Abstract

Packaging is a medium that encourages customers to discover brands and products at the point-of-sale. It materializes brand identities, communicates product attributes, and thus translates aesthetic and symbolic cultural meanings. How can we explore the different layers of meanings that specialty coffee packaging communicates to consumers? In this manuscript, we apply Peircean semiotic concepts to investigate this question. Semiotics studies meanings of words, images, languages and communication processes in nature and in culture. In the fields of Marketing and Design, we interact with signs in constant transformation. For these reasons, Semiotics has been used to explore communication and consumption phenomena in recent decades. In this context, Niemeyer (2010) emphasizes that semiotics helps us to understand the meaning of packaging, which, in addition to being aesthetically attractive or functional, must communicate qualities and characteristics of the methods of production and usage purposes to consumers. According to this author, each product communicates messages from users to themselves and from users to others, but also diffuses the aesthetic, symbolic and cultural values of the contexts with which it interacts (Niemeyer 2010). We propose to investigate how different visual and verbal signs are integral to the construction of specialty coffee packaging design in the Brazilian market. First, we define the segment of specialty coffee based on previous works by Quintão, Brito and Belk (2017). Next, we present the theoretical-methodological foundation that guided the development of this analysis. Finally, we discuss preliminary results of the study, highlighting three points of view (qualitative-iconic, singular-indicative and conventional-symbolic) according to Santaella (2004); and synthesizing the key visual and textual recurrences among the researched packages. We argue that semiotic analysis enriches the understanding of the trajectories of meanings that the packages construct, considering th