Assignments: Batch Two: Assignment 9

What do cars say about their owners? Illustrate and critically discuss how cars signify as part of a semiotic system.

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: The most relevant lectures for this topic are: Lecture 1: What is a Sign?; Lecture 3: Paradigms and Syntagms; Lecture 4: Codes.

The association of particular meanings with brands makes branding susceptible to semiotic analysis. In structuralist semiotics, Saussure emphasised the relational identity of signs. A semiotic system depends on the differences between signs. What matters in 'positioning' a product is not the relationship of advertising signifiers to real-world referents, but the differentiation of each sign from the others to which it is related. A structuralist semiotic analysis of a category of products (such as cars) as a semiotic system would include specifying how each model is differentiated from other models produced by both the same makers and by those of other makers of cars perceived in some way as similar (e.g. family cars).

There are various general categories of cars (such as family car, estate car, executive car, hot hatch, luxury car, coupé, MPV, supermini). In semiotic terms, each of these categories constitutes a paradigm - a set of items bearing sufficient similarity for it to be reasonable to imagine each as an alternative. It would not be reasonable (except where a car fits into more than one category/paradigm) to regard cars from different paradigms as reasonable alternatives - one could not fairly compare a family car with a supercar, for instance. Semiotic analysis of the car market as a semiotic system would require the investigation of the brand differentiation between cars which are widely perceived as belonging to the same paradigm.

Note that the paradigms itemised here may be those of professionals in the car industry but if we are examining the semiotics of cars within the advertising system a social semiotic perspective would prompt us to investigate the extent to which they reflect the categories used by consumers. Check car enthusiasts' forums, car magazines, Top Gear and so on to discover what particular kinds of cars are thought to say about their owners, and why. Try to show how a semiotic approach can help to reveal how this system of related signs works and what its main elements are. What codes are drawn upon in making sense of the relations between different cars?

Whilst some surprising meanings can come to be associated with brands, as Greg Myers notes, 'It may seem that with enough advertising a product can take on any meaning. This is a common fallacy of both critics and proponents of ads. But these meanings are not infinitely flexible; they have to rely on the way the brand is used, and how it relates to other brands. All the meanings shift when a new sign is introduced or new links are made' (Myers 1999: 19). Semiotic systems and their paradigms are unstable - they change over time.

Note also that this is an assignment for which the inclusion of relevant pictorial illustrations is required. For guidance on capturing stills, click here. Remember to include a list labelled either Figures or Image sources after your list of References.

Some suggested reading

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


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