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Brand personification has been well investigated in marketing literature. However, it is still rarely studied from the semiotic perspective, which offers a lens to research how the semiotic resources of products could be designed to personify the brand. Under the framework of systemic functional sociosemiotics, brand personification is theorized as a semiotic process of bonding, referring to the shared coupling of value and character. Two primary choices of bonding strategies are proposed: appreciation/judgment and affect. The source and target of appreciation/judgment are labeled as Appraiser and Appraised while those of affect are labeled as Emoter and Trigger. It leads to further considerations of how to construe the character as Appraiser, Appraised, Emoter, and/or Trigger. Then, the paper, drawing on visual and verbal grammars founded on systemic functional sociosemiotics, proceeds to illustrate how semiotic resources are co-deployed to realize these bonding strategies via a close analysis of three packaging cases of a company, Uni-President. This study provides theoretical backup for the brand personification in marketing and serves as a useful guideline for brand personification design, in particular, multimodal communication in packaging.

The current entrepreneurial pedagogy focuses on enhancing students’ ability in discovering opportunities based on an understanding of users’ needs. This study challenges this dominant pedagogy by proposing a method to help students generate innovative ideas and create entrepreneurial opportunities by transforming the existing product’s meanings, or through a meanings design process, instead of only trying to understand users’ needs. The paper draws on social semiotic theories and theoretically proposes that, by transforming three product meanings (i.e., presentational, orientational and organizational), students are able to design a novel product and thus identify an entrepreneurial opportunity. A brief case study along with some students’ design projects are provided to illustrate how to use this method in teaching. This study is intended to provide entrepreneurship educators with a fresh tool to nurture students’ ability in identifying innovative opportunities and to immerse them in a more creative learning process while shaping their entrepreneurial mindset.