A UK-based global health and beauty brand needed to understand where the meaning of ‘natural’ was headed in culture to inform their masterband positioning and brand expression, as well as underpin NPD for products they were launching with a natural platform in the future. HOB ran a cultural insight and semiotics process to decode the meaning of ‘natural’ and how these codes played out on a cultural trajectory of residual, dominant and emergent codes.

From the semiotic decoder, a brand ‘encoder’ book was developed that allowed the brand to understand how to identify brand positionings in market and develop their own product ranges in a territory that felt like a distinctive, contemporary expression of ‘natural’.  These codes were also successfully used in future ideation workshops as springboards for NPD.