Brand Personification as Bonding

Abstract

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.

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“…In a design example of a famous beverage brand called Xiao Ming “small tea”, a cartoon figure as a novel participant is shown on the package with name of Xiao Ming, which does not exist in the indigenous social context (c.f. Chen and Lin, 2018). The presentational meanings in this design are realized by a situation of a funny-looking cartoon figure and the jokes that this cartoon figure “tells” as depicted on the package.…”