Malcolm Evans
Flavours of diversity
Like ‘sustainability’, the word ‘diversity’ had little popular currency ten or twenty years ago. Today everyone at least pretends to understand it. When I told my partner – who voices documentaries, advertisements and corporate training videos – about this piece, she said: “Diversity’s a word I have to say all the time. What does it mean?”
In the UK, at the time of writing, diversity feels like a rich semiotic tapestry and a moving target. We have pressure for affirmative action towards a more ethnically diverse police force, homophobia concerns ahead of the Winter Olympics, octogenarian celebrities on trial for sex offences decades ago alleged by women only now able to speak out, a Premiership footballer accused of an anti-Semitic goal celebration, a politician exposed for alleged sexual harassment, a campaign in schools to fight female genital mutilation . . .
The d-words also sits on an ideological fault line. It polarizes, at one extreme, people uncomfortable about immigrants or same sex unions (a UK Independence Party politician recently blamed these for divine retribution through severe end of year floods) and, on the other, people who warm to this first Google search definition of ‘diversity’: acceptance and respect, recognition of individual uniqueness and differences across ethnicity, gender and sexual preference, age, physical abilities, socio-economic position etc. – while “understanding each other and moving beyond simple tolerance to embracing and celebrating the rich dimensions of diversity contained within each individual”.
Culture & nature
Many brands have explicitly identified themselves with diversity – from Benetton and Nike to Dove or HSBC. In a global marketplace diversity and its different meanings and codes, in specific cultures and cross-culturally, must be of critical interest for all brands, impacting not only on consumer empathy and interaction externally but also on internal corporate culture and the reputation that generates.
There are other significant dimensions to the diversity story. In the commercial arena I first heard the term in something like its contemporary sense near the end of the1990s, as part of a Rainbow Nation related positioning opportunity for a drinks brand ideated at a semiotic workshop, underpinned by the notion of nature’s abundance and the unparalleled diversity of the natural gene pool in South Africa.
Despite the category difference, something analogous plays out in a 2014 TV ad for deodorant’s claim that the underarm is home to “a diversity of natural bacteria essential for keeping skin healthy”. Sanex produces antiperspirants which “fight odour-causing bacteria and leave a beneficial mix of bacteria”. The camera zooms in on a microscopic biosphere with multiethnic hosts of naked women and men representing the good bacteria as they move in 1930s Leni Riefenstahl- style synchrony to celebrate the triumph of diversity and underarm freshness.
Semiotic analysis in action
Semiotics prophetically arrived at a contemporary idea of cultural diversity over half a century ago. In one of his Mythologies essays, Roland Barthes uses the word ‘diversité’ repeatedly in his claim that a 1955 photo exhibition, The Great Family of Man, universalises bourgeois received wisdom around eternal themes such as birth, death, work, love and family while obscuring real local differences, often based on inequalities, injustice and hardship: “Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened by a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is open to him: this is what your Exhibitions should be telling people, instead of an eternal lyricism of birth”.
Barthes’s example inspired commercial applications of semiotics that started to cut through in the 1990s and remain an important part of the insight repertoire for understanding diversity today. With pointers towards further reading and case studies, here are some headline approaches, successes, points in the evolution of cultural and semiotic work carried out for brands:
A key capability helping establish this methodology with corporate and agency clients in the 1990s was the ability of semiotics to lead the way towards highest factor cross-cultural positioning and communication platforms in helping create and communicate new global master brands – crafted in full recognition of the diversity reconciled in this unity, and giving specific guidance on local differences and the executional taboos and opportunities these implied. Examples of semiotic work in this area range from tracking cultural codes around women’s empowerment in sample developed and emerging markets for Procter and Gamble, helping create unified communication strategies for fabric care (Maggio-Muller & Evans, 2008), to creating a DIY competitive advertising decoding kit for Guinness UDV, with which the client’s local market marketing teams around the world could decode and map competitive advertising, using a set of 28 universal drinks codes, then identify white spaces available for existing client brands and NPD opportunities in each local market. (Harvey & Evans, 2001).
Our second example applies to consumer insight in developing markets more broadly. Where markets are vast and culturally diverse, an initial expert semiotic navigation of culture and category has proved a cost-effective way to guide consumer research and strategic decision making. Hamsini Shivakumar has written up three case studies on the application of semiotics in India, a market as internally diverse as Europe, drawn from evolving codes of masculinity and the clothing category, youth culture in relation to impulse snacking, and the communication of a major service brand across the rich diversity of geographies and consumer segments. These cases also illustrate the value of cultural and category dynamics mapping (emergent, mainstream and residual or dated codes), for tracking the direction and pace of change in demographically youthful and rapidly modernising markets such as the BRICs the MINTs. Reflecting on her experience in India, Shivakumar concludes that semiotics is a great enabler in getting the insight process started with strong hypotheses and a point of view, a great team player in interfacing with other insight disciplines, and well equipped to play the co-ordinating role of “big picture and joined up thinking provider, head-above-the-parapet pathfinder and substantiated kick-starter of new ideas”. (Evans & Shivakumar, 2010)
This methodological versatility and flexibility inspired Procter & Gamble’s Marina Anderson to commission what became an object lesson in understanding consumer diversity. The challenge (Anderson & Evans, 2006) was to model changing patterns of acculturation among US Hispanic consumers and make specific recommendations, subsequently adopted by P&G brands, on how communication, moving on from a straightforward Spanish language versus English language approach to advertising, should be more refined in its cultural differentiation – and thus better designed to target more effectively differently acculturated consumer segments. This work helped generate a conceptual mapping method, which could be adapted to help view in a different and revealing light the cultural configuration and segmentation of minority communities in any market. In this case, as well as being part of the consumer context, diversity was also encountered as an explicit theme actively discussed in Latino popular culture. Personal development literature, for example, was starting to talk about acculturation explicitly – opting for positive plural identities and behaviours (Mexican-American, Dominican-Chinese-American etc.) rather than, as in the past, assimilation into the US mainstream. At the same time, in US Hispanic films, assimilated Latino characters were becoming increasingly unsympathetic. Summarising the movement across a range of cultural and advertising materials, the old US melting pot image and its merging of once distinct identities were clearly residual, with the idea of a patchwork quilt, mixed salad or retained diverse identities the dominant mainstream cultural position, while the emergent was coming to be expressed in an ever-shifting hybrid mix of ‘Spanglish’ language and cultural experience – perhaps best characterised as a positive Ajiaco de Contradicciones, a ‘stew of contradictions’.
To every thing there is a season
So the rich mix of diversity culture overall moves on apace. At one frontier of the discourse today, Barneys New York is using 17 transgender models for its spring campaign. A biographical film of extraordinary wisdom, strength and tenderness about a young transgender couple, Katie + Arin, features on their website.
The biggest mainstream development recently heralds a return to the issues of inequality, injustice and socioeconomic diversity that preoccupied Roland Barthes all those years ago. What was on the activist fringes in Occupy only a couple of years ago is now the subject of Davos World Economic Forum 2014 headlines about the rich-poor gap being the biggest threat to the global economy. As I write this, on the morning of 28th January 2014, the voice of Pete Seeger, who died last night, has been on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme from long ago saying that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class can see what’s happening but also understands the dangers of rocking the boat. The programme is just ending with a snatch of one of Pete Seeger’s most famous songs: “To every thing there is a season/ And a time to every purpose under heaven”.
With thanks to my friend in diversity Steve Seth – a true global soul
Malcolm Evans has been working in brand semiotics since 1990 with Semiotic Solutions, Added Value, then as founder of Space Doctors. Now an independent consultant and editor of cultural & semiotic online journal Semionaut.
Bibliography
Anderson, M & Evans, M, “Foresight Semiotics: Emerging Patterns in US Hispanic Acculturation”, ESOMAR, Annual Congress, 2006
M, Barthes, R, Mythologies, tr. A Lavers, London, Paladin, 1972
Evans, M & Shivakumar, H, “Insight, Cultural Diversity, Revolutionary Change: Joined Up Semiotic Thinking for Developing Markets”, ESOMAR Congress, 2010
Harvey, M & Evans, M, “Decoding Competitive Propositions: a Semiotic Alternative to Traditional Advertising Research”, International Journal of Market Research, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2001, pp. 171-187.
Maggio-Muller, K & Evans, M, “Culture, Communications and business: the power of advanced semiotics”, International Journal of Market Research, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2008, pp. 169-180.
