Assignments: Batch One: Assignment 8

Illustrate and critically compare the visual semiotics involved in the marketing and packaging of tea and coffee.

Guidance

For general guidance about what is expected in your essays for this module, see the general criteria.

What Key Features Do I Look For?

  • Familiarity with relevant texts
  • Evidence - the stronger the better
  • Argument - coherent and balanced
  • Theoretical discussion - relation to relevant theories
  • Understanding of relevant concepts
  • Reflexivity - reflections on methodology
  • Examples - insightfully analysed
  • Style - readability and effective presentation

Please remember to avoid footnotes and to include an alphabetical list of 'References' which have been cited in the text (not a Bibliography of anything you have read for the essay). This list should include author's names, date, book titles (in italics), place of publication and publisher. Within the text always cite author's surname, date and page number. Double-space your text and number your pages. For more detailed notes on writing essays in this department, click here.

Advice for this particular assignment: Consider in particular the semiotics of colour, font and shape. What part do these factors play in visual branding? How do they relate to how 'up-market' or 'down-market' the product is intended or perceived to be? How do they differentiate one brand from its main rivals? Try to use semiotics to shed light on this issue, for instance, you might list the main colours that constitute the paradigm for the package colours or for for the fonts deployed or offer a visual mapping of the relationships between the main brands. Ernst Dichter,'the father of consumer motivation' studies (Hecker & Stewart 1988, p. 34), suggested that the marketing of tea tended to generate feminine connotations while that of coffee tended to generate masculine connotations: is there any sign of this in your own investigation? You may refer where appropriate to supporting evidence from advertising campaigns and from marketing demographics. You are encouraged to check your hunches against the reactions of consumers. Remember that, whatever the sources of your ideas, you should employ an explicitly semiotic framework. You are expected to demonstrate your understanding of relevant semiotic concepts, in particular signifier, signified, syntagm, paradigm and codes (e.g. codes of colour and of typography). This essay needs substantial illustration, particularly with photographs (ideally, some of these should be your own); essays with minimal illustration will lose marks for this. In particular, try to group related images together for comparison and contract in order to assist your discussion. Remember to include a list labelled either Figures or Image sources after your list of References. Although this is a heavily illustrated essay the same criteria will be employed as for other written assignments, so do not neglect such essential features as the discussion of relevant academic sources.

Only some of the books on the suggested reading are explicitly semiotic and you may need to recast their insights within a semiotic framework.

Some suggested reading

Note: Treat with extreme caution sources labelled with this symbol!


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