Alex Gordon

Alex Gordon is the Founder and CEO of Sign Salad, a cultural foresight, semiotics and language analysis company that helps clients understand how cultural change impacts consumer behavior – and how to take advantage of that for strategic tactical and creative purposes.


When you think about the different sources you might leverage for cultural insights when answering questions for your clients, could you take me through that full landscape of all the sources you might tap?

We have three ways of gathering our data. 

The first is social media listening. We gather – I don't like the word scrape – from across different social media platforms internationally (not just the English language ones, but Baidu as well and all across the world) to gather mass data points. 

But we also do look for smaller data sets specifically from influences across media, and we also do in-field research. We go and see mainstream cultural spaces, those that represent culture as it is now, and then we go to Walmart or see what's on the shelves there, and then go down to somewhere like Williamsburg or equivalent places in different cities to understand how culture is changing and what, in different or adjacent categories, represents that change. 

And then third, we'll look and examine brand touch points in granular detail. How symbols represent the brand, how those are changing, and if they're still relevant. 

Panera had a woman cradling the loaf, and we said “you need to become more inviting.” So they changed their logo to a woman breaking bread, which is about invitation and a gift to welcome you into their hospitality. 


When you think about the different altitudes of insight you might need in order to address a client's challenge, where do you start? 

There's the first, you know, seedling of insight that you need to get or the first lay of the land that you want to calibrate around in order to answer their question. Where do you start? 

We start by asking the clients the questions – because often they have a lot of information themselves that they don't know, or they don't share with us. And we need to understand the business case where the question comes from. They're asking us a very specific commercial question, but usually it comes from an ambition which is greater than just the question itself. So that's the first thing we do. 

We might do stakeholder interviews occasionally. We might do some expert interviews and get an understanding of the landscape from those lying outside. We might … do a literature review from where clients are. 

But actually it's really understanding the category that the client lives in and brands live in. And then the context in which their consumers live. How is the cultural context in which their consumers live changing and how's that going to change their relationship to the brand as well? 


When you deliver the final result, there's an element of staying in touch with the consumer and the culture and the context that they're operating in. How do you either continue to own this for the client, or recommend that they not set it and forget it – that they kind of stay in tune? 

So we often work in partnership with clients in two ways. One is we develop the input which leads to our output or which leads to a creative brief. So we’re helping them identify new opportunity spaces, either for innovation or for positioning purposes, or new opportunities for comps or pack designs. The clients will then go away, use our insights to brief their agencies, and then they’ll come back to us and say, here are the design routes, here’s the ad sets, tell us what you think about that. 

And then, because culture changes, we need to help them track that change. They’ll bring us in six months later, to refresh and make sure that the ideas that they had and on which they’re basing their activities on are still relevant whether culture has changed over a six, nine month, a year, 18 month, two year period. So we have a relationship with clients to make sure they remain culturally fresh. 

And then of course we work in partnership with qualitative agencies, or ethnographic agencies, and sometimes neuroscience agencies to understand what consumers think and their response, and to map what we’re seeing about their cultural context and how they’re conditioned by cultural forces. 

Then consumers tell qualitative researchers what they think: “They’ve said this, because we identified there is this change, that’s why they’re changing their opinion from this bit. When you did it six months ago with some consumers, they were saying that; now they’re saying this. These are the reasons why, because we were able to calibrate how culture is changing.” 


To what extent does desk research play a role in any of your work?

It’s a combination of fieldwork, getting out using observational techniques and desk-based research, gathering data from social media, analyzing that, and also doing the granular analysis of brand touch points.

It’s probably 40% field work, and about 60% deskspace research. We’re not engaging with consumers directly. And we’re not in competition with qual and quant agencies – we work in partnership with them. We’re investigating all the conditions that cause people to say certain things and why that and why they’re saying those things. 

We have an analyzing culture: understanding how symbolism has an impact on consumers. The symbol of a logo, a font, a color that a brand is using – or a tone of voice and how certain words impact consumer responses.


When you think about the likes of Google and now LLMs, and even Perplexity, which are using AI to theoretically help certain elements of desk research, what’s your biggest concern? 

What’s the whitespace in terms of humans staying involved in this (as much as we might be able) to leverage AI? Curious for your stance there.

I’m a big fan of AI and what it can do, but I’m also cautious about his limitations. 

There’s a sense in which in the pursuit of trying to understand the human, which is what a lot of market research is all about, it would be a shame if we stopped actually speaking to and engaging with real human beings – relied upon machines to tell us everything about the human. 

So I’m cautious about that, AI will get better and better and, and more refined about understanding us. What we do is draw tangential connections between culture and show how that’s influencing consumer behavior. And I don’t think that kind of tangential connections is easy for AI to do. 

Prime is a good example. This time last year, the drink Prime was a huge hit with teenagers. Marketing Week magazine just did a fantastic analysis of the success and failure – why that brand arced from success down to failure and now is fading away. They spoke about distribution models and brand management and short term performance marketing issues, all of which are the case. But actually, they missed out on the fact that, in the past year, a man like Andrew Tate (who was a big representation of the masculinity movement – he was big amongst teenagers, particularly teenage boys), has been exposed as being toxic. His toxicity relates directly to the way in which Prime used masculine colors and capitalized letters to represent a sense of masculine power. His decline coincides with Prime’s decline, and there’s no coincidence for teenage boys. 

That kind of tangential link is not going to be made so easily by AI, and I believe that’s what it means to be a human being: to understand that you are the product and the sum total of a range of cultural influences, not just a series of of marketing products that are designed to pull you in. 


Thank you so much. Super interesting conversation!