The Functional Building Blocks of Emoji in Consumer Engagement: A Visual Semiotic Perspective

Introduction

Emoji (in Japanese, ‘picture character’) – also known as digitally-mediated visual signs – have become a core element of consumer engagement across social media platforms (Danesi, 2016; Emojipedia, 2018; Mathews & Lee, 2018). From a semiotic perspective, emoji generally refer to a form of ‘stylised iconic signs’ standing for their referential objects (Danesi, 2016). Importantly, the visual, expressive and technological affordances of social media make emoji usage a matter of routine rather than exceptional communication. The common argument is that small, colourful and meaning-laden emoji have come to embody an essential aspect of living in a digital world – that is, “visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate” (Herring & Dainas, 2017, p.2185). Furthermore, an increasing repertory of emoji available on computer and mobile device keyboards offers users an easy access to a wide range of emoji categories, allowing them to convey both nonverbal cues (e.g., facial expressions, gestures) and verbal utterances (i.e. emoji function as words) (Ge & Herring, 2018). Indeed, a recent report shows that consumers feel comfortable conveying their ideas, opinions, and emotions through emoji (Rhatigan, 2019). Marketers also appreciate emoji, and tend to employ them in the context of social media marketing, such as generating consumer responses, humanising their brand, and building sound firm-customer relationships (Ge & Gretzel, 2018a; Hof, 2016).

Emoji usage – a new form of marketing semiotics – can either reinforce consumer engagement effort or beat marketers at their own games. Well-known instances include Goldman Sachs’ use of emoji addressing Millennials’ life choices backfired on Twitter; emoji-festooned McDonald’s billboards in England were defaced with vomit emoji (Hof, 2016). These failed emoji strategies align with the literature showing that marketers do not fully understand emoji use on social media (Casado-Molina et al. 2019) and therefore are unable to develop effective consumer engagement strategies in the consumer-dominated social media context. Consequently, consumers may disengage with firms, spread negative word-of-mouth in a highly networked online space, and ultimately damage firms’ brand image. The emoji and computer-mediated communication (CMC) literature focuses primarily on emoji semantics and pragmatics (e.g., expressing sentiment, tone modification, enhancing personal relationship) (e.g., Ge & Gretzel, 2018a; Herring & Dainas, 2017; Konrad, Herring, & Choi, 2020), and research through a semiotics lens remains sparse. Moreover, the prevailing marketing literature merely looks at the effectiveness of emoji use in specific application areas (e.g., brand communication, advertising) (e.g., Arya, Deepa, & Hemraj, 2018; Mathews & Lee, 2018), and fails to offer theoretical foundations that can explain emoji capacity, identify marketing opportunities, and inform marketing practice.

This paper aims to address this theoretically and practically important gap by proposing a conceptual framework of functional building blocks of emoji in the consumer engagement context. In what follows, this paper first situates it in relation to consumer engagement and emoji, after which it introduces visual semiotics. This paper then presents and illustrates a framework of five functional building blocks of emoji (i.e. beautification, affection, information, participation, conversation), followed by recommending

emoji strategies based on these building blocks. The proposed framework can advance visual semiotics theory by applying it in the context of social media, and also broaden emoji, social media, and consumer engagement literatures by providing conceptual support that addressing the symbolic significance of emoji in the complex and dynamic digital space. Utilised individually and together, these building blocks allow marketers to understand emoji as a new form of marketing semiotics, while also guiding them to enable and shape consumer engagement in the consumer-driven communication context.