The Photoset as a Qualitative Research Tool Designed from a Semiotic Perspective

Considering the need to integrate resources and techniques to access the mind of consumers to communicate brand positioning in a coherent and integrated way, the research team that I lead to work on branding for a college graphic design program for a private university in Puebla, has developed an exploratory study for which it has been designed a set of qualitative instruments from a semiotic perspective. The instrument presented in this document is called "photoset". It is a projective technique association consisting of selecting a set of images that are brought into contact with the user to perform interpretations, from which the researcher takes notes and draws conclusions from contextual, metaphoric, metonymies and associated elements. In this case, the photoset was designed to understand the symbolic values associated with the graphic design as a profession. The results obtained using the photoset allows to analyze the configuration of the semantic field of a segment, in this case applicants to an undergraduate academic program, to design persuasive communication strategies. The instrument designed and the analysis was performed based on the semiosis model by Morris (1994) and supported by Ecos theory of codes: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic s-codes.