Not so ‘innocent’ after all? Exploring corporate identity construction online

Abstract

While a lot of attention has been paid to online branding and the construction and communication of a company’s identity via its website, there is only very little research that looks at the processes involved in these activities from a discourse analytical perspective. This article aims to address this gap by conducting a case study of innocent, a UK producer of fruit juices. Combining corpus analytical tools with discourse analytical techniques and considering both text and multimodal features, we explore some of the strategies through which innocent creates a set of inter-related and closely intertwined identities on its website, thereby constructing the company’s brand image. However, our findings also reveal that some of the company’s identity claims (especially in relation to being an inclusive and welcoming ‘family’) are relativised and to some extent contradicted by the discursive processes through which these claims are articulated.

Social Actors “to Go”: An Analytical Toolkit to Explore Agency in Business Discourse and Communication

“…Previous work assuming such an angle has already shown that the way agency and action are encoded allows for inferring the ideologies that inform a text as well as for recognizing the possible intentions of the communicators. In terms of inferring underlying ideologies, studies have shown that the linguistic manifestations of agency and action can serve the strategic goals of individual organizations (The PAD Research Group, 2016;Pollach, 2005) but, perhaps more worryingly, even influence societal values and public policy. For example, in their analysis of AOL Time Warner's Internet policy document from the early 2000s, Amernic and Craig (2006) showed how the document refers to human stakeholders outside of the corporation.…”