Semiotics and Ethnic Marketing

by Lisa Radding lradding@ethnictechnologies.com

When I’m not looking up the ethnicities of names, I’m applying linguistic theory to names. No, not usually. But no, I’m not kidding. With my thesis advisor as co-author, I’m shortening my undergraduate thesis about the meaning of a toponym (place name) into an article for publication in a geography journal. One reviewer said I was missing a section on semiotics. Enter a week of linguistic theory punctuated by ethnic name research.

Crash course in semiotics: Ferdinand de Saussure (famous Swiss linguist) says a sign is the unification of two distinct pieces: The signifier is the form (sounds or letters) and the signified is the concept represented. He is writing about words, not specifically names. D-O-G is different from that furry thing that plays fetch, but together they are a sign, which has meaning in the context of the English language. The sign, however, is not static, but manifests itself differently with each signified: a golden retriever, a stuffed snoopy, etc. If you take this beyond the realm of language (as the French social and literary critic Roland Barthes does) that same sign can also be “a person regarded as contemptible” or “a person regarded as unattractive or uninteresting.” These meanings stem not from a linguistic context, but from a societal context. It gets way more complicated, but I think that’s plenty for the casual blog-reader.

Now I try to apply this to ethnic marketing:

1. I study signifiers. For example, I look at H-E-R-N-A-N-D-E-Z and determine that it is Hispanic. I look at just the form, the letters. I deal with signifiers.
2. Our clients care about signs. They want/have lists of individuals. Real person + name on list = sign. To those doing the marketing, unification of the person and the ethnic name is important.
3. Someone named Hernandez can be viewed differently in different societal contexts. The ethnic name has connotations that are both positive (diversity) and negative (racism). We must always be aware, when dealing with ethnic names, how they are being used.

I like the simplicity of a name and where it comes from. But I constantly remind myself that when this research is used, there are real people behind the names. People with purchasing power, and customs connected to various cultures. Based on my work with these signifiers, we can step outside the American mind frame into the land of semiotics and the ethnic consumer.

Too theoretical? Perhaps. But applying linguistic theory to this line of business was an interesting exercise for my brain.

AT: 08/06/2009 04:07:31 PM

“Guess My Weight.”

by Lisa Radding lradding@ethnictechnologies.com

“Guess My Weight...” My life is not a carnival, but I play this game a lot. At Ethnic Technologies, people frequently walk up to our booth at places like DMDays NY and ask us to guess their ethnicity by looking at their name tag. We lovingly refer to this aspect of our work as the “guess my weight” phenomenon.

At DMDays NY last week one skeptical show attendee came up to the booth, not to discuss our product, but to test us at this game. I tried to explain that while our software product is name based, it’s a bit more complicated than that. He didn’t care; he just wanted me to tell him he was Bulgarian, which Tina did, much to his amazement. I’m sorry I don’t remember his name. And he wasn’t interested in leaving a business card.

Unless it’s a name I’ve looked at specifically, a name with glaringly obviously letter combination's, or an ethnicity with which I have a lot of experience, I usually only know the region. When the person stands in front of me, I also get their physical features and their accent as hints. I don’t, however, have 30 years of research or the Internet at the click of my mouse like I do in the office. Bulgarian, Romanian, Moldavian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian… so, he was one of those, or a few others. You go with your first instinct, which in Tina’s case is almost always correct.

I play “guess my weight” pretty much every time I meet new people. When my sister introduced me to some friends last weekend, one with the last name Soltani asked the inevitable question. After he spelled his name (see my previous post about pronunciation), I knew the area of the world. Persian was a lucky guess… the luck being that I had some other clues from earlier in our conversation. But it’s always nice to impress rather than be forced to bumble about not having my computer at hand. Back in the office yesterday, I looked up Soltani in our software. No surprises there.

If I knew everything already, I wouldn’t be a researcher. I would be simply a product developer. But as a researcher, the very nature of my job is to learn more. It’s this learning that keeps the work interesting. On those days, however, when I correctly identify an ethnicity from a name tag, the knowing is immensely satisfying. My job is to learn (and to apply this learning to improve our products), not to know. Therefore the “guess my weight” phenomenon can put me in an awkward situation. People expect me to know, but I see success at the carnival as an added bonus.

Erin or Aaron

by Lisa Radding lradding@ethnictechnologies.com

I’m back from the DMDays NY Show, where I got to discuss my work. The key word here is “discuss.” I look at, think about, and write about names daily, but I don’t say these names out loud. In this line of work, pronunciation only comes in to play when articulating my work, for example, at shows. But as a name nerd, it does come in to play in my life.

I have a good friend named Erin. When I used to live with her, I’d shout across the apartment, “Eh-rin, are you home?” Then our other roommates would make fun of my pronunciation of Erin. They didn’t like the “eh” beginning. (I apologize for my unconventional spellings here, but without IPA, writing phonetically is the simplest way to capture pronunciation nuances.) Since Erin actually introduces herself as “Air-rin,” that is what our other roommates call her. It’s a subtle difference you don’t always hear, but it matters to me.

I call her “Eh-rin” to differentiate her from Aaron, which I pronounce “Air-rin.” Although we didn’t have another roommate, or even a good friend named Aaron, in my mind, these are two separate names, which I would associate with different people. Erin, a girl’s name, is the Anglicized form of the Gaelic meaning Ireland. Aaron, a boy’s name, is of Hebrew origin, meaning mountain, exalted or strength. In the bible, Aaron is Moses’ older brother. My friend Erin is Irish Catholic. (She has a brother Sean… don’t get me started on spelling and pronunciation with that one.) She is a part of my college world, not the American Jewish world in which I was raised, where every other person had a friend or relative named Aaron.

When I originally explained my pronunciation to my roommates, I told them it was to differentiate Erin from the boy’s name Aaron, stressing the gender difference. As androgynous names proliferate our culture, I tend to keep names distinct. As I reflect on instances like Erin/Aaron, however, where pronunciation is important to me, I realize that I may have pigeon holed my thoughts into gender research or ethnic research. It is all these pieces together that construct the identity of a name, something central to the identity of a person. When I connect a name to a person I know, I’m that much more conscious of what the name means.

I don’t know Dziadzan, Zydrute, Kielo, or Shaghosgi. I looked at those names last week without ever articulating them. I am interested in assigning them ethnicity and gender purely as names, with potential to be connected to people, but not as individuals in my life with complicated identities. At the DMDays NY show I thought about pronunciation because my difficulties articulating this research stemmed from an inability to pronounce examples like these. Whereas pronunciation doesn’t usually affect my research, as a name nerd, it affects my life in a way most people don’t notice or care about (except maybe to make fun of me). When the name is connected to an individual, pronouncing a name a certain way is part of my connection to a person and my relationship with their identity.