DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-064

Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano, Italy

giacomo.festi@gmail.com

Abstract

Being in the position of both teaching Semiotics and doing research inside the academic domain and working as a consultant for an agency of communication (see Festi 2012), I would like to show how the internal develop­ment of the semiotic discipline, in term of methodology and concepts, could enhance the contribution of semi­otics in the qualitative marketing research. As a case of study I will present the frame of a huge research about food trends, aimed at constituting a big platform, mapping the transformations in the food domain that could be used with different brands as a ground of reflection for marketing strategic planning.

Instead of being the first to detect new possible trends inside the social life, the semiotician could help, on the contrary, to better interpret the different dimensions involved inside an already recognized trend, in order to display the potentiality of the trend itself. A food trend, actually, can be referred to single figures (in the hjelmslevian meaning) like colors (in 2009, the purple foods were trendy...), to ingredients (for instance the trend of aloe), to specific dishes, to technologies of preparation of food (accessible sous-vide machines), to strategies of consumption or even to national cuisines (just to quote some of the most common topics in food trends). The different “aboutness” of the trend call for more interpretation about not only the values involved, but mainly the forms of connections among the different levels of organization of meaning (following the Fon­tanille model, 2008).

Presenting this general frame for the trend analysis, I will also question the dynamic of transformation of some trend, like the food trucks in US or the sharing of food photos at the place of consumption.

This contribution aims finally to show how to pass from a trend, as reconfigured in a semiotic modeling, to a brand strategy, in term of managing of identity dynamics.

1. Introduction

Keeping together academic research and consultant activity in the field of communication, it could lead to explore the consequences of the elaboration of a semiotics of cultures and identities for marketing practices. The expression “semiotics of cultures and identities” has to be referred here to the development in Italy and mainly in France of a semiotic approach that try to dialogue with traditionally sociological and anthropological questions, namely with the problem of characterizing meanings inside practices. One major reference is the book Pratiques sémiotiques by Jacques Fontanille (2008), where the author sketches a whole project of research layering different semiotics-objects (from signs, to text, objects, practices, strategies and forms of life) inside the complex dynamics of the social dimension, also articulating the forms of interaction (as a rhetoric functioning) among the multiple levels. This contribution can be accompanied by many other authors, for the purposes of this research being relevant the work of Pierluigi Basso Fossali. In Basso Fossali (2009, ch. 8), particularly, a seminal theoretical reflection about trends is present, which is the main topic of our discourse, as applied to the food domain. We are actually going to show a way to approach the quite traditional marketing topic of the trend from a specific semiotic perspective, moving through three different steps: first of all, we will look at the ways trends are becoming part of a public widespread discourse, characterizing three different regimes of discourse of the trend. Secondly, we will display the three major models of interpretation of trends, also proposing a semiotic insight. Finally, we will discuss more in depth an example of trend analysis, opening a comparative dimension involving different social phenomena and discussing the role of the semiotic sight.

2. Three discursive regimes for the trend

The topic of the trend is not only a relevant concept for marketing, since it fully became part of a public discourse, in this metasemiotic activities of human groups that constantly monitor and interpret themselves. We could say that trends are forms of re-valorization of something since they are granting a differential power. Being trendy means having chance to be perceived, since not so many share the trend yet. When something passes from being trendy to being mainstream, the high diffusion coexists with a low intensity in the perception of this social form, i.e. no one will notice it. We are just suggesting a semantic tensive background to introduce us to the topic of trend[1]. First of all, however, we would like to characterize three different ways, three regimes of discourse of the trend, three ways of presence of this concept inside the social life, in this nearly foucaultian survey. The first regime is the one identified by the daily newspapers, where the trends are generally anchored to a specific social phenomenon, explicitly tagged as “trendy”. Typically, the trend is characterized as an attractor of interest in a reflexive interpretation of the social. After the presentation of the phenomenon, there is not the necessity to build an interpretative frame of it, but some suggestions can eventually appear. I had occasion to work on a corpus of news articles about different trends, trying to discover the common aspects of the discourses. To sum up, we can find a phenomenological attestation of the trend, with a narrative counterpart since the trend needs to be made perceptible for the reader. The power of the figurative dimension, supporting the narrative one, is exactly offering a perceivable access to the trend. What follows, is the discussion about the eventual process of diffusion of the trend and finally some elements of interpretation can or not be present, in this quite canonical syntactic organization. The world of journalism, then, amplifies something that someone else already qualified or labeled as trendy, supposing a kind of iconisation or stabilization of the phenomenon, at least sufficient to transform it into something that can become a news. It is worth to point out again that trends are already part of the reflexive dimension of the culture, they witness a cognitive need that is also nourishing a passion for monitoring. Post-modern societies are strongly cultivating this kind of passion[2]. Once a trend appears, we need some reason about its plausibility and its potentiality to be individually assumed. The journalism is interested in following these movements of continuous variation inside the social, especially in their inedited or innovative character. Nevertheless, in daily journalism, the trend is not interpreted in the frame of a wider system of relationships, which is not the aim of that kind of discourse.

Beyond the newspaper, we find a second regime of discourse, the one witnessed by the specialized press about food, on paper or, especially, on the web, that starts to treat in a slightly different way the tendencies. The widespread attention about food made grow what is now a kind of ritual appointment, a sort of multimedia genre: at the end of each year, a competition in publishing the food trends for the year incoming is largely present, with long lists of expected or already attested tendencies. Is the web that is mainly devoted to this exercise, since websites can display also a lot of images inside a gallery, as evidences of the presented trend. Websites like Epicurious, Foodlovers, but also the food section of The Huffington Post or The Guardian witness the growing number of virtual spaces making place to food social dynamics. We move in this case from the single and isolated phenomenon, to a plurality of social transformations. In these lists, there are two point that is worth to underline: from one side, the phenomena that can be qualified as trendy are very different, what means that there is a semantic heterogeneity in their constitution. Adopting the aforementioned Fontanille model, proposing different layers of immanence, we move from simple signs, like a color that can become the topic of the trend (in 2011, it was the moment of the purple food for instance[3]), to ingredients (their materiality makes relevant the level of immanence of the object), to specific dishes (to be read as texts, since they display a grammar of combinations), to practices of consumption, to specific cuisines (more directly readable in term of form of life that are present inside the approach of that cuisine), etc. The “what is trendy”, in a trend, is attributed to configurations that are very distant one from the other. On another side, what is the trendy aspect in the trend, what is justifying the trend movement, remains an open question, calling for further interpretation. If you take a very simple example, the trend of the food trucks that exploded in US in the last years of the last decade[4], it is not immediately evident which aspects were trendy. To quote some of the features that has been read as trendy, we move from the mobile consumption, to the use of social media like Twitter to find out where was parking your preferred truck; or we switch from the kind of new fusion cuisines that started to be proposed, to the kind of new consumption on the go. As a consequence, what is trendy in a trend has clearly to be interpreted.

Coming back to these lists, sometimes the accumulations of social phenomena are so precise and articulated that − we could argue − are doing concurrency to the communication agencies or research institutes, that social actors that represent the third regime of discourse. It has to be added that they are also part of a social public world, since, often, some section of their researches about trends can be presented or published, online or offline, making these lasts become more visible and not just hiding them as invisible tools for marketing practices.

In the case of qualitative research, the attempt to treat the multiplicity of the trends detected with an homogeneous methodology, creating some forms of structuration of the materials, is what specifies this further regime. The point here is the integration of the identity pole: under the diversity of the manifestations of trends, at some point they participate to the redefinition of the social identities. In that way, inside the marketing research, a methodological and epistemological jump can be noticed: trends thematize identities or lifestyles. A second typical operation made by the most interesting approaches consists in abstracting, from actual trends, some system of relationships (involving values) that could be generalized, in order to project that patterns into other domains, what explains the immediate strategic valence of this option. Such a way to work is exemplar in the approach of the Italian FutureLab, ruled by the sociologist Francesco Morace (see 2011), who implicitly is adopting a configurational paradigm. In this model, it's about configuring a pattern of quite abstract relationships that become a kind of wildcard to be played inside different cultural spheres, after having of course been sufficiently original and creative in denominating the trend in a smart way.

It is quite a paradox, but this work of the agencies about trends is not supported by a consistent literature. One of the few important references is the work of the sociologist Vejlgaard, who wrote Anatomy of a Trend in 2007. In that book, he tries to let certain invariants in different social processes of changing emerge. Even if the perspective is a sociological one, it can be considered a good premise to a possible semiotization of the trends, since he is interested in the shape of the process and in the way the transformations involve certain kind of identities, modifying their relationships during the process. He discusses different historical cases of big international change (the introduction of the jeans, the launch of the I-pod, the spread of the motocycle, the explosion of beer consumption in some countries) and arrive to determine a general syntax of the trend, from incubation in specific places (typically the big metropolis all around the world), to explosion, to mediatization, to a progressive diffusion until the trend becomes mainstream. After this last transition, the trendy character is no more perceived.

He also sketches a portrait of the social identities that are distributed inside a set where the different attitudes toward the trend are manifested. As a consequence, the role of the trendsetter, the follower, the early mainstreamer and the conservative appear. The relevant point is that these forms of life are determined only by the degree of assumption of the trend, composing this restricted set of possibilities. As a further element, Vejlgaard distinguishes trend from short fashion, using as differential traits the temporal extension (restricted in the case of the short fashion) and the capability of a change to become engine of markets, to the level of production and not only of consumption (one of the main feature of the trend). His approach, finally, generalizes the process of the trend that makes it indifferent to any eventual specificity of the social and meaningful phenomena involved during the process itself. We could say that he, at the end, reduces the trend process to a fashion system. An already given paradigm of identities, a given syntax of the process: only the social substance that is invested by this shape is changing.

3. Interpretative models of trends

After the presentation of the three discursive regimes of the trend, it is worth noting that we could map how the trends are interpreted and supposed to work, generating three other models. The simplest case is the pure fashion system. An example can be the aforementioned thematization of the purple color of food for Food-Network. It is about a pure fashion system because the range of variability is already given, it’s only about passing from a dominant position to another one, in a play of substitutions and repechage. Who is representing the trend in this way, can try, in some case, to find out a form of rooting (in the quoted case, the author opens on the website an historical parenthesis about the symbolic valences of purple) but this is only a rhetorical operation, since it is just masking the merely differential functioning of the trend. The purple was an option, potentially trendy, because was a disposable choice inside the paradigm of the usable colors.

A second model works on the extension of the paradigm: the trend lets appear new cases that immediately can be re-embedded inside a relatively closed system. The novelty effect is what counts in this case. For instance, following the point of view of the culinary practices of preparation of food, the technological innovation (take the trend of the “accessible sous-vide” as an example[5]) extends the possibilities of cooking and is then part of this second modality of innovation.

The third and last case concerns innovation and experimentation, which involves a kind of exit from already known paradigms and require to follow the phenomenon in the way is interpreted by the social actors that are part of it. It is as if we were in presence of a live semiotic production, a kind of social laboratory. If a genealogy of this type of trends is still and always possible (and even wished), their destiny is not. The experimental character is immanent to the trend: we don’t know what that process will socially generate and the only chance is to follow the progressive determinations that it will eventually produce, its capability to be articulated with other practices and above all its capacity to intercept alternative forms of file. Following again the suggestions of Basso Fossali, the trend, in this case, presents a constitutive play, being assumed by the social actors in many different ways. Trends of this type let explode their semiotic complexity, given by the way the different levels of constitution of meanings are combined or recombined. They are meanings conglomerates or formations that require an interpretative effort in order to grasp the internal tensions and the modalities of articulations. The “what is trendy” in a trend, the phenomenon pointed at, is exactly an open question. At that moment, finally, the semiotic skill can operate and propose its contribution.

The lesson we take from this transition through different models about trends is first of all that there is no need to find out or invent new original trends: not only semiotics is not a statistical discipline like could be sociology, but the trends that are already thematized as such in one of the three discursive spaces present inside the social, are implicitly asking for an effort of articulation and interpretation, emphasizing the semiotic possibility to follow and describe the mechanisms of meaning. Once you decide to work on a specific trend, the relevant point is the decision about the strategy of analysis, especially observing which entry level (in the Fontanille model) could be the most interesting from a methodological point of view. If we are analyzing an app, as in our following case, the main problem is articulating the object properties, the interface, with the practices and the strategies of use. The further step is the attempt to consider how identities are involved and if some “form of life effect” is present. The last step, finally, is the extraction of some core feature of the trend, in order to see if they can be exported.

4. Analyzing trends: the case of Foodspotting

Let’s arrive to discuss more in depth an example of trend without presenting here, more in general, the frame of the transformations inside the food domain, i.e. the values that became dominant, mainstream or trendy[6]. The only aspect we would like to recall is that inside the food domain contradictory trends take place at the same moment, stressing, as a consequence, contradictory valorizations. This is just to reveal the living character of a culture that is not a fixed monument. These paradoxical pushes can be seen for instance in the opposition between trends that insist on the affective body (the comfort or the soul food, as is typically labeled) and others that evocate more the pragmatic body (the functional food); furthermore, we can observe trends that work on transitive valorizations (the ethical aim of sustainability) and other on reflexive ones (the search for new testing experience), just to quote the most visible ones.

One macrotrend inside the food domain has to do with the changing forms of sharing meals and food experiences, especially thanks to new technologies and media, that are clearly splitting the actual experience of food (eating) from the projected linguistic and discursive existence on a digital platform (the participation to a virtual community).

We will focus now on the example of an app that became quite popular in US after its introduction in 2010, recording 800.000 downloads in a few months, with a lot of following initiatives connected with the world created around the app[7]. Its name is Foodspotting, an app dedicated to photograph food all around the world. The app contains a big database collecting users photos restricted to the dishes (not people, not the places), a database that can obviously be consulted by the users. How this app is participating to the changing world of food, becoming trendy? How is redetermining food identities or the identity of the user/consumer?

This is not the place to discuss the first methodological step of the analysis, the deconstruction of the interface of the app[8], so, we prefer to consider how the app participate to promote specific practices. In the first release of the app, it was clear that each user could become a potential cataloger, which did not seem an intriguing perspective. You could “spot” a dish and photograph it, maybe being the first to record that dish in that specific place. The photo become part of the community where it can be appreciated or commented by others with a set of predetermined possibilities (three buttons: “like it”, “want it”, “tried it”). When you take the photo, the social dimension of the community is only virtualized, since the others are not necessarily connected and the app is supposed to work in a desynchronized modality. One main point is that Foodspotting, initially, promoted a kind of pioneer being part of the enterprise of creating a unique database containing all the dishes of the world. The user had the chance to be the first to document a specific dish, feeling himself like a kind of explorer that could refresh his/her own relationship with the nondomestic consumption. Such a pioneering dimension is crucial in the key of the experimentation of the identities inside the trend. Indeed, Foodspotting intended to bypass the more traditional and institutional forms of the gastronomic guide, highly engaging in this explicit polemics. In short, no more discursive mediations that tell you something about the identity of the place (the restaurant) or of the chef, on the contrary, you are immediately put in the straight presence of the dish. The technology is introduced in the most intimate contact with food, the moment just before the consumption. Taking into consideration the life of the app, it is possible to argue that the transition to the 3.0 version of the interface was the moment of conversion of Foodspotting from being trendy to being mainstream (also after the arrival of Instagram). Not surprisingly, they changed the relationship between the two main actions inscribed into the interface, taking photos or consulting the database. They equalized the two, changing also the logo, suggesting that the taking of photos could be just an option, not the main goal of the app, like it was in the first version of the app. What happened, actually, is that people started to use Foodspotting exactly like a substitute of a guide, being less interested in taking photos during the meal.

There are many aspects in this phenomenon that should be considered for our purposes. One is that the remediation of the dish[9], let’s say, monumentalize it without debating it. The photo fixes an idealtype and exclude the taste from the relationship with the dishes. There is a complete vanishing of a critical gastronomical dimension and the photographic act replicate a standard solution, under the sign of a “having-to-do”.

A further step in the trend deconstruction is the extraction of the core structural elements. In this case, where are they? I would say that the crucial pattern is the remediation of a previously non mediated moment (the effective consumption of food) and the enhancing of the coalescence between the digital life and the actual experience. The first point is what justified this pioneer form of life of the foodspotter, the tabula rasa of the gastronomic knowledge and the recreation of a photographic community of food enthusiasts. A kind of verification of this feature extraction is the development of a countertrend, the resistance to the over-mediatization of the restaurant experience. Some restaurants (starting in NY City) decided to display, on the entrance window, the poster “deinstagrammed restaurant”.

Once we get the general features of the trend, we can develop unusual comparisons looking for similar or dissimilar patterns inside different social phenomena. For instance, another trendy social transformation, connected again with the new media, has been related to the launch and development of the website “fridge watcher”. The main idea is to take a photo of one's own fridge in order to witness some aspects of a personal identity (a kind of transposition of the motto “tell me what you eat and I will say who you are”). In this case, in analogy with Foodspotting, the remediation has been introduced in an intimate and original space, before consumption, with the idea of a direct contact with an identity, a revelation effect of a very personal place. Here again, a community aspect is involved, and the photographic act is the proactive element aggregating people. This is to say that the core feature of a trend, quite abstract in their relational pattern, can be embedded inside apparently very different or distant social phenomena.

Again, let's consider the trend, inside the restaurant world, that had to do with the introduction of massive quantity of technology in the space of the table. Screens could appear under the dish, where you could “spy” the chef preparing your dish, live, inside the kitchen, monitored by a camera, like in a realty show. Inedited remediation, again, of a moment anticipating the consumption, again. The same features are then recurrent and make probably evident that the gastronomic world is exploring − is the laboratorial dimension of the social evoked before − new ways of mediatization of the practices linked to the acquisition, the preparation and the consumption of food. In the last case mentioned, on the contrary, a dissimilar aspect in relation to the two other cases is the access to the social dimension that is not relevant here. The community, indeed, is supposed to be already present around the table. This trend is more about offering new topic occasions, while watching at what happen in the kitchen.

5. Conclusion

In this article, we explored the possible contribution of semiotics for treating the marketing concept of trend. Analyzing a trend and not just recognizing it, involves an articulation of different layers of meanings, as we tried to demonstrate in the discussion of the Foodspotting case. Following the transformations in the social practices, observing how the identities and their values are redefined by the trend, elaborating a set of core semiotic feature of the trend, are the main operations of analysis that can be proposed by a semiotician. Once the core features that make a trend interesting to think and interpret are extracted, the analyst can start all kind of reflections with the eventual client, in order to strategically re-assume a trend inside a marketing perspective. This is the topic of another research work to come: how to pass from the trend to the brand.

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