Original citation:
PAD research group (Including: Schnurr, Stephanie, Wharton, Sue, Alansari, Suha, Angouri,
Jo, Chimbwete Phiri, Rachel, Chiriatti, Teresa, Debray, Carolin, Efthymiadou, Christina, Hah,
Sixian, Harrison, Tilly, Kedveš, Ana , Khamkhien, Attapol, Kim, Kyoung-mi, Mohd Omar, Nor
Azikin, Nguyen, Thi Hong Nhung and Reissner-Roubicek, Sophie). (2016) Not so ‘innocent’
after all? : exploring corporate identity construction online. Discourse and Communication,
10 (3). pp. 291-313.
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PAPER FOR DISCOURSE & COMMUNICATION
Title: Not so ‘innocent’ after all? Exploring corporate identity construction online
Authors:
The PAD research group
The following members of the Professional and Academic Discourse (PAD) research
group at The University of Warwick have contributed to the research reported in this
paper: Stephanie Schnurr & Sue Wharton (co-ordinators), Suha Alansari, Jo Angouri,
Rachel Chimbwete Phiri, Teresa Chiriatti, Carolin Debray, Christina Efthymiadou, Sixian
Hah, Tilly Harrison, Ana Kedveš, Attapol Khamkhien, Kyoung-mi Kim, Nor Azikin Mohd
Omar, Thi Hong Nhung Nguyen, and Sophie Reissner-Roubicek.
Version number and date: revised version (first revision) 05 October 2015
Corresponding Author:
Stephanie Schnurr
Centre for Applied Linguistics
University of Warwick
Social Science Building
CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: S.Schnurr@warwick.ac.uk
Short title: Corporate identity construction online
1
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 (e.g. Bravo et al., 2013;
Halliburton and Ziegfeld, 2009; Pollach, 2005), there is only very little research that looks
at the processes involved in these activities from a discourse analytical perspective. This
paper 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.
Keywords
Identity construction, website, discourse analysis, corpus analysis
2
Bio note
The Professional and Academic Discourse research group (PAD) is a group of academic
staff and doctoral students based at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of
Warwick. We are all interested in discourse analysis, from a range of different
perspectives. We meet regularly for talks and to support each other in our research, as
well as to work on projects together. The paper published here stems from
collaborative work between January and July 2015. To find out more about our
activities and the publications of various members please go to
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/groups/pad/
3
Not so ‘innocent’ after all? Exploring corporate identity
construction online
The PAD research group1
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 (e.g. Bravo et al., 2013;
Halliburton and Ziegfeld, 2009; Pollach, 2005), there is only very little research that looks
at the processes involved in these activities from a discourse analytical perspective. This
paper 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.
Keywords
Identity construction, website, discourse analysis, corpus analysis
Corresponding Author:
Stephanie Schnurr, Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, Social Science Building,
CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: s.schnurr@warwick.ac.uk
1
The following members of the Professional and Academic Discourse (PAD) research group at The
University of Warwick have contributed to the research reported in this paper: Stephanie Schnurr & Sue
Wharton (co-ordinators), Suha Alansari, Jo Angouri, Rachel Chimbwete Phiri, Teresa Chiriatti, Carolin
Debray, Christina Efthymiadou, Sixian Hah, Tilly Harrison, Ana Kedveš, Attapol Khamkhien, Kyoung-mi
Kim, Nor Azikin Mohd Omar, Thi Hong Nhung Nguyen, and Sophie Reissner-Roubicek.
4
1. Introduction
This paper aims to contribute to research on identity construction by exploring some of
the discursive processes involved in the online identity construction of innocent, a UK
company which caters for the European market. While a lot of scholarly attention is
currently paid to identity construction, especially as an aspect of professional
communication (Schnurr, 2013), most of this research focuses on spoken interactions
(e.g. the contributions in Van De Mieroop and Clifton, 2012) or written texts (e.g. Koller,
2007), corporate websites which combine spoken, written and interactive elements,
tend to be largely ignored. This paper aims to address this gap and hopes to make a
contribution not only in relation to the discursive processes involved in identity
construction but also with regards to the methodological procedures facilitating such an
undertaking – especially in online environments.
We have chosen innocent as the case study for our research not only because it is a very
successful company (being the biggest smoothie maker in the UK (Anderson, 2014) with
an interesting business story), but also because questions relating to its brand
authenticity are frequently discussed in the media. Thus, what makes innocent so
interesting from the angle of identity construction is the ways in which the company has
successfully managed its brand over the years and has maintained the positive and
5
health-conscious image that it propagates for itself – even in the face of several severe
challenges.
1.1 innocent – a brief background
Having been established in 1999, innocent fruit smoothies were first introduced to the
UK market in 2000. Based on immediate success, expansions to Ireland and other
European countries followed soon after, and the range of products was expanded. In
2004 the company set up an independent registered charity called the Innocent
Foundation, supported by the donations of the company itself (Innocent Foundation,
n.d.).
One of the unique selling points of the company is its philosophy of ‘doing good’ and
taking corporate social responsibility seriously. This high emphasis that innocent, like
many other multinational corporations (e.g. Fuoli, 2012), puts on ethics is reflected, for
example, in the values of the company which include not only ‘be natural’, but also ‘be
responsible’ and ‘be generous’ – with reference to the planet, the environment, the
people and the community. Through various sections on its website, innocent portrays
itself as an ethical, sustainable and even charitable company. These claims for an ethical
and responsible identity are, of course, already reflected in the name of the company
6
itself where the adjective ‘innocent’ immediately evokes associations of ‘pure’, ‘natural’,
and even ‘good’ as opposed to ‘artificial’ and ‘guilty’. This impression is further
strengthened by the company’s logo, which is a halo over a smiley face. Taken together,
the name and the logo thus already provide strong indications for the kind of brand
image or identity the company wants to portray for itself. This identity construction is
clearly strategically motivated and targeted specifically at affluent customers – a move
which has paid off for innocent (Johnston et al., 2011; Starr, 2009).
However, the road to success has not always been without bumps for innocent and the
company’s image as ethical and innocent, was, in fact, challenged by customers at
various points. Some of the more serious challenges to the identity claims that innocent
make about themselves, occurred when the company announced its partnership with
McDonald’s (in 2007) and Coca-Cola (in 2009). Although joining forces with McDonald’s
seemed like a lucrative move, it was perceived very negatively by innocent’s customers
who saw it as a loss of independence and threat to the ethical values that innocent is so
actively promoting on its website. The excerpts below are representative of the way
customers rejected the company’s identity claims at that moment in time:
“This is a lesson in how to destroy a fantastic brand profile with one act of greed.
Partnering with McDonald's - a firm with zero moral or ethical beliefs - has sullied
7
your company's reputation. […] I certainly won't be buying 'Innocent' products
ever again.”
In the aftermath of having joined forces with McDonald’s, innocent was even described
as having lost its soul (Sweney, 2007). Similar or even more extreme sentiments were
expressed when innocent allowed Coca-Cola to buy considerable shares of the company:
“Some of us who have been here throughout the 10 years to date were buying
your products precisely because there was no link to grandiose, greedy
corporations such as Coke. Your strategy is foolish and self-destructive. You will
regret it, as many of us do now. Adieu!”
Interestingly, in both instances innocent immediately ‘confessed’ their actions with
detailed explanations of their reasons and allowed open debate on their blog, cultivating
the impression of transparency as part of their ethical stance. We return to this point
later in our qualitative analysis.
1.2 Creating a brand and constructing identities – online
Constructing and maintaining a unique brand and communicating it successfully to
various audiences (including stakeholders, as well as (current and potential) clients and
8
staff) is an important, and potentially income-generating, aspect of any company’s
strategy. In this context, identity is often understood as a set of meanings that allow
consumers, stakeholders and others to associate, describe, relate to and establish and
maintain links with a company (Balmer 2001; Balmer and Soenen, 1999). As Cheney and
Christensen (1999) argue, identity is a pressing issue for many institutions and questions
of identity, or of what the organisation is or stands for, cut across and bring together
many different organisational goals and concerns (see also Myers, 1994).
Considerable attention has been paid in the previous literature on the internet as a
marketing and branding tool. For example Simmons (2007), who understands branding
as the process of creating value through the provision of a compelling and consistent
offer and customer experience, maintains that as customers develop trust in a brand,
companies actively invest in building relationships with their customers thereby further
strengthening their own brand. However, in spite of this interest in the internet as a
branding tool (see also: Park et al., 2005; Pollach, 2005); and an increasing recognition
of the benefits of discursive approaches to identity construction (e.g. Bucholtz and Hall,
2005), there are only very few studies that take a discourse analytical approach to
exploring some of the strategies through which identity construction is accomplished in
these online environments. One of these studies is Koller (2007) who analysed how the
HSBC banking group represent themselves in their externally oriented discourse as a
9
‘glocal’ brand successfully combining discourses of ‘the global’ and ‘the local’. Drawing
on various data sources, including websites, brochures, and advertisements, Koller
identifies several visual and linguistic strategies through which the bank’s image is
successfully constructed and communicated to the audience. For example, by
strategically including historical imagery and modern photos with easily recognisable
historical symbols, as well as the frequent use of specific colours throughout the various
documents, and making repeated explicit and implicit references to ‘the global’ and ‘the
local’ a dichotomy is created between global/modern on the one hand and
local/historical on the other. Through these strategies HSBC portray themselves as a
‘glocal bank’, a corporation successfully combining ‘the global’ and ‘the local’. In another
study on corporate self-representations of 20 websites, Pollach (2005) analysed the use
of language and hypertext resources used to construct favourable images of the
company. Among the strategies frequently used on the websites to construct a positive
image of the companies were presenting claims as facts, humanising the organisation,
removing agents (e.g. by using a passive voice to suggest trustworthiness), use of
pronouns and use of interactivity.
In this paper we aim to contribute to this research and take a discourse analytical
approach – focusing on text, visual representations and interactive features of the
websites (e.g. Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996) – in order to gain a better understanding
10
of some of the strategies and processes through which identity construction is
performed in these online environments. Moreover, by combining quantitative and
qualitative methods, as we outline in more detail below, we aim to discuss some of the
methodological challenges that arise when doing research on discourse and
communication in online environments, and we illustrate how these challenges might
be addressed and overcome by strategically drawing on the tools and procedures of
each method.
2. Identity construction – a discourse perspective
Moving away from early work in the field that treated identity as a static and fixed
attribute of speakers, we take a social constructionist stance and conceive identity in
more dynamic terms. In line with more recent research, we view identity as socially
constructed in and through discourse and communication, and as constantly negotiated
between participants (e.g. Benwell and Stokoe, 2006; De Fina, 2010). Identity is
understood as a process, as something people ‘do’ or ‘perform’, rather than a static
attribute that they ‘have’ (Bamberg et al., 2006, 2011; Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; Butler,
1990; Widdicombe, 1998); it is perceived as a context bound and relational
phenomenon (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; Schnurr, 2013).
11
These re-conceptualisations of identity as a dynamic process or performance lend
themselves very nicely to discourse analytical approaches. Indeed, in the past decade or
so, discourse analytical research on identity in professional (and other) contexts has
increased dramatically. Taking discourse analytical approaches and/or drawing on
discourse analytical tools, these studies were able to identify and describe some of the
specific processes through which identities are constructed, negotiated, reinforced, as
well as sometimes challenged and resisted by interlocutors in a range of different
contexts and across different texts and talks (for comprehensive discussions of identity
construction in the professional domain see for example the contributions in Angouri &
Marra (2011) and van de Mieroop & Schnurr (fc)).
One of the most comprehensive frameworks to study identity construction is
summarized in Bucholtz and Hall (2005). In their paper the authors outline five principles
of identity construction which are based on previous work conducted in several linguistic
and anthropological traditions. In this paper we strategically and selectively draw on the
relationality and indexicality principles.
The relationality principle, which lies at the heart of the framework (Bucholtz and Hall,
2005: 587), is in line with our social constructionist understanding of identity, and
12
maintains that identities are relational phenomena which are not constructed in
isolation but are always created in relation to other identities. They are
intersubjectively
constructed
through
several,
often
overlapping,
complementary relations, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice,
and authority/delegitimacy. (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005: 598)
The first pair of relations, similarlity/difference, captures the processes through which
identities are created by emphasising similarities with or differences from other
individuals or groups and by positioning oneself in relation to these others (see also
Locher, 2008: 513). The second set of relations, genuineness/artifice, describes the
perception of specific identity claims by an audience – i.e. whether the claimed identities
are perceived as genuine or artificial and even fake. The third pair of identity relations,
authority/delegitimacy, refers to whether institutionalized notions of power and
ideology either affirm and impose identities (in the case of authority), or (in the case of
delegitimacy) dismiss and reject claims for identities.
The indexicality principle is not so much concerned with the relational nature of
identities but rather describes some of the specific processes through which identities
are created. It rests on the assumption that when people interact with each other they
do identity work. In other words, during their interaction they constantly claim identities
13
for themselves, project identities onto their interlocutors, and at the same time they
accept, reject, and challenge certain types of identities that are projected on them. This
identity work takes place not only by explicit referral to specific identity categories (such
as ‘family’ or ‘friend’ in the case of innocent) but also more implicitly by mobilising signs
that are normatively associated with these categories. The notion of indexicality
captures some of the processes through which particular stances are evoked through
the use of particular linguistic forms and styles, and how those stances, in turn, are
associated with (and hence create) certain identities (Ochs, 1992: 341). Indexicality is
thus the process of relating certain linguistic forms to “complex systems of meaning,
such as ideologies, social representations about group membership, social roles and
attributes” etc. (De Fina, 2010: 215). Some of the indexical processes mentioned in
Bucholtz and Hall (2005) include overt mentioning of identity categories and labels,
evaluative and epistemic orientations, interactional footings and participant roles, as
well as the use of linguistic structures and systems that are ideologically associated with
specific personas and groups (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005: 594). However, none of these
linguistic forms and styles directly indexes a specific identity – rather, they evoke specific
interactional stances, which in turn are associated with particular identities (Ochs, 1992,
1993); and any utterance or linguistic form may contribute to the construction of more
than one identity at the same time (Holmes et al., 1999: 353).
14
Although Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) framework primarily describes the processes
involved in identity construction that takes place in (spoken) interactions, it has
successfully been used in the past to capture the processes involved in constructing an
organisation’s identity (e.g. McEntee-Atalianis, 2013). We use the two principles
described above and employ discourse analytical and corpus analytical methods to
analyse some of the processes involved in the online identity construction of innocent
on its website.
We also selectively draw on Membership Categorisation Analysis (henceforth MCA) to
capture the discursive processes through which identity categories are created and
membership is assigned to particular agents. MCA has its roots in the early work of Sacks
(1992) who “saw the construction of social identities as closely associated to the process
of relating categories to specific relationships and activities” (De Fina 2010: 209). These
categories are relevant for identity construction as they carry a set of specific activities
and attributes associated with them, which are then projected onto their members
(Benwell & Stokoe 2006: 39).
3. Data and methodology
15
In order to explore some of the ways in which identities are constructed online and to
address the research aims and objectives outlined above, this paper reports on a case
study of the websites of innocent, and combines quantitative and qualitative methods
(see e.g. Baker & Levon, 2015 for the advantages of such an approach). Some of the
benefits of using such a mixed methods approach for identity research were pointed out
by van de Mieroop (2007: 1122) who maintained that a quantitative analysis provides
“a bird’s eye view of the presence of identity” thus offering initial insights into the data
– which is particularly useful when dealing with relatively large data sets, as in our case
– which can then help identifying potentially interesting sites for further scrutiny. A
qualitative analysis, on the other hand, provides more detailed insights into the specific
ways in which identities are constructed in a specific interactional context. We take a
similar approach in this paper by combining tools and processes from corpus analysis
with discourse analytical techniques.
3.1 Building and working with a corpus
In order to be able to examine patterns of language choice that were repeated over the
website as a whole, we decided to extract as much as possible of the plain text and store
it as a corpus in which each subpage formed an individual file. However, the notion that
16
a corpus can be developed from a single website, or can be seen as instantiating the
textual content of a website, brings with it some methodological challenges. One of the
issues that we had to deal with was the question of how to set boundaries to the target
website. The innocent website is not, of course, a self-contained entity but includes
many links to external sites. It is therefore necessary firstly to articulate a principled
definition of the target website for the purposes of this research, and secondly to find
practical ways to harvest text from those pages which come under this definition.
For this research, we decided to work with the website as contextualised within a
specific socio-cultural context (the UK) and as representative of a coherent company.
We therefore chose to include only those pages which come under the innocent.co.uk
domain, excluding versions of the site for other countries and excluding websites about
activities with which innocent may be linked, e.g. charity appeals or festivals. By
excluding these external sites, we retained the notion of innocent's links with the activity
(as expressed on an innocent.co.uk page) but were able to form a principled boundary
to our corpus.
A second issue that we faced concerns the fact that the innocent website regularly
changes. Since it was not within the scope of the current research to attempt to capture
17
and discuss those changes, we chose a specific, albeit random, date for our corpus
compilation: 05 May 2015.
A third methodological challenge that we encountered was related to the sheer size of
the data. A preliminary look at the innocent website indicated that it consisted of several
thousand pages and subpages, and so it was necessary to use a webcrawler to identify
the urls whose text we wished to include in our corpus. Pre-programmed crawlers are
available, but these would typically open every link which could be found on the target
website and so may not respect the corpus boundaries which we had attempted to
define. We therefore chose to programme our own crawler to open only links leading
to other pages on the innocentdrinks.co.uk website, excluding links to external sites or
to versions of the website for other countries. Programming a custom crawler gave us
much more control over our data (Suchomel and Pomikálek, 2012; Baroni and Ueyama,
2006) and gave us confidence that all of the selected urls contained content which was
relevant to our corpus design principle.
Having arrived at a list of 4870 urls, we then used the programme SketchEngine to create
a corpus (Kilgarriff et al., 2004). SketchEngine includes a relatively simple interface
enabling researchers to create a corpus from urls, but it does require a number of
decisions to be made: the programme offers options to use whitelist or blacklist
18
keywords, to exclude files above or below a certain size, and to exclude duplicate
content. For our research we wished to be as inclusive as possible within the principled
boundaries which we had set – we therefore did not use any of these options, leaving
the software to harvest as many of our target urls as possible and allow any repetition
of large chunks of text to be represented in our corpus statistics. The resulting corpus
consists of 2889 files, representing those urls from which SketchEngine was able to
harvest sufficient text, and containing 2,052,019 words.
3.2 Discourse analysis
In the second step of our analysis we used discourse analytical techniques to analyse in
more detail some of the trends and patterns observed in the first step. While discourse
analysis is a broad umbrella term that signifies a whole range of theoretical traditions in
different disciplinary fields (linguistics, politics, sociology, education to name but few),
and several different schools and epistemologies have developed as a consequence, this
paper is firmly situated in applied and socio- linguistic enquiry and positions itself under
the relatively new but established field of Workplace Discourse (Angouri and Marra,
2011). In the analysis to follow, our main site of investigation is the written text on the
innocent websites but in line with recent work in the field (e.g the various contributions
in Scollon and Levine, 2004) we take multimodal features of the interaction into account
19
and pay specific attention to the ways in which the visual and interactive features of the
pages, including pictures, fonts, colours, and weblinks, contribute to meaning
construction and, more specifically, to the creation of innocent’s identity (e.g. Knox,
2009; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; van Leeuwen, 2011). These procedures are in line
with sociolinguistic research which, although often privileging the analysis of language,
acknowledges that identity construction is not only linguistic but that different channels
of communication create a semiotic aggregate (Jones, 2014; Scollon and Scollon, 2003).
Such a mixed methods approach, combining techniques and procedures from corpus
analysis and discourse analysis, we believe, can capture more holistically the processes
that contribute to constructing identities on websites.
4. Analysis
We focus here particularly on indexicality and relationality, as outlined above, and
discuss some of the ways in which innocent articulates specific identity claims by
indexing belonging to specific categories and by constructing the company’s identities
in relation to others. In particular, through the construction of the innocent ‘community’
a claim of belonging is projected onto the user who is invited to participate in marketing
activities that are implemented in different communities on- and off-line. The consumer
20
of the innocent products is thus set up as a co-constructer of the company’s identities
which goes beyond the purchase of products to participation in (on- and off-line) events,
festivals or activities.
4.1 Findings from the corpus analysis
In the corpus analysis we employed standard techniques of searching for the most
frequent words and n-grams, and searching for keywords. Frequency counts give ‘raw’
information as to frequency; a keyword analysis, in contrast, compares a focus corpus
to a reference corpus to find out which words are unusually frequent in the focus corpus,
thus indicating salient aspects of its content or linguistic repertoire.
4.1.1 Most frequent words.
Depending on the purpose of the analysis, one way ‘in’ to a corpus is to make a word list
to order the words by frequency. Although the top 20 words of any large corpus are
likely to be similar, interesting comparisons can be made based on these insights. In
Appendix 1 we compare the top 25 words in the innocent corpus with the British
National Corpus (BNC) and UK Web as Corpus (ukWaC) in terms of frequency. The two
corpora were chosen as examples of general corpora of British English, which although
21
similar in some ways differ in size and content. The BNC was carefully compiled to be a
balanced general corpus of British English published or spoken between 1960s and
1990s (Aston & Burnard 1998; Lew, 2009). ukWaC on the other hand was compiled from
websites with the domain name .uk, allowing largely random initial selection but very
principled post hoc sorting to maximise useful, non-repeated natural language (Ferraresi
et al., 2008).
In the comparison of these corpora we see firstly the similarities between the BNC and
ukWaC in terms of the very frequent function words. However after the top five words
we start to see that the innocent corpus privileges first and second person pronouns,
the most frequent being ‘you’, then ‘I’ (also found in the BNC top 10). We can also see
that the percentage of the corpus these words take up is relatively large compared to
the other two corpora. Of the 25 most frequent words in the corpus, personal pronouns
constitute 4.88% of the corpus as compared to 1.98% in the BNC and 1.01% in ukWaC.
Interestingly for the purposes of this analysis, the innocent corpus gives ‘we’ and ‘our’
as its 11th and 19th most frequent words. This suggests that in this corpus the company
makes frequent reference to itself (exclusive ‘we’) and possibly to its community
(inclusive ‘we’) – these aspects, and their meaning in terms of identity construction, are
discussed in more detail in the qualitative analysis in the next section.
22
4.1.2 Keywords against ukWaC
The raw frequency comparison above can be further refined by checking which words
are ‘key’ in our corpus compared to a reference corpus. For this we chose ukWaC,
available in Sketchengine. ukWaC is suitable as a reference corpus for our investigation
because it is large, over 1.3 billion words, is contemporary, and comes from a similar
domain, namely .uk websites (for a full account of corpus creation and comparison with
the BNC, see e.g. Ferraresi, Zanchetta, Baroni & Bernardini (2008)). The keyword
function excludes words common to both corpora and focuses on the unusually
frequent words in the corpus under investigation. Words identified as having the highest
keyness (using default parameters in SketchEngine) were as follows:
23
Figure 1. Screenshot of SketchEngine’s output of words that are ‘key’ in the innocent 05 May 2015 corpus compared to the ukWaC corpus.
As could be expected, many of the strongest keywords are to do with the subject matter
of the website, such as ‘innocent’, ‘smoothie’, ‘mangoes’. What is more of interest is the
appearance on the list of lexical items which one would not necessarily associate with a
fruit drinks website – such as ‘nosy’, ‘DOB’, ‘hoodie’, ‘friendship’, and ‘sorry’. As we
explore in more detail in the next section, all of these items can be seen as forming part
of a bigger picture which contributes to constructing innocent’s identity.
24
4.1.3 Most frequent n-grams
Taking the investigation of unusual frequency one step further, we generated a
frequency list of 6 word n-grams. In previous research, frequent n-grams have tended
to be studied as possible indicators of phraseological characteristics of certain genres or
language varieties (e.g. Liu, 2012; Simpson-Vlach and Ellis, 2010). In our case, looking at
a specific website, we were interested in n-grams as a way of locating larger chunks of
text which were repeated throughout the site. The list below shows that there are 17 6word n-grams which all occur the same number of times:
Table 2. The top 6-grams for the innocent May 05 2015 corpus.
your date of birth to check
2,955
we have to ask for your
2,955
to do this bit for you
2,955
to ask for your date of
2,955
please ask a parent or guardian
2,955
parent or guardian to do this
2,955
or guardian to do this bit
2,955
of birth to check that you
2,955
25
if this seems a bit nosy
2,955
have to ask for your date
2,955
guardian to do this bit for
2,955
for your date of birth to
2,955
date of birth to check that
2,955
ask for your date of birth
2,955
ask a parent or guardian to
2,955
a parent or guardian to do
2,955
Sorry if this seems a bit
2,955
By checking the concordance context of these phrases we find that they all come from
the same pop up on the website, in which the company apologises, in what seem to be
over-polite and clearly humorous ways, for needing to check the date of birth (DOB) of
the user:
sorry if this seems a bit nosy. by law, we have to ask for your date of birth to check
that you’re over 12 years old. if you’re 12 or under, please ask a parent or
guardian to do this bit for you. thanks very much.2
The exclusive use of lower case is not a coincidence (or mistake) here – a point which we come back to
in our qualitative analysis below.
2
26
The website obliges any user who wishes to sign up to a service or post blog comments
to enter their date of birth; the pop-up appears when the website users click a question
mark next to the ‘date of birth’ field, or when they omit to fill in this field. It explains the
unusual frequency of the words ‘nosy’, ‘guardian’ and ‘sorry’ pointed out in the keyword
analysis. This n-gram search has thus indicated a textual feature which may – on the
grounds of its ubiquity within the website design (it can be accessed from 2955 pages),
its interactive nature and its placing – be seen as an important aspect of the company’s
communication strategy. Rather than simply ‘demand’ a user’s date of birth, the
company offers an explanation – in humorous, informal, second person address – for
doing so. The pop-up thus aligns with the construction of a coherent and appealing
brand identity which ultimately contributes to the customers buying the company’s
products.
After having identified and briefly described some of the salient features of the language
used on the innocent website, the next section explores some of these observations in
more detail with the aim of understanding how some of these discursive strategies and
linguistic features may contribute to portraying innocent in a particular and idiosyncratic
way thereby constructing its unique and distinctive, as well as authentic and legitimate
identity.
27
4.2 In-depth analysis of selected aspects of the website
Based on previous research (e.g. Pollach, 2005) we have decided to focus in the
qualitative analysis on the ‘us’ section of the website, where innocent, like other
companies, explicitly describe who they are, how the company was founded and how it
has developed since. These so-called ‘about us’ sections, provide important sites for
identity construction as they are generally used – often very strategically – by the
company to construct a particular self-image which they convey to their (potential and
actual) customers and which is closely related to their brand. We first describe some of
the discursive processes through which innocent make specific identity claims thereby
attempting to construct the company’s identity – largely through drawing on the
processes of indexicality and relationality described above – before taking a more critical
look at how these processes and related identity claims are sometimes complementary
and sometimes contradictory.
4.2.1 ‘hello we’re innocent’ – making identity claims
The ‘us’ section of innocent is a good example of the interplay between linguistic, visual,
spatial and time-based elements described in Pauwels (2012) which constructs
28
meanings (and identities). The ‘us’ page comprises two sections: one entitled ‘hello,
we’re innocent’ (all in lower case), and the other called ‘the innocent timeline’ which
consists of a combination of pictures accompanied by short texts capturing the
company’s development since 1998 up to 2014. Combining images and text, this
webpage caters for at least two potential user groups: those who look for specific
information and those who ‘stumble’ across the page while looking for something else.
In both cases, well-constructed ‘about us’ pages, which strike a balance between
providing quality information (while at the same time avoiding self-congratulatory
statements) and using images and relevant weblinks can contribute to image formation
and hence identity construction (Pollach, 2005: 298). The company consistently uses
these pages to index belonging to an imagined ‘ethical’ company category, which,
according to MCA, projects certain positive attributes and behaviours often associated
with such a company onto innocent. At the same time the website user is constructed
as someone who follows a ‘healthy’ lifestyle (defined by the consumption of innocent
products amongst others). This is achieved through the imagery evoked on the various
webpages, and drawing on the different processes captured in the relationality and
indexicality principles described above. In the ‘us’ section innocent portrays itself as a
fun company that is driven by a strong interest in being (and being perceived as being)
an ethical, sustainable, and health-conscious brand.
29
A good example of an attempt to construct these identities can be found in the timeline
entry for 2014 entitled ‘tastes good, does good’ (in lower case), which is accompanied
by a photograph of what appears to be a farmer (who, with a big smile on his face, is
holding a papaya fruit towards the camera; see Picture 1).
Picture1. ‘tastes good, does good’ (http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/us/our-story)
Here, identity construction takes place via setting the company in close relation to the
workers it employs (as per relationality principle). By positioning themselves in relation
to these others (who are here represented by the smiling man in the picture), the
stances of responsibility and ethicality are evoked, which, following the indexicality
principle, contribute to constructing the company’s identity as ‘a good employer’ who
cares about its workers. These identity claims are also supported by the frequent use of
primary colours on the website, which carry a strong link to purity (van Leeuwen 2011),
which is used here to help creating the company’s identity as ethical. These trends are
30
further complemented by the following text which accompanies the picture of the
farmer, described above, on the right hand side:
‘After a lengthy brainstorm we conclude that the things we make taste good, do
you good, and do others good too. And thus ‘Tastes Good, Does Good’ is born.’
This strategic combination of headline, picture, colours and text, and the content which
makes reference to innocent’s foundation (‘Tastes Good, Does Good’) thus work
together and complement each other to create this ‘ethical’ and ‘caring’ image of the
company. This professional identity of the company is complemented by another
identity that the company consistently constructs for itself on its website, and that is
closely related to the stances of playfulness, friendliness and fun.
This other, perhaps more social, identity is constructed through various modes and
channels, including colour (e.g. the use of the colours of the rainbow for the years on
the timeline, and the use of mainly saturated colours to indicate “positive, exuberant,
and adventurous” values (van Leeuwen 2011)), fonts (e.g. the exclusive use of lower
case in the headings but, interestingly, not in the texts underneath), and text (e.g. the
overall very informal and often amusing and humorous interactional style and tone of
the text on the website). Of particular interest is the overall humorous style which is
characteristic of the company’s websites and which is not only constructed verbally but
31
also visually and interactively. Verbally, for example, the choice of words is often less
serious than could be expected for a corporate website – especially when delivering
information, such as in the timeline where the company’s beginnings are described (‘so
we resigned from our jobs the next day and got cracking’), as well as in the various
headlines used to describe memorable moments in the company’s history (e.g. ‘world
domination continues’, ‘our quest for more natural, delicious, healthy foods that help
people live well and die old’), the regular use of unusual lexical items (such as nosy’,
‘hoodie’ and ‘fete’ as identified in the corpus analysis above3), and the frequent play
with words which is of course central to the name of the company itself and which is
also reflected in the heading on the ‘us’ webpage: ‘hello, we’re innocent’. Visually, this
humorous tone is accomplished, for example, by evoking the stances of playfulness,
friendliness and fun in the various pictures in the timeline by surrounding them with
what appear to be hand-painted frames. Interactively, this humorous style is achieved
by providing links to numerous social media (e.g. the blogs) and the recurring integration
The unusual use of ‘hoodie’ is related to one of the competitions that innocent regularly
organise for their consumers and that contribute to the theme of community building in a selfdeprecating way as described above. The same function is performed by the lexical item ‘fete’
which is frequently used to describe an event they held in Regents Park. Using the term ‘fete’
rather than ‘party’ or ‘event’ emulates the traditional ‘village fete’ of English rural life and evokes
associations of community and family thereby further adding to the company’s attempts to set
up these identity categories.
3
32
of the pop-up mentioned in the corpus analysis, as well as an invitation to ‘sign up for
love, friendship, a weekly newsletter’ (at the bottom of almost every page)). All these
features contribute to constructing the company’s image as someone who does not take
themselves too seriously thereby enhancing both the image of the company as well as
its products (e.g. Guillory and Sundar, 2014; Sundar and Kim, 2005).
Through a combination of various discursive strategies, then, including informality, use
of humour and play with words, the company evokes the stances of being likeable,
friendly, playful, fun, non-serious, and by mobilising connotations associated with
children/youth, these identity claims are substantiated. All these adjectives, and the
stances they evoke, are also often associated with a friend, someone fun to be with. This
finding is perhaps not surprising as it ties in nicely with the observations made in our
corpus analysis where we identified ‘friendship’ as one of the unusually frequently used
keywords on the innocent website. These processes are further supported by claiming
membership in specific kinds of categories (such as that of an ‘ethical’ and ‘fun/friendly’
company) which enables the company to benefit from the positive attributes and
behaviours associated with them. Through these processes, then, innocent constructs
an identity which appears to be primarily social rather than professional. However, these
two identities are not contradictory but are inter-related and interwoven in complex
ways. Thus, rather than claiming to be either one or the other, innocent skilfully
33
combines them into a set of identities which ultimately contribute to creating the
company’s highly successful brand image as ethical, healthy and professional, yet
friendly, humorous and playful.
In the next section we focus on a different aspect of identity construction and look in
more detail at those instances where the company’s identity claims are not simply
accepted by the website users but where they are questioned and challenged – for
example (drawing on Bucholtz & Hall 2005) for not being authentic and legitimate. We
explore some of the strategies that innocent employs to deal with and respond to these
challenges thereby legitimating their identity claims.
4.2.2 Dealing with challenges to identity claims from customers
A good example to illustrate some of the ways in which innocent deals with and responds
to these challenges to their identity claims is the representation of the controversial
take-over from Coca-Cola on the timeline (2009) on the ‘us’ section. One of the
strategies that innocent successfully uses in this context is humour, or, more specifically,
self-denigrating humour and self-irony. These kinds of humour are renowned for
assisting the user in coping with a difficult situation and protecting them from criticism
by others (e.g. Hay, 2001), as well as in admitting own mistakes (Zajdman, 1995) thereby
34
creating a positive self-image and portraying oneself as being in control of the situation
(Campbell, 2000).
Under the heading ‘hello coca cola’ the take-over by Coca-Cola is described as follows:
‘Coca-Cola invests in innocent. A nation rejoices/sends an angry letter/doesn’t
really notice’.
While a lot could be said about the humorous wording of this text with its multiple
contrasting meanings and interpretations, what is particularly noteworthy about this
item on the company’s timeline is the image accompanying this text. The picture shows
a coke can with a juice pack squeezed out by the coke can’s wide mouth with sharp teeth
(see Picture 2).
Picture 2. ‘hello coca cola’ (http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/us/our-story)
35
While the coke can (and by implication the Coca-Cola company it represents) is
portrayed as a predator gulping down its prey, the innocent juice carton is depicted as
the prey, the victim and as, quite literally, ‘innocent’. This impression is further
reinforced by what appear to be red dots (of blood?) on the white floor around the
violent coke can. Through this visual representation, innocent’s identity is thus
constructed by positioning the company (as embodied by a smoothie carton) in relation
to another company, Coca-Cola (represented by a coke can). Drawing on MCA, this
relationship between the two companies is presented here as the standardised
relational pair (Sacks 1992) of culprit and victim, which actively and, one could argue,
strategically, contributes to identity construction by portraying innocent as the (‘good’,
‘innocent’, and perhaps even helpless) victim in relation to the (‘nasty’ and ‘dangerous’)
Coca-Cola. Innocent thereby skilfully rebukes the criticisms of its customers (see, e.g. the
comments at the beginning of the paper) and, using Bucholtz and Hall’s terminology,
tries to counter the customers’ perception of the company’s identity claims as artificial
and fake, and perhaps even as delegitimate. Through these strategies innocent at the
same time reinforces its own identity claims as ‘good’, ‘ethical’ and ‘innocent’. Similar
strategic self-representations were also observed in a study by Buttny (2009) who
analysed how Wal-Mart was represented to the community during a public hearing in
light of the community’s criticism of the company’s plans. Like innocent, Wal-Mart’s
36
representatives tried to place their company in a positive light by rebuking their
customers’ points of criticism. However, unlike the juice company, they did not use
humour to help them achieve this but rather drew on the discourse of facts and
information to support their own arguments.
So far our analyses have described some of the diverse processes through which
innocent attempts to construct a set of closely intertwined (professional and social)
identities on the company’s website. The processes described above and the various
stances they evoke and identities they create have been relatively complementary and
have contributed to a more or less homogenous, even if multifaceted, image of the
company as ‘ethical’ and yet ‘fun’. In the next section we critically re-examine some of
these identity claims and take a closer look at the discursive processes through which
these claims are being articulated and sometimes undermined by focusing on the choice
of pronouns the company uses to portray itself – especially in relation to its customers.
4.2.3. How ‘innocent’ are we really? Making contradictory identity claims
Choice of pronouns is another discursive strategy that is often associated with identity
construction (e.g. Pollach, 2005; van De Mieroop, 2007). It is, in fact, one of the
strategies through which relationship claims are uttered and thereby constructed
between the company and its website users (Fuertes-Olivera et al., 2001; Pollach, 2005;
37
Serrano and Aijón Oliva, 2013). In this section we focus on the use of pronouns in
relation to innocent’s claims of a ‘family’ identity.
As we have elaborated in our quantitative analysis above in more detail, pronouns
feature prominently on the innocent webpages. As shown in Table 1, the most
frequently used pronouns on the website are ‘you’ and ‘I’ followed by ‘we’ and the
corresponding possessive pronoun ‘our’. According to Callow (1998), first person
pronouns, like ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ are particularly effective in establishing a relationship
between the author of a text and its readers, while second person pronouns, such as
‘you’ and ‘your’, are characteristic for mass communication in spite of the fact that the
authors clearly do not know their audience. These generic uses of second person
pronouns “draw the audiences into the discourse, thereby remedying the impersonality
of mass communication (Fairclough, 1989)” (Pollach, 2005: 296).
The first person plural pronoun ‘we’ is particularly complex as it can be used as an
audience inclusive, audience exclusive or impersonal pronoun (e.g. Serrano and Aijón
Oliva, 2013), and its reference can shift, sometimes within the same sentence. The ways
it is used and the meanings it conveys on the ‘us’ webpage are particularly interesting
as they challenge some of the identity claims the company makes on this page.
38
Under the link ‘family’ the main heading on this webpage reads ‘welcome to the innocent
family’, which together with a framed black and white photograph of what appears to
be a family sounds like an invitation to customers to become a member of the innocent
family (see Picture 3).
Picture 3. ‘family’ (https://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/us/family)
Through the image and the text on this webpage and especially by explicitly mentioning
the identity category ‘family’, innocent portrays itself as a collective (rather than an
individual) which, according to MCA, is welcoming and inclusive (as indexed by ‘welcome
to’ and ‘join’) and which carries all the positive attributes and behaviours associated with
a family. This reference to family is in line with the frequent use of ‘friendship’
throughout the websites as described above, thus making further identity claims for the
company by evoking stances that index a collective, supportive, friendly and inclusive
identity for innocent.
39
However, upon closer reading of the text below this inviting headline next to the ‘family’
photograph, a rather different picture emerges. Of all the pronouns used in this text,
half refer to the collective identity of ‘the family’ while the other half refer to what
appears to be a singular ‘you’ – i.e. the user of the website. Particularly noteworthy in
this context are the ways in which the ‘we’ is often set in opposition to the ‘you’ –
thereby creating distinct subject positions rather than an inviting and welcoming family.
A good example of this is the opening sentence: ‘We were wondering if you’d like to join
the innocent family’ in which the ‘you’ is clearly put in opposition to the ‘we’. This ‘us’
versus ‘you’ dichotomy (Van Dijk, 2001) is maintained throughout the entire paragraph
and at no point do the ‘we’ and the ‘you’ merge. This is further shown in the promise
that once ‘you’ have joined ‘our family’ ‘[w]e’ll email you our news once a week’. It is
thus very clear that the ‘we’, although it appears inclusive, is, in fact exclusive, and
means ‘us at innocent’, while the ‘you’ refers to ‘the people who drink our drinks, i.e.
you’ as the website explicitly states. This setting up of rather distinct subject positions
by explicit mentioning specific (and in this case exclusive) identity categories which are
set in opposition to each other (i.e. ‘the innocent family’ versus ‘the consumers’), is
rather surprising and appears to undermine and challenge the company’s attempts to
portray itself as an inclusive and welcoming ‘family’.
40
These observations on the ‘family’ webpage are further supported by a quantitative
approach to the referents of ‘we’ across the innocent website. Looking at concordance
lines, as was noted in Table 1 above, there are over 20,000 instances of ‘we’ on the
websites, making it unfeasible to look qualitatively at each instance. But a qualitative
analysis of a random sample of 250 concordance lines generated only one instance of
‘we’ in its inclusive use – thereby providing further support for our observations that
this pronoun is predominantly used in its exclusive meaning, which, in turn, challenges
some of the company’s identity claims as being an open and welcoming ‘family’.
5. Discussion and conclusion
Through a strategic combination of tools and techniques from corpus analytical and
discourse analytical approaches, and using Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) framework and
MCA as a guiding principle, we have identified and described several processes through
which identity claims are articulated (and sometimes justified and reinforced, as well as
strategically played down and contradicted) on the corporate website of innocent. This
identity work takes place in different modes and channels and involves discursive, visual,
and interactive processes. Through these various modes and largely drawing on the
various processes captured by the relationality and indexicality principles (Bucholtz &
41
Hall 2005) and MCA, the company makes specific identity claims for itself and creates a
set of interrelated and intertwined professional and social identities. This set of
identities enables the company to strategically foreground and exploit the different
functionalities and meanings associated with each identity, such as professionalism,
ethicality and responsibility, or friendliness and informality, which is particularly useful
when dealing with customers’ criticism and attempting to uphold specific identity
claims, and to construct an authentic and legitimate brand image for the company.
Like Koller (2007) in her study of HSBC we have also observed that one of the strategies
through which this identity construction takes place is the creation of a dichotomy which
enables the company to draw on and utilise competing discourses thereby setting up
specific, and sometimes opposing, subject positions for itself and its customers. For
example, through their use of certain images (e.g. the black and white picture of what
appears to be a family in Picture 3), choice of pronouns (e.g. ‘we’) together with the
explicit mentioning of specific identity categories (e.g. ‘family’) innocent indexes the
stances of collectivity and togetherness, as well as friendliness thereby claiming
membership in this category and benefiting from the various positive attributes
associated with it. Through these processes innocent portrays itself as an open, inclusive
and inviting family (who asks its website users to ‘join us’). However, these claims for a
‘family’ identity are at the same time relativised and perhaps undermined to a certain
42
extent by using the pronoun ‘we’ predominantly in its exclusive (rather than inclusive)
meaning thereby creating an ‘us’ versus ‘you’ dichotomy in which ‘the innocent family’
and ‘the consumers’ are positioned at opposing sides.
But rather than interpreting these contradictory practices negatively and assuming that
they are inconsistencies which render the identity claims of innocent on its website fake
or artificial (Bucholtz & Hall 2005), we would argue that they are a reflection of the
recipient design of websites which needs to consider and accommodate various
different potential audiences (e.g. consumers, but also stakeholders and staff) who may
all visit this website and expect to feel addressed appropriately in their needs and
expectations. Using the identity category ‘family’ could thus be seen as a strategic move
which enables innocent to achieve this by drawing on different kinds of family at
different points, corresponding for example to the nuclear family (including staff), the
extended family (including stakeholders) and the metaphorical family (including
consumers). In order to achieve this, the referential vagueness of the we-form as well
as the generic you-form are strategically drawn upon to design the website for the
different recipient groups. This choice of pronouns together with the use of the category
‘family’ thus allows for different degrees of proximity to the ‘family core’, making every
potential website user feel ‘at home’.
43
In addition to generating these insights into the complexity of corporate identity
construction online, this paper also makes several methodological contributions. Not
only do our analyses provide further support for the benefits of combining quantitative
and qualitative procedures when researching corporate or professional identities (see
also van de Mieroop 2007; Koller 2007), but we have also discussed possible ways of
dealing with the methodological challenges of conducting research on websites. And
while we do not want to claim too much here, we hope that future research on (identity
construction in) online environments which deals with relatively large quantities of data,
may find some of the procedures that we have outlined here useful and may want to
follow (or challenge) some of the procedural decisions that we had to take. A particularly
interesting avenue for future research could be to take a more diachronic approach and
examine possible changes in online identity construction over time – especially given
the rapidly changing nature of this environment.
Clearly, identity construction is a complex yet fascinating topic of inquiry which takes
place beyond the borders of the written text and is accomplished creatively and
conjointly across the different modes and channels. All these modes and channels
constitute important sites for meaning making in identity creation – and more emphasis
should be put on systematically incorporating visual and interactive elements in
44
quantitative and qualitative analyses of identity construction – both methodologically
as well as theoretically and conceptually.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to innocent for giving us permission to reproduce the pictures from
their website in this paper, and to Ben Heuer for his generous support in programming
the webcrawler to harvest the data from the innocent websites. We would also like to
thank The Centre for Applied Linguistics at Warwick University for providing financial
support to finalise this paper.
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