There are careers, and then there are careers built on pure conviction. Dr Rachel Lawes, social psychologist, futurist, author and founder of Lawes Consulting, belongs firmly in the second category. In Episode 2 of Season 4 of the BITE BIG Podcast, recorded on location in London, Amber Bonney sits down with one of the original architects of British commercial semiotics for a conversation that covers everything from Barbara Kruger and Supreme's two-step ladder, to teaching an AI model to see the world the way a semiotician does.
Three Words. A Whole Career.
Rachel's personal mantra, 'Read, Create, Give Thanks', doesn't sound like something that built a global consulting practice. But as she unpacks it through the conversation, it becomes clear it's less a mantra and more a daily operating system.
"Read might come naturally. But Create, I have to schedule it, otherwise it doesn't happen. And if I don't create, I'm going to go a bit mad from cabin fever."
For Rachel, 'Read' is the engine of everything. She grew up in a working-class family in the UK with not a lot of money, but there was always money for books. That foundation never left her. Today she feeds her thinking with art theory, literary criticism, psychiatry and YouTube rabbit holes about Japanese mythology and the semiotic meaning of a 'wolfish look'
'Give Thanks' is the one that surprises people. For someone who has fought as hard as Rachel has to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field, gratitude sounds like an unexpected choice of value. But she's pragmatic about it: when things get hard, she physically sits down and writes a list of everything she's grateful for until she runs out of ideas. 'It's just a survival strategy,' she says. Not soft. Not performative. Practical.
From Broke to Building a Category
Rachel went to university at 27. Finished her PhD at 33. Was, by her own account, 'broke her whole life.' When she delivered a conference paper called 'Demystifying Semiotics' at the Market Research Society in 2002, the phone started ringing the next day. Bank of Scotland. Various brands. All wanting to know more.
Her clients told her to start her own business. So she did. And for the first several years, she picked a new industry each year, just because it interested her. Public transport. Pharmaceuticals. Retail banking. " When you're building the field, there's no fence to keep you out.
Courage Is the Brand Strategy Nobody Talks About
Things decided by committee regress toward the conventional. Safe, in brand terms, is slow death. Rachel's example of what courage actually looks like: Supreme. Built on an unoriginal font (Futura), a red panel, and the visual language of artist Barbara Kruger, whose 'I Shop, Therefore I Am' drew directly from newspaper headline semiotics. Supreme wrapped that vocabulary around a limited-edition brick. A marker pen. A two-step aluminium stepladder that was, by Rachel's assessment, amazingly useless. The more absurd, the higher the value. Real distinctiveness requires artistic impulse, semiotic intelligence, and the willingness to follow both somewhere uncomfortable.
"Try going to a global corporation and saying, 'I know you make clothes, but what we want to do is make a useless stepladder with your logo on it. Trust us, it's going to work.'
The Only Woman in the Room
Rachel is clear-eyed about what it means to build a career in a field that defaults to male authority. "If you're confident about saying what you've achieved, a man will be told he's got star quality. A woman will be told she's showing off and needs to be taken down a peg or two."
Her strategy isn't anger, it's design. She built her network deliberately around women: reaching out, teaching, lifting. When you help women, they remember. Some became her clients. Her advice to the woman who finds herself alone in the room: use your expertise, be interesting, draw people in. Create something beautiful and make them want more.
Teaching AI to See
The most forward-looking thread of the conversation is Rachel's current frontier work: embedding her semiotic expertise into AI. Working with Reach3 Insights, Rival Technologies and Warner Bros. Discovery, she has helped teach a large language model to read images the way she would, mapping visual content to emotional meaning at a scale and speed no human analyst could match alone.
She's not threatened by it. She wrote a paper a few years ago listing ten things AI couldn't do that a human analyst could. Most of that list no longer holds. 'Now they can do that.' But the point, for Rachel, is what humans and AI can build together that neither could achieve alone. 'We couldn't have done this before AI, and we couldn't have done it without semiotics. Is it a replacement? It's not. It's a small piece — but in the right hands, it creates something big and new.'
Give Thanks: Elizabeth's Story
The most quietly powerful moment of the episode is the last one. Rachel's sister Elizabeth is a breast cancer survivor. Rachel describes the post-treatment reality honestly — the fear, the disconnection, the expectation that you should simply celebrate and move on. Elizabeth channels it into fundraising for CoppaFeel, a charity focused on younger women. She'd been reaching the point of giving fatigue when she checked her JustGiving page and found a large donation from Bite Big. She hadn't been told it was coming.
"She was overjoyed. All her problems were solved. She couldn't believe what happened."
That's the Give Thanks part of the mantra, made real.
At The Edison Agency, we believe the most powerful brands are built on deep cultural intelligence — the kind that doesn't come from surveys, but from genuinely understanding the forces that shape how people feel. Listen to the full episode of BITE BIG with Dr Rachel Lawes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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