NEWS30 November 2010
UK— Virginia ‘Ginny’ Valentine, widely recognised for her work in introducing semiotics to the UK market research industry back in the 1980s, died last night. She had been ill for some time.
Valentine was nominated for and won numerous awards from the Market Research Society (MRS) during her career, including Best Presentation in 1989, Best Conference Paper in 1995 and Best New Thinking in 2000 and 2001. She was also a fellow of the MRS.
Valentine had focused on the application of semiotic techniques in market research since 1983. In 1988 she set up Semiotic Solutions, a company created to provide semiotics training and advance technical development.
Greg Rowlands, an original Semiotics Solutions team member, told Research: “Ginny was such an incandescent combination of drive, intellect and flamboyance that it’s almost impossible to believe that she’s gone. Semiotics was a challenging sell back in the early 90s, and without Ginny’s determination and sheer chutzpah it would have remained a one-off commercial anomaly. I know how very proud she was to have given so many people a way of enjoying a life in business that had hitherto been inconceivable. So many of us will remember Ginny with an incalculable measure of gratitude and, of course, absolute affection.”
Fellow founding member Malcolm Evans, now of Space Doctors, said: “Ginny Valentine’s passing is a deeply sad loss not just to family and close friends but to the world of consumer insight in UK and globally. Many of the leading names in semiotic and linguistic analysis today learned their trade first with Ginny – and she remained the intellectual leader of the UK community and a formidable force in commercial semiotics internationally until serious illness forced her to step back earlier this year. Ginny’s sharp analytical powers, generosity of spirit, cultural curiosity and unquenchable sense of wonder remained undimmed until the recent final days of her illness. In these times of epic social and cultural change her closest friends and colleagues will be thinking every day for a very long time to come: ‘What would Ginny have made of that?’, ‘If only she could have seen this!’ and ‘Ginny would have been amazed – she would have absolutely loved that’.”
In 2007 she joined Truth, the strategic insight consultancy founded by Andy Dexter, to work as a creative partner. Dexter told Research: “Ginny was one of a handful of genuine research revolutionaries – and as a person, she was one of a kind. She had a rare combination of intellectual rigour, absolute disregard for conventional wisdom, and a great sense of humour. She was a great friend and supporter of Truth – in every sense of the word. It was a pleasure to know her and work with her, and we’ll miss her.”
Speaking in 2007 at the MRS annual conference, Valentine remarked how there was “some serious acknowledgement and admiration for the power and values of semiotics – coupled with an intense frustration at the complexity of the theory that provides the values and the power”.
You can find more of her writings for Research on semiotics here.