Alex offered ideas about how play, engagement and empowerment are shaping our consumption habits and our interaction with brands.

You can also watch the Q&A session afterwards here.

The Big Engage: Intro from Hall & Partners on Vimeo.

Just as small, pure-breed dogs like Chihuahuas and miniature pugs suggest wealth and manicured femininity, so pit bulls and Rottweilers indicate aggressive masculinity – animals refashioned as weapons, to intimidate or pre-empt attack. Context of course is everything – toy dogs signal party-girl affluence more keenly when peeking from the clasp of Paris Hilton’s handbag, fighting dogs hostility when tethered to a teenage boy by a metal leash. A beagle or a lurcher codes fox hunting more strongly when walked by a ruddy-faced white man in Barbour jacket and tweeds than by a black African grandmother; a Golden Retriever beside a young woman in dark glasses codes guide dog, where in the company of a family with young children it may not. Meaning derives not from an intrinsic quality of the animal, but from relationship and association – from the dog in relation to its handler in a specific environment, not from the dog alone.

These canine semiotics can be witnessed in – for example – recent campaigns by pet food brand Cesar, the emblematic West Highland White Terrier of which communicates many of the values of the brand. Small, neat, clean and cute, the Terrier codes lifestyle accessory and non-threatening companion – not (say) a weapon or a hunting tool. Cesar, the Terrier suggests, is a brand for those (women) for whom a dog is a friend, to be cherished and so fed accordingly. Correspondingly, Cesar’s advertising communications explicitly target (through the use of suitable actors and expensively decorated but unshared living spaces) a market of affluent, professional single women in their 20s and 30s – women for whom a dog is not only a pet but a friend, and (perhaps) a partner-substitute, too.

This particular webinar dealt with how consumer habits may be changing over the next five years. Alex was speaking with Alasdair Ross of The Economist, Nader Tavassoli of London Business School and Charles Randall of SAS. The video should start playing below.

This is the first of a series of free webinars in the run-up to The Big Rethink 2012 in March next year, where Alex will also be speaking. More news on that closer to the time.

To watch the broadcast live at 2pm UK time on Thursday October 6th, register at the event webpage.

Essentially Sweet Shoppe exposes the ways in which retailers can employ both online personal information about the individual visitor and combine that knowledge with choices made in the store/theatre moment, to create specific ideal products uniquely relevant to the character and personality of the individual consumer.

For Sweet Shoppe, Sign Salad offered semiotic insights to enable appropriate selection of chosen objects that represented the identities at the heart of the experience – objects representing ‘craft lux’, ‘scientific’ or ‘revivalist’ identities, and those representing ‘factual’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ identities. In this way, it is possible to characterise the personality of the customer, according to which objects he or she chooses during the experience. These semiotically influenced choices lead to the creation of the ideal sweet for that individual customer.

A curated personal experience, Sweet Shoppe is now open and will continue until Friday 30th September. Sweet Shoppe is an appointment-only experience. Book your appointment with the Shoppe-keeper by emailing shoppekeeper@thefuturelaboratory.com or calling +44 (0)20 7186 0770.

It’s great to see that Russell Davies’s response to the paper that AMV submitted picked up on the importance of the cultural detail that we brought into our analysis:

“One of the great strengths of the paper is the way it encourages the reader to buy into the strategy by unpicking the semiotics of a motorcyclist’s visual identity. The fact they use Top Gun to do this only adds to the readability. Maverick and Goose have their names on their helmets and their faces are visible, in comparison to the MIG pilots who are faceless and therefore more disposable.”

Fingers crossed for the awards ceremony on the 6th October. In the meantime, see our case study of the project for more detail.