From corporate websites to consumer blogs: Analyzing recontextualization of brand identity in fashion discourse

This study focuses on the linguistic expression of brand identity and how it is recontextualized from the producer’s to the consumer’s perspective across two digital genres: corporate websites and consumer blogs. The analysis is situated in the discourse of the fashion community, where brands are often identified with iconic personalities and the world of luxury, and thus offer richly articulated descriptions. The methodological approach integrates quantitative text-mining and qualitative textual analysis. Small specialized corpora were compiled from the websites of three fashion brands. Three parallel corpora were then compiled from fashion blog posts that discussed the same brands. The software WMatrix was used to extract all adjectives from the six corpora, which were then manually analyzed to identify those that encoded various attributes of brand identity (e.g., modern, elegant, light). The results showed that brand identity as communicated on corporate websites is often recontextualized within the social community of fashion bloggers, who add new and creative meanings that expand on those originally defined by companies. The findings can be useful in the context of brand management to determine which attributes are perceived most favourably by consumers and should thus be reinforced.