Qualitative researchers, how much would you love to be able to speak with confidence on The #Future? Join me for a Skills Zone training session at IMPACT, the conference of the Market Research Society (MRS), March 16th 2022.

Much qual research is located in the here and now of family homes and supermarket aisles. Where does one find a point of leverage with huge topics like the #metaverse, #China and #decentralised economies? Where to even begin?

#Semiotics has the tools you need, and a procedure. Step 1: identify interesting event or spike in behaviour. Step 2: collect as much factual and contextual information as you can. Step 3: apply a set of distinctly semiotic prompt questions and hypotheses, that will encourage you to explore:
– Who holds the power in this situation?
– Where there is choice, there is meaning.
– Where have I seen this before?
– What is at stake in this situation? What is prized & what is a threat?
– Where do you see people investing in each other? Not just money, but also time, energy, even emotional support.

I conceived this session because I am a researcher, I have a big heart for #qualitative researchers, and I know from the response to my first book how many people want to get into semiotics. So here is my newest effort to be helpful. Based on insights and tools from my newly published book “Using Semiotics in #Retail”, I’ll share ways to develop an original and worthwhile point of view on our rapidly changing world.

If you’ve already made a start with semiotics, you’ve probably run into semiotic signs and symbols, often grouped into codes. This type of activity is called **bottom-up semiotics** – it is the “decoding” part of semiotics that you’ve met before and that I also wrote about a lot in my first book.

There is, of course, a whole other half of semiotics, called “top-down” semiotics or “big semiotics”. It’s not about picking out semiotic signs and giving them all labels. Rather, it is about following in the footsteps of the big philosophers and social thinkers who dragged semiotics out of pure linguistics and showed how its core principles can be used to tackle ANY question about society, change and progress.

The point of top-down semiotics is not to catalogue all the signs in the category “shampoo” or “family cars”. The point is to gather and take advantage of the wonderful tools and prompts that the heroes of semiotic theory have made available for us. Why? Because they help us to THINK. And that is where confidence and eventually innovation come from. It will boost your #research skills to the next level. And by the way, if you don’t spend all of your time with #FMCG, as wonderful as it is, and you have or would like to have clients in #pharma & #banking – they love top-down semiotics. They are very interested in hearing something new.

16 March. https://lnkd.in/dNr5RCJV

#impact2022 Petta Naylor Marc Brenner John Bizzell Jane Frost CBE Research Live Lawes Consulting Ltd