Trajectories and meanings in specialty coffee packaging: a semiotic exploration of the Brazilian market
Packaging is a medium that encourages customers to discover brands and products at the point-of-sale. It materializes brand identities, communicates product attributes, and thus translates aesthetic and symbolic-cultural meanings. How can we explore different layers of meanings that specialty coffee packaging communicates to customers? In this paper, we apply Peircean semiotic concepts to investigate this question. Semiotics studies meanings of words, images, languages and communication processes in nature and in culture. In the fields of Marketing and Design, we interact with signs in constant transformation. For these reasons, Semiotics has been used to explore communication and consumption phenomena in recent decades. In this context, Niemeyer (2010) emphasizes that semiotics helps us to understand the meaning of packaging, which, in addition to being aesthetically attractive or functional, must communicate qualities and characteristics of the modes of production, usage purposes, and consumers. According to this author, each product communicates messages from users to themselves and from users to others, but also diffuses the aesthetic, symbolic and cultural values of the contexts with which it interacts (ibid.). We propose to investigate how different visual and verbal signs participate in the construction of specialty coffee packaging design in the Brazilian market. First, we define the segment of specialty coffee based on previous works by Quintão, Brito and Belk (2017). Next, we present the theoretical-methodological foundation that guided the development of this analysis. Finally, we discuss the results of the study, highlighting three points of view (qualitative-iconic, singular-indicative and conventional-symbolic) according to Santaella (2004); and synthesizing the key visual and textual recurrences among the researched packages. We argue that semiotic analysis enriches the understanding of the trajectories of meanings that the packages construct, considering their communicative potentials and their interactions with consumers during the shopping experience.
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País:
Brasil
Temas y ejes de trabajo:
Las articulaciones y confrontaciones entre perspectivas semióticas e investigaciones en comunicación
Semióticas de los lenguajes visuales, sonoros y audiovisuales
Institución:
Federal University of Santa Catarina and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez
Mail:
mariacmendonca@gmail.com
Estado del abstract
Estado del abstract:
Accepted