🇺🇸 Marketing lessons from commercial semiotics
Residual strategies can still work—just go in with your eyes open
My sister, Hannah Hoel, who has started working with me at RMS Health Advisors, is a commercial semiotician. She’s also smarter than me, a better writer, and mother to three young kids—but it’s her semiotics background that’s relevant here.
Semiotics is the study of cultural symbols, and especially how their meaning changes or shifts over time. Huge, consumer-facing companies are interested in these meanings because they point the direction toward new market opportunities. Often, they help inform what the best marketing strategy might be to enter a new market, launch a vertical, or perhaps do a rebrand.
Hannah has done commercial semiotics projects for companies like Uber, Google, General Electric, and Lego, studying everything from light, to our ideas of safety, health, to the reasons why boys tend to be more into legos than girls, and the meaning of cars in pop culture.
Some years ago, Hannah was working for a London-based agency that needed a marketing expert who could study U.S. healthcare, and I volunteered to put together a brief explanation and analysis of the cultural symbols embedded in the U.S. system (side note: explaining U.S. healthcare to Europeans is always fun if only for the absolutely dumbfounded looks that inevitably come over their faces).
It was during that project that I first got exposed to a basic structure for understanding how the meaning of cultural symbols shifts: there are dominant meanings, residual meanings, and emergent meanings.
Most symbols have a dominant meaning in culture, but of course, culture is constantly shifting. In semiotics, analysts say that some meanings are “emergent,” while others are “residual.” The emergent ones are growing and may soon become dominant, while the residual ones are likely on their way out, though they might hang around for some time yet.
As Hannah and I were talking the other day about marketing, AI, and the future of strategy for RMS Health Advisors, I realized the same thing might be true for marketing strategy itself.
That is to say, there are dominant, residual, and emergent strategies.
For example, take Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. I’ve already written on LinkedIn I think it’s on its way out as a marketing strategy:
🤖 SEO is changing fast, if not evaporating altogether. Yes, AI is to blame. But also I think the whole Internet is about to endure a slow crack-up from what we've known the last 15 years.
This will have a profound impact on traditional (or we could call them “dominant”) marketing strategies that rely on SEO for discovery at the top of the marketing funnel:
🛩 I think what's happening is the same as in a financial crisis—a "flight to quality." When a recession happens, people run to treasury bonds because they're safe and known. Now, amid the massive glut of sub-par AI-generated content, there is also going to be a flight to the known. That means LESS SEARCHING ONLINE, more going directly to trusted sources.
👇 What does this mean?
🔎 SEO has always been a fundamental tool at the top of the funnel. The theory was this: attract traffic to your website, then engage them with other content (white papers, email newsletters, etc.), which would eventually lead them to take action, and then BOOM—business development swoops in.
😬 News flash: if search as we know it is going away, that means the top of the funnel is disappearing. Meanwhile, we've mistaken "traffic capture" for "having an audience." Earning traffic isn't the same as earning loyalty to your voice, your brand, or your business.
Does this mean strategies based on SEO don’t work anymore?
No! The correct way to think about this isn’t “will it work,” vs. “will it NOT work.” It’s is this strategy emergent, dominant, or residual, and for how long?
SEO is a dominant strategy that will become residual
Dominant cultural symbols are basically mainstream. Meanwhile, emergent symbols are usually propagated by some fast-growing sub-culture. These are the kinds of symbols big consumer brands really want to identify because it tells them where the market might be going in the future.
Similarly, companies that wish to be forward-looking in their marketing will start experimenting with “emergent” strategies. Over the last decade, an example might have been jumping onto a new social media platform before your whole audience is there. Today, an emergent strategy that I predict will fast become dominant is using AI to generate various forms of content, including graphics, images, and videos.
SEO is still dominant, but I predict it will soon become residual.
But here’s the key: residual, dominant, and emergent strategies can ALL WORK!
Just because there’s a strategy that is no longer mainstream, or another that is emerging or still unproven, doesn’t mean it’s still not the right strategy for a specific use case or business problem. For example, I would argue that PR (placing earned media in traditional publications) is a formerly dominant strategy that is now decidedly residual, but it could still be important and effective for certain business goals.
Likewise, AI may be breaking SEO, but that is still going to take time, and it may not completely break. Strategies that use SEO are currently still working and will continue to do so for a long time—just how long and for which use cases is another matter.
Residual strategies can become emergent again
Many cultural symbols fade away in relevance, only to one day have new life breathed into them, usually by a cultural innovator.
Take Beyoncé, who I’ve seen doing this over and again over the past decade. Look at the album cover for her new album, Cowboy Carter:
Now think about the meaning of a “cowboy” over time. Or the American flag, Or horses. I’ll leave the substantive analysis on those questions to the semioticians, but the point is that, just as symbols can fade, and return with new applications, so too can marketing strategies. Who knows, maybe direct mail will make a massive comeback the harder it becomes to trust what you say online. Maybe sponsoring your local golf tournament (where you can actually meet local business leaders in person) might suddenly become much more effective if we start preferencing “in real life” experiences over virtual ones.
Making these judgment calls, experimenting, and evolving over time, is of course what a good marketing strategist will do. Most disagreements about marketing strategy boil down to disagreements over effectiveness vs. ineffectiveness, with strategists often trying to guess, based on their experience, what they think will work for a given business or use case.
I propose a better way to think about marketing strategies: some are emergent, some dominant, and some are residual. They all might work, in certain circumstances. Just go into it with your eyes open.
Or, have a good strategist + semiotician by your side.
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