On Semiotics and Selling: A Response to Camille Dubois
A Parisian brand strategist has been deconstructing advertising with the tools of Barthes and Baudrillard. A practitioner of the craft responds.
A Parisian brand strategist named Camille Dubois has been writing essays that trouble me — not because they are wrong, but because they are uncomfortably close to right about things I have spent thirty years trying not to examine too carefully. She writes about the semiotics of branding, the philosophy of consumer culture, the way advertising constructs meaning from nothing and then sells the construction. She does this with the tools of Barthes and Baudrillard, and she does it well. I recommend her work even as I intend to argue with it.
Her central claim, as I understand it, is that every brand is a fiction — not a lie, she is careful to say, but a fiction: an imaginative construction that both creator and audience agree to treat as real while knowing that it is not. She draws on Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief," on Tolkien's concept of sub-creation, on Barthes's analysis of mythology. The argument is sophisticated, well-constructed, and rather beautiful. It is also, for someone who has spent a career building these fictions, slightly terrifying.
Because here is what Dubois understands that many practitioners do not: the craft of advertising — the selection of words, the arrangement of images, the architecture of a campaign — is fundamentally a semiotic operation. We are in the business of producing signs. A headline is a sign. A typeface is a sign. A colour palette is a sign. The white space I have written about elsewhere is not empty — it is, as Dubois would say, a signifiant that communicates taste, restraint, luxury, authority. Every decision a copywriter or art director makes — from the headline to the typeface — is a decision about meaning, whether they know it or not.
Most of us do not think about it in these terms. I certainly did not, for the first twenty years of my career. I thought about clarity. I thought about persuasion. I thought about whether a headline would stop a reader and whether the body copy would hold them. These are practical concerns, and they remain the right ones for a practitioner. But Dubois's contribution is to show that these practical concerns rest on a theoretical foundation that most of us have never examined.
Where the Philosopher and the Craftsman Diverge
There is, however, a point where Dubois and I part company, and it is an important one. She writes about the "simulacrum of authenticity" — the idea that when every brand performs authenticity using the same codes (the founder in a field, the humanist sans-serif, the warm lighting), authenticity becomes a genre that refers to nothing but itself. The signifier detaches from any genuine signified and floats free in a system of self-referential signs. Baudrillard's desert of the real.
This is an accurate description of what happens when authenticity is pursued as a strategy rather than expressed as a consequence. I have seen it happen. I have, if I am honest, contributed to it. But where Dubois seems to conclude that the problem is structural — that capitalism inevitably recuperates even its own critique, that the spectacle absorbs all opposition — I reach a different conclusion. The problem is not structural. The problem is craft.
The brands that fall into the simulacrum of authenticity are, almost without exception, the brands that have substituted strategy for skill. They have a positioning document and a brand book and a quarterly content calendar, and they execute against these assets with mechanical precision. What they lack is taste. They lack the ability to distinguish between a sign that communicates genuinely and a sign that merely performs communication. This is not a theoretical failing. It is a craft failing. It is the difference between a good copywriter and a bad one, between art direction and decoration, between a campaign that earns attention and one that merely occupies space.
I think of Ogilvy's Rolls-Royce headline: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock." By Dubois's analysis, this is a fiction — a semiotic construction designed to produce an experience of luxury and engineering excellence. And she would be right. But it is also true. The fact was found in a technical report. The headline did not invent the quality; it revealed it. The fiction and the truth are not in opposition here — they are the same thing, expressed with skill.
This is what craft does that philosophy cannot fully account for: it finds the sign that is also the substance. The headline that is both a semiotic operation and a genuine piece of information. The advertisement that constructs a fiction and, in doing so, tells the truth. This is not a trick. It is the highest expression of the profession, and it cannot be reduced to a system of signs without remainder.
On the Matter of Brand Purpose
Where I find myself most in agreement with Dubois is on the question of brand purpose. She writes about it in her essay "Brand Purpose, or: The Ideology of the Turtleneck" — a title that made me laugh aloud, which is not something I do frequently when reading critical theory. Her argument, as I understand it, is that brand purpose is ideology disguised as sincerity: a way for corporations to claim moral authority while continuing to pursue profit, with the added benefit of making their employees feel meaningful and their customers feel virtuous.
I have been making a version of this argument for years, from a practitioner's perspective. My essay on why your brand does not need a purpose was written out of exasperation with clients who wanted to attach a social mission to a perfectly adequate product. Not every brand needs to save the world. Some brands just need to sell shoes, and to sell them honestly, and that is enough.
But Dubois goes further than I do. She asks why we feel the need for brand purpose in the first place — what cultural conditions make it necessary for a shoe company to pretend to have a philosophy. This is a question I had not thought to ask, and it is a good one. The answer, I suspect, involves the decline of traditional sources of meaning (religion, community, national identity) and the corresponding pressure on commercial culture to fill the void. But I am not a philosopher. I am a copywriter who has read some philosophy. The distinction matters.
What Craft Offers Theory
I want to end with a proposition that Dubois may find either interesting or infuriating, depending on her temperament. (From her writing, I suspect she will find it interesting, disagree with it sharply, and then write something more intelligent than I am capable of producing in response.)
The proposition is this: theory needs craft as much as craft needs theory. Dubois is correct that practitioners should understand the semiotic operations they perform. We should know that we are constructing fictions, producing signs, operating within systems of meaning. This knowledge makes us more conscious, more ethical, and ultimately more effective.
But theory, in turn, needs to account for the irreducible element of skill — the fact that some advertisements work and others do not, and that the difference cannot always be explained by the semiotic system in which they operate. There is a residue that escapes analysis. Call it talent, call it taste, call it the trained intuition that comes from writing ten thousand headlines. Whatever it is, it is real, and it operates within the system Dubois describes but cannot be reduced to it.
The best advertising is both a semiotic operation and an act of genuine communication. It constructs a fiction and tells the truth. It produces signs and delivers substance. If that sounds like a contradiction, it is — and it is precisely the contradiction that makes the craft worth practising.
I look forward to Dubois's response. I suspect it will begin with Baudrillard and end with a question I cannot answer. That is, I have come to believe, how the best conversations work.