A Semiological Analysis Of Chanel Coco Mademoiselle Perfume Adverts

Adverts found in magazines are designed to attract the attention of its target audience effectively and promptly to ultimately persuade its target audience to want to consume the advertised product. However, in Media Semiotics; an introduction, Bignell brings to light the argument that ‘advertising has a function, which is to sell things to us, but it has another function which I believe in many ways replaces that’…’It creates structures of meanings’. (Bignell, J, 2002: 31). These structures are constructed through cultural objects or ‘signs’ which are made to be read and interpreted in specific ways by the viewer. This leads to the underlying argument behind the semiotic approach, that signs placed in adverts create meaning and therefore ‘must work like language works and be amendable to an analysis’ (Hall, S, 1997: 36). The concept of semiotics and semiology originates from the work of Saussure and Pierce, the word deriving from the Greek word ‘semeion’ which means sign and referring to ‘the study of how signs communicate meanings’ (Bignell, J. 2002: 1). This essay is a semiological analysis of the Chanel Coco Mademoiselle perfume advert (fig.1) which was printed in several women’s magazines in the U.K.
The semiotic analysis begins through discussing the main components of an adverts mis-en-scene and the connotations which can be derived from its construction. In media texts ‘signs’ are purely just cultural objects, however when analysing a media text in a semiotic way it