discipline. Chris Arning beautifully compared semiotics with meditation. We all know that meditation (semiotics) is useful and fascinating, some of us practice it, but none of us fully understand how it works. This metaphor made me realize that I am a mere disciple on an eternal quest for semiotic enlightenment, with a goal to become a Semiotic Buddha – the one who understands the ultimate Semiotics. ;)

My first rendezvous with semiotics was during my master’s program in communications at MICA. The course at MICA was my first step towards understanding semiotics. The workshop this week was the second step. Now, my goal is 998 steps away. Being a first year PhD student, I feel that this is the best time for me to start walking on this path of academic exploration. In a series of blog posts on semiotics, I would be periodically sharing a beginner’s perspective on what I read over the next couple of years. I hope that this endeavour would help other beginners like me on their journey as well.

I begin this blog series by sharing my understanding of how semiotics differs from traditional qualitative research. These thoughts are based on the discussions we had at the workshop, supplemented by some preliminary reading on cognitive psychology.

How is Semiotics different from traditional Qualitative Research?

The subject matter of semiotics is ‘interpretation of meaning’ – to decipher how consumers create meaning in their minds when they witness any stimulus. Any individual, who uses his mind to interpret something, would be using certain habitual or routinized modes of thinking. These habitual modes of thinking are created through a learning process (conditioning) that the individual goes through in his entire life. There are many things in his environment that influence the way his mind is wired to think (develop schemas/ semantic networks in his mind).

Semiotics looks at the elements from the individual’s cultural environment deemed to have shaped the semantic structure of his mind. For example, being an Indian, I would have grown up watching a certain kind of movies and TV shows and I must be absorbing cultural content that is currently being shared around me. All these cultural ‘texts’ would be depicting the idea of ‘success’ in a certain way. These depictions or codes of success would have subconsciously entered into my mind and would have modified the wiring of my schema of ‘success’.

Suppose a researcher needs to understand the schema of success – what does ‘success’ mean to the consumer? A traditional qualitative researcher would conduct a focus group discussion or an in-depth interview with the consumer and elicit his verbal responses to the idea of success. Although this method has the potential to give rich content, the hard truth is that consumers would not be aware of their own subconscious schemas and it would be difficult for them to articulate the same. Furthermore, deliberative elicitation would lead to rationalization of thoughts and we would not be able to uncover the raw subconscious structure. Chris Arning used another beautiful metaphor of the surface of the ocean vs. the wave current underneath the surface. Traditional qualitative research would capture whatever appears on the surface, but may not be able to dive into the depths sufficiently.

But if the consumer is not able to tell me what is in his mind, who will?

We do not have a machine that can let a researcher travel into the subconscious mind of the consumer and to take photographs of the semantic networks in his mind ;). But semiotics shows us the way forward. The basic premise of cultural semiotics is that individuals consume cultural content and absorb the semiotic flow of these texts into their memory. These individuals then mimic the semantic structure reflected in these cultural texts. Hence, if we analyse the cultural content that surrounds the individual and decode the semantic structures within these texts, we can construct a replica of the semantic structure that exists within the consumer’s mind. This is the reverse engineering technique followed by a semiotician.

Traditional qualitative research is inside-out, whereas semiotics is outside-in. Hence, semiotics does not involve interviewing of consumers. The population/ sample to be studied consist of cultural texts like ads, movies, music, materials, packaging, blogs, etc. The sampling of content follows the general sampling principles of traditional research – aiming for a balance of parsimony and representativeness. These texts are deconstructed and analysed using semiotic analysis tools and theories. Semiotics uses a rich bag of techniques and theories for analysis. The colourful, enigmatic box of semiotic theories and techniques is what remains to be explored. I would be exploring these theories and techniques one by one and would share my thoughts on them in my future blog posts. I invite critical feedback on my posts from researchers (practitioners and academic) and students. Let’s all discuss, debate and learn together :)

Calculating 50 Shades of Grey

The Mathematics of Social Sciences

As I enter my journey at IIMB as a PhD candidate in marketing, I see myself as a social scientist. I see myself as an explorer and investigator of the human mind and behavior. I see myself applying principles of psychology, sociology and anthropology - the beautiful 'soft' sciences of mankind. But suddenly, my vehicle of learning takes a sharp detour into the 'hard' science of mathematics.

Over the last 3 weeks, I have been exposed to a lot of mathematics - a lot and of a different breed. I have been exposed to a lot of concepts whose existence I was oblivious to. After keeping me away from mathematical education after class 12, life decided to finally orchestrate a rendezvous with Linear Algebra. As terms like matrices, vectors, transpose, multivariate calculus, projections, etc. were being 'bombarded' at me, a volley of questions bounced in my mind...

"Why do I need to learn all this? How is this related to my future research work? How will this help me in understanding the human mind? Isn't statistics enough to compute quantitative data? Why do we need matrix algebra here???"

For the first 2 weeks, these questions kept rotating within my mind. But as I entered the third week, consciousness dawned into me. After spending 5 hours with Gilbert Strang (I met him virtually through his book!), epiphany struck its magic wand and I realized that Linear Algebra is one of the coolest things a social scientist can learn. From that moment, I started seeing myself as a potential 'Social Mathematician' as well.

As a social scientist, I would be involved in explaining the human mind and behavior. As we all know, today's world is not a very simple place. There is nothing purely black or white. There are various shades of grey. And as we all know, grey is nothing but a linear combination of black and white.

Let's take a simple generalization of the human mind being a combination of 2 elements namely - Good & Evil. All the people in this world would have different combinations of good and evil in their minds. We can draw parallels with numerous ancient oriental philosophical concepts like Yin & Yang (Combination of 2 opposing elements) and Om (Combination of 3 elements A,U,M).

So, we can start identifying linear combinations in almost everything around us, including the human mind.

Let's go back to our basic example of linear combination of 2 basic colours - Black and White.

Now, imagine that I am mixing these 2 paints on a palette to get a resultant colour Grey. It is possible for me to mix black and white paint in different proportions to arrive at various shades of grey.

When we are given a particular shade of grey, we can find out the specific proportion of black and white that was combined to get this specific shade of grey. Since grey is a linear combination of black and white, we can express them in the form of algebraic equations where w= white, b=black and g=grey

g= xw+yb

Here, x & y are the proportional weights of white & black respectively.
For different values of x & y, I will get different shades of grey.

We can express this particular linear combination in the form on a matrix where the rows equate to the dimension of 'whiteness' and 'blackness' and the columns signify the actual colours:

In a scenario where I am mixing only 2 elementary colors - black and white - that are mutually independent of each other - for every shade of grey I can identify the specific combination of black and white. But there may be situations where we may not be able to arrive at a specific combination.

Situation 1 - No possible combinations!

Imagine you come across a question as absurd as, "What combination of black and white will give you RED?"


No matter what combination of black and white you mix on your palette, you will never get red. Hence, such a situation has no solution.

Situation 2 - Infinite possible combinations!

Imagine you come across a question that says, "What combination of black, white and medium grey will give you dark grey?

Here, we are combining 3 colours to get a fourth colour. But the problem is that the initial 3 colours are not mutually independent of each other. The third colour medium grey is a linear combination of the first 2 colours. In such a situation, we end up getting infinite possible combinations! 

Let's see this with a numeric illustration:

We define medium grey as lg= w+b, and dark grey as dg= w+3b, we can express this as:

As it can be seen above, we can have multiple possible combinations of the 3 colours to arrive at the fourth colour. We can either mix only white and black and none of medium grey, or take a portion of medium grey and add some more black to it to make it dark grey. If we were to include the possibility of having negative values (i.e, if it was possible to remove some colours from a mixture), we would be able to get infinite solutions!

Now, let's calculate the grey areas of human mind

Till now we looked at colours and pigments which are physical objects. But the crux of the exploration of a social scientist is human mind and behavior. So, let's apply the concept of linear combination in a human phenomena.

Let's ask a fundamental question - "What makes me content with my life?"
As a social scientist, I would think of various elements that lead to contentment in life. These elements could be having a job that you love, having a positive family life and earning handsome money.
Linear algebra comes into picture here because the level of contentment in my life would be a linear combination of these 3 elements in some proportion!

For some people, earning good money may be more important than doing something you love. Such people end up doing a job that they hate doing just because it pays them well. For some people, family happiness may be much more important than job satisfaction. Such people may end up doing something they hate just in order to keep their family happy. Instead of just guessing what element could be important in a society, we can use the magical wand of Linear Algebra to precisely find those proportions!

For illustrative purposes, let's assume that we are trying to find these proportions among a homogeneous group of 28 year old, male, graduate, working professionals in Bangalore. In order to find the combinations, we need to measure the individual elements. We can measure the following 4 questions using a 100 point scale where 0=Not at all and 100= A lot:

Q1. How content are you with your life?
Q2. How much do you like the work that you are doing?
Q3. How much higher do you think is your salary as compared to what people get at your age & experience?
Q4. How positive/ pleasant is the overall mood of your family?


We administer these questions to 3 people and their responses are as follows:

Name	Work Likeability	Paycheck Handsomeness	Family Positivity	Life Contentment
Ayush	40	50	10	27
Bharath	20	60	40	38
Chandan	60	30	50	49

As it can be seen, the data that we receive will always be in a tabular or matrix form. Each column stands for a variable captured in a question. Since we are trying to find the importance of each variable on the final variable of Life contentment, we will carry out combination of columns as follows:

On solving this system by linear algebra methods, we arrive at the solution of x=0.3, y=0.2 and z=0.5.
This gives us the solution that family positivity is given more importance, followed by work likeability and paycheck.

With the help of linear algebra, we can find out what is the main driver of contentment. Similarly, this tool can be applied in calculating any other measurable linear combination in this world.

We know that the human brain is made up of grey cells and the human mind is also made up of shades of grey. Mathematics can be used to quantify the human mind and yes, we can calculate more than just 50 shades of grey!

Moral of the story: Embrace mathematics, even if you claim to be a qualitative researcher because beauty lies in integration - the linear combination of qualitative and quantitative research!

Linear Algebra helps us visualize beyond the physical 3 dimensional space through the column-vector concept. Once we are able to visualize multiple dimensions, we may get closer to solving Einstein's dilemma here:

Simple is Robust

Every researcher should treat this as a guiding light :)



If the concept is extremely clear in your mind, you should be able to explain it even to a 6 year old child with ease. This clarity of thought and simplicity should reflect in our writing.
Our research paper should be so simple, yet robust, that the reader should feel the joy of discovery and excitement on turning every page. And it should feel effortless like reading a comic book - an academic, robust comic book.

Creating Meaningful Impact in Academia

As an academic researcher, one needs to develop a new theory which is "path breaking". One needs to do disruptive research  in a positively constructive manner.

How can one's contribution be seen to be 'meaningful'?

I was reading a semiotics paper and discovered a beautiful analogy used by Saussure in describing the relationships between words and their meaning.

Saussure talks about a "Chess" metaphor. In a game of chess, moving one piece on the board alters the relationship between all the other pieces on the board.

This metaphor can beautifully be applied to the role of meaningful research in any domain of knowledge. Our theory should be like a new move on the chess board of existing knowledge.  Our move should influence the interrelationships between all other pieces of knowledge in the domain. This influence can be brought by challenging the underlying assumptions in the body of knowledge because the assumptions form the common thread that connects all the pieces together.

Research is not an activity. It is a mindset.

I do not consider research to just be an activity or a process. I see it as ‘a way of life’. From the day we are born, we are inquisitive about everything around us. When we hear a loud noise outside, we run towards the window to see what is happening outside. When we see someone upset, we approach her to find out what is wrong. Life always throws mysteries at us that provoke our minds. We are not at peace until we find answers to solve those mysteries. One can draw a parallel to the ‘Laws of Karma’ from Indian spirituality that says that there are many incomplete equations in this world that need to be completed and written-off. Life will give us a chance to solve each of these equations from time to time. We need to be equipped with the spirit of research to solve those mysteries. With research as our way of life, we will be able to make informed decisions at every step and help reduce the level of chaos in today’s world. Well researched decisions are well balanced decisions.

Academic Research is a very interesting field. Throughout our academic life, from school to graduation, we have been reading books written by others. We have been studying theories founded by thinkers over the years. Research is the only way we can create something new and original to the existing knowledge base in this world. The human mind and intellect is capable to finding answers to the deepest unanswered or even unasked questions. If we keenly observe what’s happening around us every day, we will come across many such activities that have no explanation. It would be interesting to find the cause behind such things. Blindly accepting the conventional wisdom is not the right thing to do. According to Galbraith, conventional wisdom is simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting. We need to think out of our comfort zone to find the real answers.

The role of an academic researcher is a very exciting one. I believe that it encompasses numerous other roles that would give me a well-rounded personality. Firstly, it makes me feel like a detective who has been hired to solve a ‘market mystery’. It is my responsibility to collect evidences and deduce insights from the same. Secondly, it makes me feel like a doctor who needs to diagnose the ‘health issues’ with the world of management and provide them with ‘medicinal insights’ that would heal them. And thirdly, it makes me feel like an explorer who is diving into fathoms of the conscious and the unconscious minds of people to bring out pearls of insights to share with the rest of the world. These are three different worlds that come together to create the research world. But the common philosophy that runs through all these roles is of being ‘solution-oriented’.

I recently attended a panel interview where I was asked a question by a gentleman:

“Can you give me an example of a well-researched product that did not do well in India?”

It was a thought-provoking question. As I tried to analyse the question in my mind, I realised that it was actually an invalid question, an oxymoron to be more precise. We need to first define what ‘well-researched’ means. The fact that the product has not done well in the market proves that it was NOT well-researched in the first place! How would you rate research as good or bad? I firmly believe that the ‘mystery-solving’ ability of the research determines its quality. The general belief is that a ‘well-researched’ project is one with a complex research methodology conducted at a large scale with a plethora of jargon, statistics and reports. But the fact is that if the simplest method of research is able to find answers and solve the problem, it will score better than any mammoth project that just ‘beats around the bush’. Sometimes, the journey (methodology) becomes more overbearing than the destination (solution). We must remember that some of the world’s most revolutionary discoveries happened by the most fascinating methodology of nature called ‘serendipity’.

We know that intelligence quotient (IQ) is a hygiene factor for any individual to excel in a knowledge-based environment. But academic research requires a much deeper level of understanding of oneself and of others. Hence, emotional intelligence and empathy is very important to be able to clearly extract insights from the human mind. A researcher needs to possess high emotional quotient (EQ) and be able to step out of the problem to analyze it objectively. She needs to understand her own mind before she can start understanding the consumer’s mind because her own mind will create many biases in her analysis. And finally, she needs to be stung by the “asking bug”. Since childhood we have been encouraged to raise our hand and ask the most stupid questions. We won’t get any answers until we ask questions. Fear of making mistakes stops us from being creative. As Sir Ken Robinson said in his TED talk,

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original… And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.”

Courage to question the norms, to think of out-of-the-box ideas and to turn them into reality is what is needed to boost the research further into the future. We all have an urge, a need to move forward into the future. But before we move forward, we must learn to look backward and learn from our past. We must learn to be like kids again.

As David Ogilvy says, "The best ideas come as jokes. So, make your thinking as funny as possible."