Multiple sponsorships and advertising in the discursive construction of corporate identity

This study deals with sponsorship discourse, and is aimed at identifying the strategies deployed in corporate communication by companies engaged in multiple sponsorship initiatives, focusing on those aspects which contribute to the construction or enhancement of the general public’s perception of corporate identity. It takes as a starting point the analysis of a representative case study, that of the multinational corporation Accenture, and examines the texts presenting its sponsorship initiatives as they are presented on the company’s Website, and looks at how they are leveraged through campaigns based on various media – print, television, online and posters. Special attention is given to ‘sponsorship webpages’, i.e. webpages devoted to illustrating the rationale underlying sponsorship initiatives, as an emerging (sub-)genre native to the Web, as well as to advertisements. The main purpose of the study is to identify the principal discursive and – more generally – semiotic strategies deployed to make the most of the sponsorship effort, while assessing their impact on the public’s perception of corporate identity and their possible contribution to corporate image enhancement. The basic methodological framework of this study is in the area of discourse analysis, and relies on some fundamental concepts in pragmatics which help explain how unexpressed notions and standpoints are put to use in communication. Reference is also made to genre analysis, both in its traditional versions and in its more recent evolutions that take account of the interdiscursive relationship between genres, their mutual influence and hybridization (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993, 2004; Askehave/Swales 2001; Devitt 2004). For the exploration of the interaction between text, images, graphics and different media in multimodal environments – and in particular on websites – occasional reliance is made on principles put forth in recent studies applying discourse analysis to multimodality, usually grouped under the denomination ‘multimodal analysis’ (Kress/van Leewen 2001, 1996/2006; Iedema 2003; LeVine/Scollon 2004; O’Halloran 2004; Garzone 2007).