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QUALITATIVE RESEARCH CONSULTANTS ASSOCIATION
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to check the key communication signs,
and to analyze both the Italian women’s
cultural codes
and attitudes toward
hair. We also adopted a hermeneutic
analysis, i.e., the study of the hidden
intentions of the ad. While not an aca-
demic tool, studying the hidden inten-
tions proved useful indeed.
Semiotic grids
We used the same parameters as
“semiotics of art” in order to study the
advertising messages, which are:
• Mimetic: the way the message is built
(angle, pose, likelihood).
• Non-mimetic: how the eye follows the
message (depth of field, colors, focus).
• Linguistic: how the signs are linguisti-
cally/visually organized (lettering,
rhetoric figures).
To do this, we adopted the European
“structuralist”
approach using Greimas
semiotic grids (Contradiction /
Alternation / Opposition).
Cultural codes
Afterward, we organized a “desk”
research to check as many materials as
possible connected with the Italian
women and their culture. This we did
by adopting the
British codes
approach:
residual (past), dominant (present), and
emergent (future), to give a sociocultur-
al frame and a wider perspective to the
emerged insights.
At the end of the story, to summarize…
Our end results pointed out the need
for future advertising to consider:
• The real experience of the user, with
her particular deep needs and atti-
tudes toward her own hair and the
products.
• The cultural and emotive background
and habitat of the respondents. Real
people live a real life, and the adver-
tised “dream life,” even if sought after,
doesn’t fit the key need to “feel fine
as I am.”
• The emerging codes, in order to fore-
see changing needs and to reconcile
these with the advertising narrative.
Main results
(European) Structuralist approach
Our analysis shows that current
advertising on hair seems more prone to
self-celebration than to an emphasis on
the consumer and her problems. Instead
of focusing on real problems, hair turns
into a show.
(fig. 2)
Both broadcast and print ads refer-
enced illustrate:
• Aesthetic: super beauty staged instead
of natural beauty; gigantic, wavering
hair as the undisputed star of the show.
• Ethereal-magic: mysterious atmo-
sphere and alchemical transformation
triggering some magic in the product,
but ignoring the person.
• Aspirational: cheap evasion and cheesy
miracles, disappearance of common
sense and of the consumer milieu.
The problem (dried-out hair) is given
as a matter of fact, its solution (the
product) as a dogmatic assumption. To
the usual consumer’s mantra “try to
believe,” advertisers oppose their one,
“believe to try.” The consumer’s goal—to
live at ease with herself and her hair as
is—is completely upside down in terms
of “to be another person…a better one!”
Note that in this way advertising
shifts the focus from the person as a
subject who admires herself to the per-
son as an object to be admired.
The consumer’s quest for lasting
self-confidence (= “inside me”), and the
representation of a milieu both reassur-
ing and self-reported (= “around me”) is
diverted to:
• An emphasis on natural ingredients
(= outside me).
• Visual hyperboles of super models
swaying super hair or detaching
from the ground (= detachment
from me) in the repeated advertising
cliché of “flight.”
• Women bathing in lagoons or chat-
ting with lions in the savannah (=
“other than me”).
• Luxury, the artifact or rarefied, and/or
the magical (= other than me and
outside me).
(British) Socio-cultural Codes
approach (fig.3)
This approach—not alternative in our
case, but parallel—gave a semiotic-
anthropological perspective to the
Figure 1
Figure 2