기호학적 접근에 의한 유통공간의 픽토그램 특성 연구

Abstract

Today, almost everyone visits stores and shops at least once a day and retail spaces are now indispensable thing in human life. Especially hypermarkets are rapidly growing in Korea ever since E-mart, one of the hypermarkets, is opened in 1993. It became more popular and nationwide now than department stores, shopping centers, boutiques and other shopping complexes and the number of hypermarkets is over 500 and many more are expected to be open currently. Domestic hypermarkets were able to successfully grow under specific retail space conditions – companies’ pricing competition, change of consumers’ lifestyle and innovations in distribution information technology. We can find some reasons of the success of the hypermarkets. There have been intensifying competitions among leading department store brands, constant economic recessions and financial crisis. Customers needed to be smarter to go through these difficulties and became more practical on spending. They seek for quality goods with a lower price and hypermarkets satisfy their needs and become a favourable place to shop. Hypermarkets are continuously putting more attention on mutual communication with consumers to meet their needs and expectation and pictograms are used as one of the means. Pictogram is a type of communication and visual language in the sense of conveying meanings to many and unspecified people. As they are as simple and clear as enough to make people grasp its meaning at a glance and also it’s feature applies to everyone who sees them regardless of cultural and ethnic differences, so they play a big role in many large scale stores. In this theory, it will be examined the various circulation space, in particular the pictogram of hypermarkets focusing on Pierce’s semiotics triangle and suggest the improvements of pictogram.