Meaning Architecture: How Can Semiotics Gain More Traction In Solving Business Problems Today?

February 2018 meaning.global PhDr. Martina Olbertova
#Meaning Architecture
How reframing Semiotics as the ‘Cultural Systems Thinking’
for Business can help brands and organisations navigate
sense and create meaning for the value creation & growth. @MartinaOlb

Meaning.Global| Credentials | January 2018
© Martina Olbertova 2017 2
Confidential material
Based on the Festival of
#NewMR talk:
How Can Semiotics Gain More Traction
In Solving Business Problems Today?

Because it studies “meaning” – how it’s created, consumed and reproduced in
our culture and society.
Organisations and brands today are not ﬁt for purpose anymore.
But their biggest blind spot (and biggest liability) is also the biggest untapped
business value to date: Meaning.
Meaning is the inner compass every brand and organisation needs in order to
navigate their vision and strategy. It’s the most valuable asset any business can
ever strive to create, as when brands don’t make sense, they can’t hold value.
And yet, it remains to be the most understated value in business to date.
I wanted to change that. That's why I founded Meaning.Global.
Why should we talk about
Semiotics?


meaning.global!
A new breed of a global strategic brand
consultancy powered entirely by meaning.


Semiotics is not just for
brands and marketing:
•  Applied or also called Commercial Semiotics
isn’t just for brands and marketing, it’s also a
powerful resource for businesses and
organisational change.
•  Semiotics just found its home with brands as
visual language and iconicity and tonality as
some of the primary vehicles how organisations
assess brand value and equity.
•  But Semiotics is so much more powerful! It’s
basically the inner structure of our world as
everything in our lives is signiﬁed, everything
communicates and everything conveys
meaning.
•  Semiotics and meaning are at the core of any
purposeful communication, transformation,
value creation or organisational, social and
political change.

Matrix is real: The secret language of things.
•  This is only counterintuitive (or suspicious) to us because we usually don‘t perceive the
world this way. But if you were to turn the world as we know and experience it inside out,
you‘d see that everything is structured around our ability to produce, assess and consume
meaning.
•  Everything tangible we see around us today had an abstract symbolic image created ﬁrst
before it was manifested in its physical form (food, products, services, buildings, cars,
fashion, books etc.) Things start as abstract thoughts and then gain meaning through their
physical execution.
•  Semioticians are the Culture Hackers: They are the real Neo’s of the world ﬁxing errors
in the (business) system and tracking them back to their original source code – Culture.
•  Hacking cultural systems allows organisations to see where the real value is. This way,
semioticians can become the hackers of value creation & growth for business. Therefore,
we need start seeing Meaning as the self-organising principle for a cultural change.

How to reboot organisations in the Matrix?
To help brands and organisations:
•  reinstall meaningfulness
•  fuel new cultural relevance
•  make them resonate more across regions, markets and geographies
•  ﬁx cultural errors
•  create better communication
•  engage with people better
•  create a meaningful organisational change
…we need to start looking at organisations as complex living ecosystems of meaning.
This means we need to create and embed meaning on a systemic/architectural level.

Meaning Architecture: What is it?
•  Redefining Semiotics as the ‘Cultural Systems Thinking’ for Business Organisations, where
meaning and sense are becoming the most valuable currencies of the 21st century.
•  Powered by Semiotics as a backbone for the systemic view of meaning patterns, it is a
methodological approach I am developing which looks at brands and organisations holistically
as the ‘living dynamic ecosystems of interlocked meanings’ in order to fix complex
problems on a systemic level.
•  Its primary aim is to map out individual layers of the system, fix points of friction and instill
sense to inform more relevant future strategies. By placing meaning at the heart of brands and
organisations, we can increase efficiency, effectiveness, promote brand health, cultural and
symbolic relevance, make brands mirror society better and increase social responsibility.

Different Architectures:
Meaning vs. Choice
•  Meaning Architecture is to Semiotics what Choice Architecture is to
Behavioural Science – it takes the theory and contextualises it to solve the
most apparent and pressing business problems.
•  Where Choice Architecture looks at the inherent decision-making fallacies
and cognitive biases, Meaning Architecture looks at the structure of meaning
around a particular business problem to understand and solve it in context.
•  Meaning Architecture utilizes semiotics and cultural intelligence not only to
drive insight locally as most uses of commercial semiotics do but also
systemically to address the meaning systems and patterns of a problem or a
particular business challenge, similarly to what the Choice Architecture does
for the practice of Behavioural Science and its applicability in the real world.
•  This is why they both can be incredibly complementary when used
together as human behaviour is a complex semiotic system in its own right.

© Martina Olbertova 2017
10
Meaning Architecture: What it does?
1.  Addresses the gap in Business Architecture as it looks at the points of friction and inefficiencies
within the organisational system
2.  Uses Semiotics as means to reframe the enterprise architecture from the inside out and applies
structure to encapsulate the dynamic intangible entity that is meaning in an organisation
3.  Navigates sense and meaning throughout the business ecosystem to understand how the parts
relate to the whole, where the points of friction are and how to redefine meaning for better results.
4.  Maps the individual layers of the brand/organisational system to detect gaps, points of friction, loss
of sense and inefficiencies to reinstall meaning, create consistency, limit inefficiencies and promote
new value creation, brand growth and future-proof business.
5.  Helps fuel the invisible nodes of data and information by looking at insight, innovation, behavioural
interventions, product design in a broader context of social signification (how we consume, assess
and create meaning in the world)
6.  Thanks to its systemic/holistic approach, using Meaning Architecture can help brand owners and
stake holders redefine the meaning of important business and cultural concepts to fuel a new-found
relevance for future value creation & growth (diversity, inclusion etc.)

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My premise is that organisations are more of the latter and less of the former. We have become
accustomed to see and manage organisations as machines. This has led to extinction of meaning,
fragmentation of sense, creation of silos and compartmentalised value creation. But this is not how
Humans operate – organisations need to become more of living holistically managed organisms to
reﬂect how people make meaning, create new value and collaborate. Organisations need to address
their fundamental role in learning how to capture, organise and articulate meaning on a systemic level.
Key Q: Are organisations machines,
or living self-evolving organisms?
vs

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Brands are increasingly breaking the rules of
Culture: Cultural relevance is systemic.
Many of the recent cultural lapses are hard to solve as they occur on the systemic level. Seeing brands & orgs
as living ecosystems of meaning can help trace problems back to their origin and solve them on a complex level.
There is a fundamental lack of the systemic ability to craft and sustain relevance throughout the organisational and
brand systems (omnichannel, fragmentation, touchpoints, departments, silos, markets, regions — too much noise)
H&M accidentally racist photo
(2018)
Dove, Unilever: Body diverse packaging campaign (2017) Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad (2017)

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•  Piloted in spring 2017 on a behavioural intervention project
in collaboration with Ogilvy Change for London Gatwick.
•  To apply the meaning architecture approach with regards to
the behavioural science angle of this project, I created
The Matrix of Human Behaviour to illustrate the individual
layers of human experience at the airport at different
touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
•  These are the levels of meaning and signiﬁcation we
explored to inform the behavioural intervention design for
an increased operational efﬁciency solution at the airport à
The Meaning Architecture pilot

14
PSYCHOLOGICAL
LEVEL
SITUATIONAL
CONTEXT & STATE
DISCOURSE LEVEL
CULTURAL LEVEL
SOCIETAL &
IDEOLOGY LEVEL
The Matrix of Human Behaviour:
Meaning is organised in patterns throughout the time and space (both physical & cultural/mental/emotional space) to create value.
Behavioural perspective from the purely psychological standpoint (looking at
triggers for motivation and perception, cognitive biases and the universal
psychological make-up of people)
Situational triggers, mental and emotional states, moods and feelings
(how we think & feel in the particular situation, what version of us
does is bring out, how we react)
Physical context and rules, social norms and expectations tied to
our behaviour in this particular space. He we look at the messaging
and signage that constitute the customer journey experience.
Cultural values, beliefs, expectations shaping perception and
takeouts in various situations, understanding and interpretation of
communication, sensitivity to messaging (tonality & tone of voice)
and possible clashes of cultural values, cues and attitudes,
especially in multinational contexts.
Overall global situation and the systemic view of today‘s world (political,
economic, social, ideological, media forces) seeding narratives in our
subconscious mind and structuring what we perceive as the natural
state of things (aka social hegemony).

15
Behaviours of both the security staff and
passengers are simultaneously being inﬂuenced
by all of these layers of matrix, while also actively
re-shaping and re-creating the situational context
and intervening with people’s cultural make-up.
When we’re interacting with messages, physical
places, rules, and other people, together these
layers form natural clashes of emotions and
mental states, social norms and behavioural
expectations, contextual perceptions, cultural
values and societal triggers (media, safety etc.).
Therefore, it’s impossible to successfully analyse
and/or design effective interventions for change
without understanding the full scope of inﬂuence
these layers have on our everyday lives…
PSYCHOLOGICAL
LEVEL
SITUATIONAL
CONTEXT & STATE
DISCOURSE LEVEL
CULTURAL LEVEL
SOCIETAL &
IDEOLOGY LEVEL
Behaviour is a complex semiotic system:

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Mapping the Matrix variables: Airport security
1.  Security scan – the actual physical checking process and behaviours that go with it – what happens (the facts)
2.  Security scan (situational context) – Emotions, expectations, moods, feelings (hungry, exhausted, stressed, terrified of flying, worried
about the kids, flying to see the family, flying to get to the hospital on time, flying to the funeral, worried about a business deal...)
Insight: Flying is already a highly sensitive personal and stressful area as you‘re flying for a reason / purpose / need – it‘s a personal
transformation process, therefore security should make things easier for people, not worse and stress people even more!
3.  Psychological level: Rules around security enforcement (implicit & explicit) – social norms and expected behaviour - two sides of the
psyche: UK security rules vs. passengers from other cultures
4.  Discourse level – physical context of airport, travelling, security, communication (mixed feelings – short discomfort for the bigger gain,
we dread airports but look forward to the destination)
5.  Cultural level (UK side) – airports are the land of no one’ (we are still physically in the UK but expect international level service and
behaviour that is highly inclusive and sensitive to diversity)
6.  Cultural level (international) – values, beliefs, behaviours and expectations of different cultures – they can be supressed but will still
dominate over behaviour, compliance with the rules won’t happen naturally for everyone (especially if they don’t come from a rule-
dominated compliant culture themselves)
7.  Societal level – the overall international political, security, economy, crime, terrorism condition (subconscious priming of worries, fears
and unease with which people enter into this situation)
à This means that people are already terrified as it is with how the world looks like today. You will always get better results with positive
incentives and more pleasant friendly behaviour towards the passengers than making them feel frustrated and down in the process.)

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Scenarios for business application of Semiotics:
1. Tracking, measuring and assessing the ‘Meaning Footprint’
of Brands and Organisations
(the sum of meanings they create through their operations and how
they affect the world – increase in cultural awareness of organisations,
symbolic relevance and social responsibility)
2. Redefining the Narrative as means for Organisational
Change & Change Management:
Narrative reframing and North Star definition, finding new meaning
and changing/owning the conversation (shift in organisational
dynamics from the reactive towards a proactive role)
3. Operational costs and efficiency:
Driving increased efficiency by fixing points of friction within the
system (could be used when looking at diverse data sets and distilling
sense, consumer behaviour, customer journeys, streamlining, lean
optimisation, behavioural interventions)
What other complex business problems can we solve using Semiotic principles and
the Meaning Architecture approach?

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4. Marketing effectiveness and experience optimisation:
Optimizing communication streams or messaging for the clients,
mapping meaning in communication journeys and transforming them,
aligning meaning and sense in signage/coding/comms in various
cultural adaptations
5. Cultural relevance and scalability of sense:
Mapping meaning and scaling sense across multinational creative
campaigns in different touch-points, markets, cultures & geographies,
aligning brands and organisations with the codes of culture
6. Brand management and leadership:
Empowering regional leadership teams with the knowledge of culture
and using semiotics as an insight & structural tool to gain cultural
richness and drive brand value and equity from bottom-up (vs. top-
down hierarchy that ﬂattens cultural brand sense)
There are many more interesting overlaps and synergies we that can ﬁnd
in the business ecosystem and look at more in-depth such as:

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7. Amalgamation of sense (the ‘glue’ method):
Synthesizes insight from various domains, a multi-
disciplinary aggregator, adding the extra cultural lens/
layer to complex business challenges and client briefs
(such as behavioural interventions, organisational
change etc.)
8. Redefining Meaning of important cultural
concepts driving value creation and growth
within the organisation and brand execution:
What does Diversity & Inclusion, Humanity, Unity,
Equality etc. mean today? What does it mean for
YOUR organisation? What it means in context of the
world/market/category/landscape you operate in?
How to best embody, organise and portray these
symbolic concepts to drive a meaningful cultural
change?
Brands and organisations today would benefit from redefining the meaning of
important social and cultural concepts to fuel cultural relevance in their comms:

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Thank you.
For more information, contact us:
hello@meaning.global
www.meaning.global

Meaning Architecture: How Can Semiotics Gain More Traction In Solving Business Problems Today?

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