New book: Creating Value, The Theory and Practice of Marketing Semiotic Research, by Laura Oswald

Creating Value, The Theory and Practice of Marketing Semiotic Research (Oxford 2015) explains how brands draw actual market value from thecultural myths, social networks, and intangible experiences consumers invest in marketing signs, symbols, and rituals. It guides readers through the process of managing brand value by means of consumer ethnography, cultural analysis, design research, and media strategy.

Creating Value extends the discussion begun Marketing Semiotics: Signs, Strategies, and Brand Value (2012) to post-structural debates related to ethnographic performance, multicultural consumer identity, the digitalized consumer, and hetero-topic experiences of consumer space. By applying semiotics to the everyday world of the marketplace, the book makes sense of the semiotics discipline, which is often mystified by technical jargon and hair-splitting debate in the academic literature. The book also provides practitioners, professors, and students of semiotics with a practical guide to the methods used in semiotic research in a wide range of contexts, from brand strategy and advertising to retail design and multimedia marketing.