Transcript
Speaker: Hello, before we get stuck into this episode of Bite Big, let me tell you a little bit about who the hell I am and why this content is important to me. My name's Amber Bonney and for the past 25 years, I've been reshaping iconic Australian and international brands, helping them stay relevant, get noticed and be remembered in the good kind of way.
Speaker: I'm a passionate feminist and committed to advocating for better representation of women in senior creative and marketing roles, which is why this podcast is proudly brought to you by my business, The Edison Agency.
Speaker: If your brand or organisation needs help aligning your vision to your reputation, then you can find us at www.edison.agency or you can connect with me on LinkedIn. Let's get into it.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Season 4, Episode 2 of a special Byte Big series. Coming to you from the greater centre London, I'm Amber Bonney, Brand Strategist and Agency CEO and right now we're on the road in the yeah UK to meet the women building culture and challenging norms. This This season is a spotlight on the pulse of global creative leadership. And today i am intellectually over the moon. It's been conversation with a woman who's quite literally written a critical rule book on semiotics in marketing. In fact, she's written two of them. I'd really like to welcome Dr. Rachel Laws. Welcome. Thank you so Thanks.
Speaker: Now, Rachel, you'll need to listen to me talk about your glowing bio. Rachel is a social psychologist, futurist and founder of Laws Consulting, a global commercial practice she built from scratch in 2002. Before the field, she built this in a field that didn't exist.
Speaker: The field is commercial semiotics, the science of reading culture, decoding signs and symbols and turning the invisible forces that shape consumer behaviour into real measurable brand growth. Rachel grew up in a working class family in the UK where, as she tells it, there wasn't always a lot of money, but there was always money for books. That love of reading became the foundation of a career. She has taken her to a renowned university discourse and rhetoric group, to boardrooms at Unilever, P&G, Lego, Diageo, Warner Brothers, just to name a few.
Speaker: Her two award-winning landmark books, Using Semiotics in Marketing and Using Semiotics in Retail, have been translated into multiple languages and used by brand leaders, researchers, strategists around the world, including myself.
Speaker: And just this year, Rachel made headlines for embedding her semiotic expertise into AI, literally teaching a large language model to read images the way she does with Warner Brothers. She's a fellow of the Market Research Society and her clients span over 20 countries. What a bio.
Speaker: So Rachel, let's get into it and get under the skin of what drives you and your mantra and why we think you're a boss woman leading big. Now, your mantra is read, create and give thanks.
Speaker: Three words, three different verbs. do they How do they show up in your day-to-day life? They show up on a daily basis. Some ah take the lead at different times depending on what's going on in my life. yeah But I try to have all three of them be present with me all the time.
Speaker: Yeah. And is it something that you have to consciously think about or? Yeah. Especially the create bit. I suppose read might come naturally, but the create. The create bit does as well. I have quite a strong creative impulse that expresses itself in lots of different ways. The challenge with create is that there, and reading, is that there are huge demands on my time. yes So I really have to schedule it into my day, the otherwise it doesn't happen. it Doesn't happen. You know, but it's so important because um if I don't create, I'm going to go a bit mad from cabin fever. Yeah. And if I don't read, then you'll hear me talk about reading length in this conversation. Reading is absolutely vital. It's a lifeline. Well, as an academic, suppose it's the foundation of everything. yeah If you want to be good at semiotics, it's a lifelong process of looking around for new ideas. yeah Yeah. And tell me about the give thanks part. Is that the hardest one or the easiest one?
Speaker: In some ways, it's easy because if you look at your life, it's pretty easy to list things which you can be grateful for and to identify your own privileges. So there aren't times when it's um difficult exactly, but there are times where it's very necessary. yeah So if you're going through a difficult time in life,
Speaker: then I feel it's very important to get into a daily gratitude practice. Yeah. And is it something, is this a morning practice, an evening practice? Just as and when really. Whenever you can. catch myself feeling sorry for myself, I would sit down and manually write a list of things that I'm grateful for until I run out of ideas. That's impressive.
Speaker: Just a thing, just a survival struggle. Yeah. I sometimes do that, but it's it' it's very few and far between. But maybe I need to practice that the more. How do you keep creativity alive in consulting work when potentially sometimes it feels either very commercial or repetitive in nature? How do you keep that sort of fire alive? So i think this is a really interesting question that is intimately tied up with semiotics. So the kind of entry point for semiotics with basically everybody, and I was no different when I first discovered it,
Speaker: the first thing you encounter is this idea of signs and symbols, right? And so you you begin by asking these interesting questions like, why are some things red and some things blue, so you might say, um why is a brand name in this particular typeface? Like, why did they choose that one and not something else? Those are terrific questions, right? yeah But if if that's all you ever do, then your work will become repetitive. And especially if all you ever do is look at brands and their visual design,
Speaker: The chances of becoming repetitive are high yeah and and clients don't want that and you don't want that either because you'll be bored. So what are the things you draw from that break out of that? So I think it's really important to realise that semiotics is a branch of philosophy. And we're playing some very sophisticated thought games when we're doing semiotic yeah thinking. We're performing some challenging experiments and we're crash testing metaphors and trying to find out how far we can take certain ideas. Like you might find an idea that's useful and you'll take it to its logical conclusions and then a bit further and then a bit further to see how far you can go before it stops being useful. So you're not going to get any of that from endlessly looking at, you know, packs of yogurt or processed cheese. Yeah. yeah so I think that it's important to realise that in every area of sort of human endeavour, certainly in the arts and humanities,
Speaker: There ah is and has been a lot of semiotic thinking going on. For example, I'm a big fan of visual art. I like painting, photography. I'm also keen on sculpture. i like conceptual art.
Speaker: Conceptual art in particular is backed up with a whole lot of theory and some of that theory comes straight out of semiotics. Or um if you like literature, then ah read novels but also read literary theory that helps you to think about novels in a critical way. yeah you know what i man Do you ever critically analyse your own pieces? Constantly. yeah Oh, God. ah I feel like that would be a ah complex circle between the creative process and the academia of understanding. Yeah, yeah yeah it never stops. But the important thing is to keep feeding your brain. For me, I need to constantly feed my my brain with all of these different kinds of stimuli. were Another thing that I really like, because my academic background is psychology, so I'm very interested in psychology. I'm also really, really interested in um um psychiatry.
Speaker: So I don't have a medical degree. but Did you ever contemplate going and adding that to your... Another feather to the bone. Believe me, I've thought about it. I'm probably too old to get into medical school at this point. But um psychiatrists tend to be smart because getting into medical school is really competitive. Yes. So they're not messing around. you know They're normally highly intelligent and they've got interesting ideas that may not cross your path if you're a mere a psychologist like this. So all of this stuff is I'm constantly feeding my brain with all of this stuff, right? So that when a client comes to me and says, what can we do to make our yogurt brand more interesting? Or why do people drink tea?
Speaker: I've got things to say that they've never heard before. They're very That's what keeps it fresh. What's the most interesting thing you've read recently? And I know just maybe asking one. just just yeah it's just It's just constant. I'll just tell you something that crossed my path just the of day.
Speaker: So I've been listening to this psychiatrist on YouTube. His name is Andrew van der Voort. And He was talking about a man who had committed some crimes. And and he he observed of this man, there there were many photos of him and even little video clips, like there was a police body cam clip from a time when he'd been pulled over for some trivial um driving offence.
Speaker: All of this was prior to this this crime that he'd committed. And the psychiatrist observed that he had a particular look about him, ah sort of what you might think of as a sort of wolfish look, you know, very alert. with a rather hungry expression.
Speaker: And ah ah the psychiatrist observed that you see the same and facial arrangements often in um people with certain kinds of addictions, people who are experiencing heroin addiction. Heroin, has the the feeling it delivers at least at first is this feeling of um contentment and everything finally being okay, satisfaction, you know, finally being satiated.
Speaker: But it soon wears off and then the hunger kicks in, you know. And people develop this kind of predatorial appearance, gaunt but hungry and very alert in the eyes. This was very interesting comparison to me. And I also, um then he went a step further and went, oh, by the way, you've just flashed up a couple of drawings. He said in... um ah japanese traditional Japanese um line drawings and in in Japanese mythology there are these demons and here are a couple of pictures these ink drawings. That same sort expression. They are but really interestingly they've got um big bellies and tiny little pinholes for mouths. Isn't that interesting? So what it's depicting is a hunger that can't be satisfied, a big appetite yeah and a tiny little orifice through which to feed with the result that they're always hungry and this is what gives them their predatorial appearance. So what he's observing here is that this yeah this experience but also these encounters with the other people and this idea of a hunger that can't be satiated
Speaker: is and cross-cultural. yeah It exists historically as well as in the present day. And um so when ah we, or indeed the popular press, you know, ah um alert on somebody with a degree of notoriety and comment that they look woolfish,
Speaker: there's ah there's ah there's a whole backstory going on there that might lead to that conclusion. So I'm really interested. Semiotics is about noticing these kind of metaphors. Like if you say that somebody has a wolfish aspect about them, there's ah there's a whole lot of meaning to be unpacked behind that word that helps us really understand our kind of underlying pathology and also why why we're scared of wolves.
Speaker: yeah Because their appetite is insatiable. yeah See what I mean? Interesting. this is the kind of thing that I feed myself with all day long. Yeah. Well, what's so interesting about your career is you turned this academic discipline that most people don't understand or or can't even pronounce into teaching.
Speaker: a commercial powerhouse, if you like. It's something that not only sustains you, but actually has probably no doubt inspired other people in the industry. What do you think that you saw that potentially others hadn't, that hadn't made that jump into commerce from, say, academia or sociology? With any individual who achieves something, there's a ah big element of being in the right place at the right time. And so really the pioneer of British commercial semiotics was another woman, Virginia Valentine. And she was she arrived on the scene quite a long time before I did. So you were 2002, is that correct? Yeah. Well, she was she was certainly the first and she was brave and people kind of...
Speaker: gave her a difficult time and sort of mocked semi-ology and said, oh, it's half an ology. And there was like... Just misunderstood. like too misunderstood because she was female. Of course. So there was like mockery and yeah she had a hard time getting it off the ground, you know. and then And then I arrived on the scene some years later, just around the time that one or two other people in the UK were starting to move as well in the same direction. And I guess what I had going for me...
Speaker: was that, as you can tell, I love theory, but I'm also really good at explaining things in simple language that people can grasp. Yes. yeah And that was something that semiotics had not benefited from previously. do you think previously it was just highly academic and complicated? I love theory, but there can be a lot of long words. And, you know, when i was back when I was doing my PhD, my supervisor, I was but being all stressy like most doctoral students, trying to trying to be, I thought my brief was to try and be the cleverest person in the world. you yeah And my supervisor said to me at the time, look, the trick here is not to take something simple and make it seem complicated. It's actually the inverse. The point is to take difficult things and make them seem easy. yeah And I carried that with me when I came into the commercial world. And that's what I've been doing ever since is try to make people interested by telling them stories about wolves and criminals and heroin objects. But also to make their lives easy by using simple words to explain difficult concepts.
Speaker: Do you remember the first time that a client recognised the return on investment in working with you and how that made you feel? Because I'm assuming, you know, some of your projects go for a long time. So starting in the early 2000s. It was so interesting because when I first started to work commercially,
Speaker: You know, I was one of, let's say, three suppliers in the UK. So it was really, really early days. There was hardly, barely any semiotics around. Every client had to be educated from scratch.
Speaker: Yeah, which is a big job because, as you know, behaviour change right is complicated. So it needs to change now. People are quite educated now, which is great. You know, so you don't have to start from the very beginning so much. But their immediate early questions would be about return on investment. Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, there's me talking about theory and metaphor and stuff like that and perceptions of the body and incisible desires and this kind of thing. and in the early days, people would go, well, how soon are we going to receive return on investment? Like, you know, dollar for dollar, how much are we going to get back in return for how much we spend on you?
Speaker: it' It's a very difficult question to answer, you know. Yes. It was much later when people like Keith s Slight from Unilever came along and said, look, this is how you quantify them what the value we're getting, you know. But at the time, what actually happened was not so much about and return on investment. What happened was that I would just go to people's offices and they'd say, you know, like, how can we describe and explain what this particular dietary supplement is doing? Or or why is it that people drink tea or whatever it is?
Speaker: And I would just talk and freestyle and people would start to look excited. yeah You could see light bulbs coming on above their heads. It's like the entertainment or the the experience of being in the moment. The experience being in the moment. And I found that this was something that I was good at, was creating a world and drawing people into it. And these were people who, we were talking earlier about work being repetitive, you know,
Speaker: if With the best will in the world, if you work on the same brand month in, month out, it's kind of get a bit repetitive. Well, I suppose the value for them is is the learning that they're getting from you so that when they move on to their next role, they're bringing with you this knowledge that you've planted. People felt inspired. Yeah. Not very long after that, I started to type clients out with me and we'd go out and do semiotic field trips together and we' just go and look at things, you know. wish I could go on a semiotic field trip with you. This would be great. you're in Australia, please invite me along. Go to the zoo or go to Christmas fair or go to the airport.
Speaker: And i would describe what I could see as I looked around. Wow. And I found that um people were able to pick it up They were able to and understand them yeah what I was doing. And after a while, I'd go, so look at that over there. Is that an example of XYZ? And I was like, yes, you've got it. Wow. Wow.
Speaker: yeah How rewarding both ways. I know. Yeah, rewarding for you and imparting this knowledge and allowing them to see the world in a different way, but rewarding for them in having access to this new information. You mentioned Unilever before. Tell us about that Shopper app because it's quite a remarkable story. Thank you.
Speaker: Yeah, this was really exciting. Well, I finally got some... um Some solid evidence regarding return on investment. So Unilever has a long history of using me for a fresh insight concerning retail marketing. And Unilever has an app which they developed in-house called Shopper Eyes. And it's used by Unilever staff. It's like a kind of checklist. yeah It's used by Unilever staff to um make things like fixtures and signage better. Let's say that you've got a new brand that you want to place in. Yeah, what are the critical things that you need to do to what do you prove effectiveness? What you do to make your fixture attention-getting and make people want to engage with that and stuff like that, right? Yeah.
Speaker: And then um after a certain point, Keith, who I'd worked with previously at other the companies, Keith moved to Unilever and sort of brought me with him. And um he he said, can you give us some semiotic opinion on what would be your...
Speaker: top 20 things that you you you think a a sort of retail marketer should look for and do with their fixtures and their displays. So I just gave him a bullet-pointed list of stuff and he put it into the app. And with the result that the sales uplift generated by the app doubled. I know. And he kindly got up on stage at a Retail Week conference.
Speaker: And told the audience that I single-handedly doubled the effectiveness of their super marketing app. So there you go. We finally got the hard evidence. Finally. Amazing. and Was that pre the book or post the book? That was around it at the same time. Around the same time. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: What an incredible story. And also to have a client that publicly gives you and the kudos. Yeah, because it doesn't always happen. In that first period of your career as a social um psychologist, do many people cross over into a new path? Like what was that point where you felt like, I want something more?
Speaker: Yeah, i wanted some money. Yeah, you wanted the cash. Well, there's a learning there for everyone. i was broke. You know, I'd been broke my whole life. Yeah. And I went to university rather late, 27, and ah finished my PhD at 33. Well, that's a long time studying so and a long time of having no money. So by the time I was 33, I had research methods coming out the wazoo. What am I going to do with it? yeah No money at all. And so um I looked around for what I could do with a PhD in psychology and I found that the market research industry was kind of absorbing a lot of people like me.
Speaker: So I joined a small market research agency and I worked there for two years in their qualitative department learning about the industry because I knew a lot about semiotics and psychology but nothing about business. Yes, yeah. So I spent two years there learning about um how to speak to clients, how to understand the business language that they were using, and some practical skills like how to how to moderate a focus group and stuff like that, you know. And then i published a... yeah a paper and delivered it at an MRS conference called Demystifying Semiotics. Right. And um the Market Research Society acknowledged it by creating an award for me. And it went it went viral, as we would now say. Wow. And um so the next day I had
Speaker: clients, but I was still so early in my career, I was afraid to speak to clients. and I said something that betrayed my lack of experience. But the next day, the phone was ringing off the hook and had Bank of Scotland and McVitie's and various other the brands. And um i kind of nervously went to see them and explained, they said, give an account of yourself because I'd been name dropping their brands you yeah and using them as examples. And I kind of explained myself and they said, look, you need to start your own business. So i did as I was told and started own business. That's what you did. Yeah. That was 2002.
Speaker: two thousand and three Sign symbols and the art of sort of standing out. After 23 years of arguing that differentiation is one of the most misunderstood concepts, what do you think brand owners are doing wrong?
Speaker: What could they be doing that would be more helpful? want to say it's really important to have courage. There's a reason why startup brands and small sort of direct-to-consumer brands and things like that. Perform so well. often have a better time at striking the right note with people than brands from large corporations like Unilever, Procter & Gamble. Less stakeholders, less dilution of the idea. yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, these organisations are fantastically successful and I give them full credit for their business processes which serve them so well.
Speaker: but But almost inevitably, they're not very adventurous with branding and design because everything's got to be signed off by six people further up in the hierarchy. And things tend to get decided by committee. And so where you've got a lot of people involved in creating something... it will regress towards a conventional norm. So things start to look safe and ah predictable.
Speaker: And so um the the thing that successful brands often lack is the courage to be to be different, to be radical, to c say something provocative. Yeah, it it feels like the my observation of the industry over the last probably 15 years especially has been big businesses used to invest a lot in innovation and I worked with lots of global companies that did that.
Speaker: Now it seems the model is we acquire innovation because in some ways it's actually easier for someone else to pilot, an independent to pilot something, and then for you to acquire that brand and take it into the machine. Have you have you seen that or does that resonate at all? i Yeah, I have seen that. like ah It's really hard to argue with as a business practice. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, someone else is testing it risk-free. You wait for it to be successful and then... Having said that, there are there are certain industries where um innovation is prized. And so ah big ah because I started ah at a time when semiotics was so new, there were no barriers to working in any category that i wanted. And so for the first several years of the having my own business... Each year I would just pick something that I was interested in and talk about it and write little articles and give conference papers and things like that, right? So it was just a random collection of stuff. Like one year it was um public transport. I just wanted to think about public transport. That took me on some amazing adventures. Wow. I had some amazing field work where I was sent to investigate metro systems in all different countries around the world. It was just incredible. How amazing. Amazing, right? And then another year it was pharmaceuticals and that led to years and years of work in pharmaceuticals. And pharmaceutical companies are rich and they are very interested in innovation. And then another time it was um I became very interested in retail banking and that set me up again for years of work. And and again, banks are rich and they're very interested in innovating. And they can also play the long game, right, as in...
Speaker: they can They can stretch it out further. I think in fast-moving consumer goods, especially like in food and beverage, yeah it's sort of short. It's quite a short attention span, whereas there are some industries that can play along the game. Yeah, that's right. I want to ask, do you believe that that true distinctiveness is something that can be engineered or is it that long game? Does it need to be discovered I think it it can be engineered. if you if the people doing the engineering have got some, um I don't know, enough of a strong enough artistic impulse or intuition or they know some things about semiotics. Do you know Supreme, the fashion brand?
Speaker: Supreme, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think they i think they're brilliant and that was entirely engineered. So Supreme with it, it's got this very distinctive um logo with its um blocky sort of text on a red panel. Is it on an angle? Yeah, it's like angle, yeah. It's fascinating to me because that um typeface, it's not even an original font, it's Futura.
Speaker: Right. you know Could have been anything. So why are they why they so successful? because It's partly because they were actually drawing on the work of a female artist, Barbara Kruger, who um was a gifted semiotician.
Speaker: Right. And had a lot of commercial experience. Okay. And she worked in in advertising and worked with brands, but she also was quite critical of consumerism. And so she made some amazing artworks using black, white, and red, and using exactly these typefaces. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: saying things like, I shop, therefore I am, yes for example. yeah A cluster sort of like social commentary art. A famous Barbara Kruger work, right? So she was using the visual semiotics of, I guess, print newspapers. Yes, yeah. With their ability to um grab attention. She was using the semiotics, the splashy headline, attention-getting headline. Yes, yeah. you know So she was she was very knowledgeable about these design gestures that that the that sort of shouted, This is important news. She knew how to create something that looked that way. And then she would use that aesthetic to wrap around provocative messages like, I'm shop, therefore I am. So Supreme drew on her work to create their brunt. And this is partly what led to, so it's got this resting appearance, clean and very resting and also classic and timeless, right? yeah But also Supreme did a lot of things that we have to regard as entirely intentional, but With regard to creating buzz around their brand, so it's never been just about clothes.
Speaker: One thing that I really love and that a lot of people really love about Supreme is their tendency to put their branding on random stuff, right which then sells for tons of money. So yeah one year they did a brick. It was a house brick with the Supreme logo on it. it was very limited edition. They only did a few. Of course. It's almost like the more absurd, the higher the value. Exactly. You're exactly right, right? Another thing that they did, they did ah um a marker pen, which sold for a tonne of money.
Speaker: They did a stepladder, right? A stepladder. Who even your what who is yeah and uses these things, you know? stepladder. And my favourite part about this little aluminium stepladder,
Speaker: was that um it was only two steps high. It was one of the most useless items. with Functional really pieces of merch that anyone, you know. yeah And then they put their branding on it. So this is entirely designed and intentional. but it' it said It's provocative by being very cheeky, right? As in...
Speaker: That balance between art and commerce. There's a ton of art in there. it's ah it's It's a very intentional brand full of conceptual art. And I love that. And so do a lot of people. A lot of people. So, yeah, I absolutely think that you can design differentiation into your brand. But look how much courage that takes. Yeah. You try going to a global corporation and saying, well look, I know you make clothes, but what we want to do is make useless… We're going to get a brick. Get a brick. Yeah. A step lads that's only got two steps and we're going to put your brand on it. Yeah. Trust us. It's going to work. And we're only going to make 12 of these bricks. It comes down to the bravery of actual business culture, right, in terms of like especially large organisations.
Speaker: You've been critical of brands who chase uniqueness at the expense of consistency. Where does that line sit, do you think, terms I know that I'm expected to say, I'm sure a lot of my clients would expect me to say that uniqueness is the most important thing. I actually think that consistency slightly has the edge. And the reason for that is because of the times we we live in. so The reassurance of the the repetition of whatever it is that you're... I'm actually thinking of the effect of private equity firms, actually. In what way? So private equity firms buy companies and strip the value out of them. Yes. With the result that um what that firm is supplying to its customers goes downhill. So there's this there's this well-documented process called entiatification, where things have a tendency to get worse over time. Yeah, you know yeah. Especially when they've changed hands, a lot of heritage brands, this happens a lot in Australia, their acquisition history is like a you know prolific LinkedIn profile of like merge, demerge acquisition. that then got you know Private equity came in, deconstructed it, sold it on, and it's very hard to maintain integrity. When you've had, yeah, so much ownership. There's well-known Australian boot that people used to love all over the world because it was well-made and it had a sheepskin lining. oh yes, um yes, I know the one you mean. Yeah. so Even Australians are confused. Like, that was just...
Speaker: such a schmauzel in terms of um or copyright ownership. but Everything that could go wrong with a brand went wrong there. I know. And and people lose faith in it. And then yeah what was it what was it all for? What's it for? And the same with like in in the UK, chocolate brands, like ah a load of our well-known, well-loved household brands Chocolate biscuit brands have now, in order to comply with the law, have to put um chocolate flavour on their packaging because their product no longer counts as actual chocolate because it's just full of palm oil and not many cocoa solids and not much dairy, you know. Yeah. It's just such a fine line between the integrity of...
Speaker: what you're promising, right, versus the financial implication of that. And ultimately, the integrity is going to go downhill and people will stop loving it the way that they did. So the value will go down of the brand.
Speaker: When consumers really love a brand, and I don't think that happens nearly as often as marketers and brand and owners like to think it does, but when when people really love a brand like they're used to, those boots, for example,
Speaker: or they love a particular fragrance that didn't need to be reformulated, you know, or they really loved a particular household biscuit or something like that, they it's really in their hearts, you know, then that's a precious thing and I don't think it's something you want have to wear. You have sensitive. I'd rather put the price up, actually, and just keep you preserve it in its original beauty. But that's just me. The integrity. Yeah. yeah Well, there's a fine line, isn't there, between...
Speaker: evolving something and every, certainly like the the visual assets of a brand, they do evolve. If you've been around 200 years, of course they evolve, but they should evolve with a sense of sensitivity around um so that you're keeping up to date with with culture, but people aren't necessarily noticing that you're changing. So those little micro changes, which of course don't always have to be the primary changes, sort of logo, they can be how you're manifesting and showing up. But we always tell clients, if you leave that gap too long, where you have not sort of kept pace with culture, and it could be you know anything, then you're in a high risk situation, right? Because then you risk losing loyalists because the degree of change that you need to make to keep pace has now gone wrong. 10-year gap or a 15-year gap and yeah suddenly you're in you're in trouble and this is a chunk of the work that I do i guess because I'm I'm not at the start of my career I've been around a long time ah so I know some I've seen brands fail and I've seen other other brands survive over the long term and so quite a lot of the work that I do is with well-established brands that need to refresh themselves to attract new younger customers and so you've got to play this balancing game between Emerging consumers and loyalists. Yeah, being relevant, but at the same time, you don't want to just dispense with your heritage and ah upset your loyalists. So you want to preserve what you've got, but also try and be relevant and timely as well. And that's that's quite a challenge depending on what your category is. So, for example, I do a lot of work with whiskey. So whiskey is very focused on its own heritage. Do you like whiskey?
Speaker: I like the idea of whiskey. Just not the taste of whiskey. Yeah, you like the narrative of whiskey, but... I know a lot about the narratives around whiskey, yeah. It's um it's it's not my preferred drink. Let me think.
Speaker: I quite like gin, actually. Quite like gin, but my experience, years of experience in whiskey. Yeah, well, it's quite rich, fertile area of storytelling, isn't it? So fascinating. Yeah, and also the ritual in it. I mean, that's what think is interesting about the alcohol industry. Obviously, there's downsides to the alcohol industry, but it is very fertile, high engagement, like high consumer engagement space where people are making choices that are very intentional versus, you know, potentially lower engagement bases like bread, milk, you know, commodity food.
Speaker: I want to ask, what's the most expensive semi-autic mistake that you've watched a brand make? So not even in your own client realm, but where you've seen, you know, a PR ah disaster and you've thought, why did you do that? Like what what is the most common mistake that people probably should avoid?
Speaker: And is it making too much of a dramatic change? Sometimes there are misfortunes that are hard to avoid. Hmm. Is that in process, do you think, or in management? I'm reminded of the yeah um the misfortunes experienced by Burberry, with that distinctive Burberry pattern yeah in its woven fabric. And it had such strong British heritage. It was used by the royal family, et cetera, et cetera. And then there was suddenly a period where and it became fashionable,
Speaker: amongst certain segments of the British public who were, shall we say, unsavoury. Right. And so you had football hooligans and people who were turning up to football matches looking for a fight and decked out in in their bedroom from head to toe. and And it dragged the brand right down market. It gave the brand something to really, really worry about. And so how does a brand stop that though? Because once you're, I mean, you can't so embarrassing you can't control who's purchasing you and you can continue to change the price point, but not even that is of is going to dictate who's going to buy. So it's a difficult dilemma to be in.
Speaker: They changed design directors a couple of times. Yes. Until they eventually started to um to produce items, very expensive items, that managed to bridge that gap we were just talking about where they managed to look new and yet old at the same time. Yeah, I know. They reworked their the bee into a new pattern, so moving away from yeah sort of the plaid into exactly something else. So trying to pivot the meaning yeah potentially. Yeah, that's right. And they finally succeeded. as It took a while, but they eventually got there. Yeah, well, as we said before, and change takes time, right? It does. sometimes it's about playing the long game. Playing the long game. Speaking of which, that is a beautiful segue into speaking about leadership in a male field. And I'm not sure if this is something that you consciously think about, but marketing science has historically been developed defaulting to to male expertise and you've spent you know a long time, over 23 years, being that exception. What does that feel like to be the exception? And you've mentioned a few really um inspiring women that have forged the the path, but I imagine it is still a very male-dominated...
Speaker: in It can be, especially with the arrival of AI. There are so many men out there going, oh, yes, we can automate what you're doing. And we've, you know, we've, um you know, invented a software tool that that can that can do everything you've all already thought of.
Speaker: it's always It's always the men that do this stuff, you know. So i think that... um My policy throughout my career has been to realise that um as a woman, the odds are stacked against you.
Speaker: So you can succeed on your own raw talent or whatever it might be, or there's an element of being in the right place at the right time, like I mentioned earlier. But also the odds are really stacked against you as they offer women in any area of life. And so if you look at, for example, the history of literature, why are all the big names men, you know? Yeah. Why is it men who have been praise? Even though know that often the females were in the background writing. mean, there's a lot of questions around, you know, Shakespeare and... I know. don't know if you've read that book. I can't remember what it's called. The Fitzgeralds, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Yeah.
Speaker: In Australia, our um history of female graphic design and artists is very much the same. Yes. Often published under the brothers or the ah father's or the husband's name, but it was the female's work. Exactly. And and then there are this big question about why if we get, London's full of art museums and you can go into any of them and you'll find that, and you know, 90% of the works in there are made by men. Why? White men. Why? Right. Yeah, that's very true as well, right? So where are all the women? So yeah yeah you're going to be're going to be sidelined and your achievements will be glossed over.
Speaker: People will credit men with thinking of things that you that were your idea. if you're If you're confident about saying what you've achieved, a man will be told that he's got star quality. A woman will be told that she's showing off and she needs to be taken down a peg or two. Yes. so yeah You've got all of this stacked against you. It's really hard. At one point I i had stuff and I learned that a hard lesson that you could have junior male stuff and people will talk to them first and assume that they are your boss.
Speaker: So and my strategy has been to find women, reach out to them, network with them, teach and um lift up women wherever wherever they are and form relationships with them. Because when you help women, they remember and their loyalty. Well, that is the very premise of this podcast is giving voice and platform to you know firstly an eclectic, diverse group of women across disciplines that are ah sort of centred around communication and behaviour. But for that very reason of shining a light versus...
Speaker: Casting a shadow. Exactly. So ah I found that, you you know, you might be as a woman, you might be the first person doing a particular thing in your field, but there will be women doing something similar in other industries yeah or doing something similar in other countries or um in the literature that you're reading, there will be, yes, there's all these men who are the big names and the founding fathers of whatever it is, but also take the time to look deeper and find the women. Semiotics is full of women if you care to look for them. And then also look behind you because there will be women in your industry, in your country, who would love to do what you do. And if you reach out to them and give them a helping hand,
Speaker: They'll be loyal supporters and some of them may eventually become your clients. Rally together. I mean, that is my experience of most women. There's this misconception, you know, that that benefits the patriarchy that women are always against other women. But that is actually not my experience. I feel like that's a false construct. Yeah, it's not my experience either. I think that a lot of people...
Speaker: you A patriarchal society benefits from pitting women against yeah each other. But also we're raised to be pro-social, think. And look how women easily bond with each other. yeah The culture of business is very masculine and very you're supposed to compete and be aggressive and talk about impact and stuff like that. But ah you there's no... there's no um law that says that you have to behave like that and you can actually choose to be collaborative, cooperative. You can choose to bring a lot of women into your circle. Yeah. So I think that's something you can design in to your career. Yeah, by design. Yeah. So what would your advice be
Speaker: to women who are in a room feeling like they're the only woman in the room without having having to wait 30 years to have sets and boundaries and have conviction?
Speaker: I think that um what I want to say comes back to and the question that you asked me earlier about what it was like in the early days of semiotics and I wanted to convince clients and it was too early in in the history of commercial semiotics to ask about things like return on investment. so the assets that i discovered that I had was the um ability to talk about mundane, everyday things like the client's brand of laundry detergent, let's say, yeah or their savings account or whatever it was, or family car.
Speaker: ah had the ability to talk about those things and tell stories about them in a way that was... um illuminating and refreshing and that would make people nod enthusiastically and smile and sit up and look alert and that could draw them in. It's like a magnetic quality to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that I just knew a lot about semiotics and it gave me a point of difference. It meant that I was reliably interesting, yeah on demand. On demand. So I think that as a woman, if you find yourself as the only um the only woman in the room,
Speaker: Use your strengths in the sense of whatever it is that you're an expert in, use that. But also be assured that all those men probably find you actually enjoyable to look at and listen to. Be around. yeah And so use the space, speak, be charming, be interesting.
Speaker: Share what you know, create something beautiful and draw them in. Draw them in. I want to hear more. i I like that. What do you think in your in your field specifically, what do you think will encourage more women to to join and how have you seen that change?
Speaker: I think there are a lot of women in semiotics. I think that in commercial semiotics there are probably more women than there are men. It's a... ah ah discipline which is not very mechanistic.
Speaker: There's a lot of subtlety in semiotics and it requires a degree of sensitivity and ability to read between the lines. yes And I think that is something that women are well suited to. Again, because of how we're raised, we're quite good at... um We're credited with having a lot of emotional intelligence. And I want to say it's kind of a survival strategy as well so because on in generally speaking...
Speaker: We're ah not as able to defend ourselves physically as men are. So i men are somewhat of a threat, right? Women have had to outwit versus outforce. Yes, think most women are very adept at um ah sensing, being able to read the room, sensing the emotional pitch of a situation.
Speaker: we can tell when things are starting to go wrong before anything happens. The warning signs are there. So all of this sensitivity and ability to understand context and to notice subtle signals and to read between the lines, all of that sets you up for being fantastic at semiotic. Yeah, well, I'm glad to to hear that it's improving. So again, I think that and right now AI tends to be dominated by men, although I want to give a lot of credit to the fabulous women that I've worked with at ah Warner Brothers and especially Reach. So Reach is... um an American agency, and ah they are my client.
Speaker: And ah so I want to say a special hello and thanks to Trish Chapin Bailey at Reach, who we've collaborated extensively. ah And are they a communications agency, ads, brand? What sort of agency are they?
Speaker: They're basically an insight agency. Gotcha. And they have a sister company called Rival Tech. Okay. I love the name, so it's good semi-autic. Tech, yeah. And ah Rival Tech makes the AI products that they use. Gotcha. So I work closely with Trish and with a guy called Keith at Rival Tech. And we make things together using her knowledge of, I guess, market research methods. yes Yeah. His knowledge of technology and my knowledge of semiotics. And we build things together.
Speaker: How exciting. And then Warner Brothers gets excited and pays pays money for it. Yeah. And do you think there's this is an exciting time in the industry for you or does it come with a degree of caution when we talk about AI?
Speaker: I am excited. It's moving me very quickly. That's what excites me about that. It's moving very quickly. We're still at a very early stage as humans in our ability to appreciate what we can do with it. Yes.
Speaker: So I was at the Quirks event in London recently. yeah What is the Quirks event? I'd say market research and an event. It's a global event of which there's a London branch. And right now, the market research industry is um using AI in a very unimaginative way.
Speaker: It's all about, well, we've got synthetic moderators now and we can we can do loads and loads of ah depth interviews using chatbots. Okay, well, that sounds fabulous. know So we're at a very, I want to say, primitive stage in the way that we think about what AI is for and what we can do with it. And meanwhile, AI evolving evolving faster than our ability to um imagine applications. Yes. So i think things will become more interesting over time as we get past these initial stages of, oh, let's just use it to ask questions. Yeah. I feel like that sentiment you just spoke to is probably why so many people feel anxious about AI because it it feels like literally overnight there's there's something new or something's changed or something that wasn't possible two weeks ago is now completely possible. I think that speed, the acceleration has been feels...
Speaker: as a human as being faster than any time I certainly remember in my 50 years. But, yeah. Yeah, it's amazing, right? I mean, it's only it's only a handful of years since i wrote a rather provocative paper which turned into a chapter in someone's book ah describing the things that AI was not capable of doing compared to a human analyst. And does that still ring true? No, it's not true anymore. Yeah. and just ah there I pointed out about 10 things that humans could do but that um software couldn't. One of those things was um the early AI tools where you could show them an image and they could pick out what was in the image, but they were not able to say what was missing.
Speaker: Sure. Now they can Now they can. A good AI tool can tell you what's not in the picture as well as what is in the picture. Wow. You see what I mean? Yeah. So im I'm happy to say that it's evolving. I'm not worried because... i As you can tell, more and I've managed to fill my head with this constant stream of new ideas and and constantly engaging in these thought experiments and crash testing metaphors and things like that. and it keeps me very busy. You're going to have a hard time replicating that using AI. yeah So that's that there's there's more to much more to semiotics than decoding visual signs and symbols. However, what we can do as as human thinkers and practitioners of semiotics is work with people like Trish at Reach and Rival Tech and work with Warner Brothers to make market research methods um exciting in ways that wouldn't previously have been possible. So what what they're doing, which i I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about it really, but making a tool that... um can procedurally generate images that um consumers will um use in a reliable and predictable way to express certain kinds of emotions. right That's very exciting. yeah We couldn't have done that.
Speaker: before AI and we couldn't have done it without semiotics. Is it a replacement for semiotics? It's not. no It's a very small piece of semiotics, but it's a small piece that in the right hands creates something big and new and is a good use of AI. But it's also the reason why I'm not worried about it because i spent 25 years saying there's more where that came from and there always is. There's always more.
Speaker: Yeah. And in projects like that, because you spoke about philosophy, are there what are the ethical considerations and and are there experts that get engaged in those sorts of projects looking at from an ethical perspective? So interesting. I think, yes, I do think there are ethical considerations.
Speaker: at risk of At risk of, you know, being provocative and upsicking people, i I think that there are ethical considerations around using AI to make ah chatbots with human-looking avatars that interview people. Yeah, where you're misleading people. I've got a bit of a concern about that. I was at a presentation the other day and the company said that... ah Essentially said that we can make our kind of AI generated chatbots more relatable and get more information out of people by allowing the respondent to choose how they want the avatar to look. Right. So if you're South Asian, you can choose an avatar that looks like you. And the idea was that, well, this makes the respondent more comfortable and then they'll share more information. But this was making a bit twitchy from a ethics point of view. And I kind of wanted to... In my head, I was thinking... that if I were to give advice to somebody who's going to be a market research respondent and be interviewed by one of these avatars, chatbots with an avatar, and you've got some control in deciding what the avatar is going to look like, make it look like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump, because it might make you a bit more cautious and circumspect about what you're feeling. There's that balance of emotional comfort versus exploitation. Yeah, just think.
Speaker: I want to ask before we finish about reflecting on 21-year-old Rachel. What do you think she might have wanted to hear that she didn't hear as a younger version of herself?
Speaker: I had a very little idea of what a big world it was out there. This was pre-internet, of course. Yes. ah The world's a different place now. When I was younger, i was I was broke and I lived in a fairly small world. I hadn't been to university. That was still some years away. yeah There were no things like take your daughter to work day, those sorts of institutions, didn't it? There was nothing modelled for you. I had very few models. Yeah. And what I've learned now is that um semiotics, with its with its emphasis on ah noticing details, being able to identify patterns, willingness to think ah experimentally, if you're good at semiotics, you probably could have any number of career paths open to you. You could be a psychiatrist, you could probably make a great fantastic detective, you could be an artist.
Speaker: You could be a marketer. There are a lot of things that this skill set is useful for. And I had no idea about any of that. If I could record a video now and show it to myself at 21, she would be absolutely blown away by what i was saying. She would think that she'd been Would she have thought it was possible to achieve what you have achieved? I guess within, yeah, within a firm, like now you can go on YouTube and watch, um like, for example, what a day in the life of being a... Any career, yeah. Any career. You can watch you can watch videos of actually what it's like, what do people do all day and then how do you get there. So there was none of that around when I was young and I would have really benefited from so seeing the possibility. Yeah. Yeah, I really love that.
Speaker: Well, thank you, Rachel, for firstly being the boss woman that we believe you are and for showing us that your version of Biting Big and this sense of read, create, give and give thanks, how that's impacted your choice and your career, because I think that's really inspiring for everyone that's going to listen to this and and hopefully new people that we'll reach out to. This podcast is produced by women um for everyone, really. And to show our gratitude, we've donated £250 on your behalf. And you've chosen a charity that's very dear to you and your sister.
Speaker: You did a sponsored trek for charity Copperfield to raise money. Tell us a little bit about Copperfield and its importance to you you. You made my sister so happy. ah My sister's a survivor of breast cancer.
Speaker: and Shout out to your sister. What's her name? Thank you. Her name's Elizabeth. Shout out to Elizabeth. Very strong. Yeah. it's It's not an easy thing to deal with. And I've worked on projects concerning cancer for pharmaceutical companies, so I know a bit about it from a market research point of view as well. And one thing that I've learned is that um there's a period where you've been discharged from treatment and everybody around you expects you to kind of celebrate and go, oh, good, I'm cured, i'm back to normal. It's not like that. Yeah. The period after were discharged from treatment can really feel like you've been you've been through the kind of sausage machine and spat out the other end and now you don't know what to do with yourself and you're terrified that it's going to come back, you know. Yeah. And you've been disconnected, no doubt, from work or from normal life. Oh, awful. People lose their jobs and just those their marriages suffer and all sorts of terrible things happen, right? And then what are you supposed to do, you know? So my my sister's incredible and she's resilient and brave and she's um ah invested a lot of energy in um fundraising. And she's also great at making connections with women. And so yeah she does a lot of fundraising activities for Copperfield, a breast cancer charity. Yeah. And Anne has had really fantastic sort of um feminist solidarity experiences with are the women who are doing the same thing. And they're focused, Copperfield are very focused on young women. Is that is that true? yeah Breast cancer is affecting women at younger and younger ages. Yeah.
Speaker: So they sort of raising awareness earlier, because I think there is a misconception that breast cancer is sort of 50 plus. That's right. you know, it's increasingly affecting younger women. So she does a lot of these kind of sponsored um walks and things like that. And so every time there's an event, she's got to go around and ask people for sponsorship. And honestly, she was getting to the point where she was feeling like maybe people are tired of hearing from her. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And then you sort of giving to yes donated um ah the fulsome that she needed to raise to take part in this Copperfield event and just wiped out, and in a sense, the infancy before her need ago utter stroke. Begging for for more. She was overjoyed. ah I didn't tell her in advance it was going to happen. Right. She just looked on her um thing and then saw on her just giving page one day and there was this huge donation from you.
Speaker: And all her problems were solved. couldn't believe what happened. So thank you. The least we could do. From both of us. Oh, you're welcome. Well, thank you for being on today. I'll finish up by saying I'm your host, Amber Bonney. And until next episode, may you all bite big, chew like hell.
Speaker: Thank you. Thank you.
