India’s leading experts in applied semiotics for marketing, Leapfrog Strategy Consulting has recently launched a brand new website – www.leapfrogstrategy.com. The website aims to evangelise applied semiotics based on real experiences and tangible results delivered over the last ten years.
Chief semiotician and founder of Leapfrog Strategy Consulting, Ms. Hamsini Shivakumar, nostalgically talks about semiotics not being new at all, “Two years into our existence, Leapfrog Strategy had included Applied Semiotics into our proposals, as early as 2009.” Two years later in 2011, the semiotician with over a decade worth of experience co-founded Semiofest – a global conference in commercial semiotics that helps resolve interpretational conflicts and provides sharper tools for social meaning-making spaces.
What is semiotics? For the beginner, semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and what meaning they represent. Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure from Switzerland was perhaps the first semiotician; he spent considerable time studying how the meaning of words (in a language) is encoded into language. The nexus of symbols and signs and the meaning it forms as given by Saussure is still used by modern-day semioticians in their submissions. Charles Sanders Pierce, on the other hand, created a theory that was language-agnostic, that is to say, that signs and sign interpretations that are applicable across all classes of signs – mathematical, visual, symbols, etc. As part of their website and knowledge centre, Leapfrog Strategy shares a plethora of beginner-level information while also catering to experts in consumer insight. The website is akin to a bridge that joins theory and practice with respect to applied semiotics.
And how is semiotics useful? Often users say one thing but actually mean quite another. This confuses the marketer or the business owners with regard to their communication strategy. In such cases, semiotic decoding helps paint a truer picture of what’s going on in the consumers’ minds. Another use of semiotics is in simply understanding how some individuals think in a changing culture. For instance, our understanding of a mother’s role has changed over the years, she is no longer the sacrificing dying-but-still-cooking mother that we used to deify in the Nirupa Roy days. So perhaps communication to new mothers might now be about taking care of themselves, as opposed to the earlier notion of putting others first. Understanding these changing heuristics in dynamic cultures, helps us understand our consumers better, resulting in pinpointed and effective messaging.
The main attraction of the Leapfrog website is the knowledge centre – https://leapfrogstrategy.com/learning-centre/ containing a comprehensive and in-depth column dedicated to colour semiotics, video guides, reading material like articles, white papers, and even a list of books.
Broadly, Leapfrog Strategy has four offerings. The first is that one can commission a Semiotic Study or Research in Semiotics, for example, the Mahindra group commissioned a study about the alpha male for their SUV car category. The second is Brand Strategy where their Leapfrog’s semioticians help reimagine or reconstruct a brand to make it more future relevant, for example, the work the team did for Chambor cosmetics by tracking the brand’s 30-year history and mapping the changing contexts of user consumption. The third service they provide is Semiotic Inputs into Design, for example, they helped decode the SugarFree Green package design, and based on their inputs, their client Zydus Wellness’ sales grew at least ten times. Lastly, they provide training to marketing professionals in using semiotics in their jobs.
Rasika Batra, one of the semioticians in the Leapfrog team explains why the team is a pioneer in semiotic research that finds useful applications and proven results. She says, “The Leapfrog Strategy team consists of leading experts, a whole team works on the project, not just one person, so the client benefits exponentially from collective eyes and minds. I think our experience in strategy, particularly Hamsini’s thirty-plus years in advertising and consumer insight make our work highly implementable.”
www.leapfrogstrategy.com was launched on 1st June 2022.
To learn more about how semiotics is applied in the fields of marketing and advertising for brands and businesses, look up www.leapfrogstrategy.com
Leapfrog Strategy is a semiotics-approach strategy consulting firm that provides an overarching brand strategy to specific design inputs from brand packaging to product User Experience or User Interface (UI & UX). The team helps their clients identify their current problems within the category, with the design or with the understanding of the culture they are operating in. They then devise an actionable solution based on research and analyses. To know more about Leapfrog Strategy Consulting, visit – https://in.linkedin.com/company/leapfrog-strategy-consulting
