Parsons the New School for Design:Analyzing TrendsProduct Mood BoardFall 2014

A product’s package serves more than as a brand’s salesman. How can we extract cultural codes and deeper consumer narratives from the words and symbols it uses?

THE CHALLENGE

WHAT I LEARNED• Presenting a trend mood board.• Using semiotics to find patterns

The assignment asked us to shed assumptions and learn just from the details. We were challenged to catalog and decode a package’s language, then assemble a concise and graphic mood board that told a com-pelling trend story, with the product as its centerpiece.

Going in with just a product...

LanguageList key words and phrases.SEMIOTICS.VisualsConsider logos and imagery.SYMBOLOGY.

SynonymsUse a thesaurus to buildlinguistic taxonomies.CONNOTATIONS.AntonymsBinaries reveal unexplored territories.“NOT-NESS”.

TrendsWhat current culturalpatterns emerge?THINK: CONTEXT.CodesWhat broader narrativeis being told?THINK: OPPORTUNITY.

A breakfast food: What macro cultural narratives does it capture?

Bob’s Redmill Steelcut Oats: How does the brand and product’s packaging seek to address these codes?

It was about the physicalprocess of mood boarding, of

seeing the product as acultural artifact, not mere

promotional material. Don’t give us a brand pitch.

This was NOT amarketing exercise.

The first workshop was spent on the basics - we’re asked to simply Collect key Language and Visuals from the packaging. The goal was to avoid framing our product’s meaning in our own biases and generalizations.

The key words which immediately stood out to me included “Organic”, “All Natural”, and “Award-Winning”. It seemed that the Language used sought not only communicate the health benefits and quality of the package’s contents, but also to justify the brand’s superiority over rivals.

Embracing the Inductive ProcessStarting only with what’s there - no jumping to conclusions!

Visuals - mere marketing fluff or artifacts of macro trend narratives? Does an image only serve to occupy blatant branding space, or could it suggest wider cultural phenomena? Separating the two possibilities from each other was especially critical when pulling the packaging’s graphic details.

Mood Board MaterialsMulti-colored post-its and Sharpie pens.

The Man Behind the BrandDoes including a friendly portrait of “Bob” help humanize the brand in consumers’ eyes?

Utilizing PinterestThe perfect platform for building a visual inventory - pinning related images and products to get ideas flowing.

Now it was time to Connect the dots - running thesaurus searches on all the key words I’d accumulated. Both Synonyms and Antonyms helped expand words’ linguistic connotations - thus serving as essential building blocks for later trend decoding.

Key words had been written on blue post-it notes; their Synonyms were given a different color. The process of laddering up linguistic analogues side-by-side helped reveal important code shifts - that is, how a word’s past meaning / connotations have markedly tranformed over time.

Thesaurus.comAn invaluable resource - my go-to site for forming my semiotic analysis.

Mood Board BeginningsSticking the post-its on - beginning to craft a visual layout.

Virginia Valentine, Semiotic Solutions6

Understanding the role of linguistic polarities in meaning-making.

[...] the understanding of anything comes from knowing what it is

rather than what it is. We know about clean, only because we know about dirty. We understand the concept of “processed” food because we have a framework of “fresh” [...]

shows how we understand what is going on by splitting the world about us into pairs of

Hearkening to Virginia Valentine’s words of wisdom, I also made sure to collect the Antonyms of the key words pulled. These were written out on post-its of a different color.

Considering the “Not-Ness”Similar product, different messaging: What does the brand not want to stand for? How does “Bob” differ from “the Quaker Man” in the eyes of consumers?

Trends: Past vs. PresentExploring the “not-ness” of one of my key codes, “Authenticity”.

Too often, a firm falls victim to the marketing mind-trap: thinking what it’s selling are goods and services, when what’s actually being “sold” are the signs and meanings of its brand. The last step in the analytical prodess was to Curate Trends from key packaging details, then Codes from the trends.

What is the current state of the cultural story hinted at by the product? To answer this question, searches were run on key language pulled to uncover what overarching social Trends they could be capturing. For a brand, such insights are invaluable - they help them craft long-term strategies which are more sustainable than quick-fix solutions

Consumer is KingInspecting how people craft their own cognitive roadmaps from brand messaging - how can firms translate motives into favorable behaviors?

Debunking MythsUnderstanding codes by their historical context - what do trend shifts hint at where they’re heading?

What separates Codes from trends is that the former is an affirmation of moving away from something that’s losing cultural relevancy. Brands which position consumers as their North Star in strategy planning need to be especially aware of such code shift signals - how else can they remain emotionally connected to their customers?

Final Four Codes“Authenticity”, “Civility”, “Slowness”, and “Simplicity” - current codes with strong brand value. Tradition trumps modernity, but “realness” must be justified.

Final Mood BoardKey words and visuals, synonyms and “not-ness”, trends, codes... grouped and layered, side-by-side.

The Codal ShiftsExamining code legacies - new meanings for the new consumer, new opportunities for brands.