The analysis of product semantics (also see Semiotics) can be traced back to the linguistic studies of structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes' collection of short essays, particularly his Mythologies (1957). Scholars only translated these works from French to English in the early 1970s and thus the term ¨product semantics¨ only became widely used by industrial designers starting in the 1980s.
Product semantics refers to study of all the meanings that a product's form, decoration, color and other features could potentially communicate to its users. Decoding Advertisements (1978) by Judith Williamson was a popular examination of product semantics in the advertising industry.