ABSTRACT
Charles Peirce helped found the discipline of semiotics, which focuses on the study of signs and meaning. Peirce describes semiotics as "the general physiology of signs" – a definition that casts semioticians as biologists of representation seeking to document and understand the anatomy of signification. This chapter introduces Peirce's thinking in a way that will not only acquaint newcomers with his frameworks but also provide a foundation for building on how Peirce has been applied in consumer research. Peirce coined arcane-sounding terms and often used familiar terms in unfamiliar ways. Peirce viewed semiotics as central to the connections among many academic perspectives, and his writings often engage multiple perspectives. Peirce's model has three elements: the sign (the thing doing the representing), the object here is opportunity to use these foundational concepts to shed new light on how marketers manage signs in the marketplace and how consumers experience them.
