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Since the mid-1980s, "experience" has become a central object of reflection for marketing as well as for semiotics, to the extent that meaning is always created during an experience. However, English and French literatures on experiential marketing often approach the concept of experience differently. This article argues that these divergences concern the thematic of the experience (i.e. shopping vs consuming), and that, more essentially, experience should be conceived as the common denominator of all marketing offerings, no matter if it is a product, a service, an event, a place ... Using the post-structural semiotic frameworks of the "interactional regimes" theory, the author proposes to consider four fundamental consumer experiences (domination, cooperation, emancipation, and harmonization), each of these related to the logic of a specific type of offering: "goods," "play," "work" and "existence." In considering these four macro-offerings, this paper aims to better grasp the interactional and semiotic stakes of consumer experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interrelatedness of text and performance is a feature of semiotic approaches to drama. Because of their relation to performance and to social life, dramatic texts are among the most complex texts. A dramatic text creates an imaginary world which is “staged” in readers’ imaginations. Clarifying the playwright’s vision and facilitating transformation of the play from text to performance, stage directions are key components for the interaction with readers and spectators. Stage directions act as useful interventions which lead the readers to the world of the play and guide them to imagine the three-dimensional stage space. The receivers of the dramatic text complete their semiotization through adding their own interpretation to a virtual performance which they then place against any performance they see. This paper investigates how stage directions function as a focalizing element of the text which are important to the interpretive possibilities of a play. The paper probes how stage directions can be illuminated by the sensitive application of socio-semiotics to the encoding of motifs and stage imagery in dramatic texts as a meeting point of life, culture and imagination that generates meanings which are highly sensitive to receivers’ social and cultural backgrounds. Examples from stage directions as an integral part in the plays of Sam Shepard, an American writer, will be the focus of the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The social sciences have mostly focused on the formation of social opinions from a semantic point of view: given a certain semantic field, interviews, statistics, and other analytical instruments are commonly deployed in order to map the distribution of views, their evolution, their conflicts and their agreements. Socio-semiotics, social semiotics, and the other semiotic branches that bear on social inquiry have contributed to the effort by providing semiotic grids of categorization. These grids too, however, have been mostly related to semantic contents circulating through societies and their cultures. The present article pursues a different hypothesis. After briefly recalling the events of 7–9 January 2015 in the Parisian area, the article seeks to survey and map the syntax of progressive differentiation of opinions circulating in the social networks about such events. Some patterns are identified and semiotically described: (1) cleavage; (2) comparative relativizing; (3) blurring sarcasm; (4) anonymity; (5) unfocused responsibility; (6) conspiracy thought. A new semiotic square is created to visually display these patterns, their positions, their relations, and their evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]