Semiotics

As we know that semiotics is the study of signs and sign processes in the society. We often perceive the meaning of symbols like as we see images, hear sounds and feel smells. Our life is full of signs; they can be found literally everywhere. Advertising is one of the media branches that widely uses semiotics. 

Advertising has always been using visual signs of an established value, causing the usual associations, which take the role of rhetorical assumptions. For example, the image of a young couple with a child refers to the representation, "there is nothing more beautiful and important than a happy family" and therefore then comes your (you as a customer) conclusion "if this happy family uses this product, why my family don’t use it?" The same applies to branding, where it takes the form of applied semiotics approach. For example, branding- is a unique communicative element, allowing the product to bind to a particular object of the symbolic world, like in Marlboro cigarettes, where we initially think about cowboys. 

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Bignell, J. (1997) Media Semiotics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.  
Image: 
Marlboro (1971) Marlboro [Advertisement]. Available at http://home.honolulu.hawaii.edu/~pine/Book2/marlboro-ads.html (Accessed: 3 April 2012).