Sustainability as an element of corporate identity: multimodal analysis of an Italian coffee company’s website
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Marina Niceforo
Abstract
The present paper originates from a research partnership established between the author and the Italian coffee company Caffè Motta (Salerno) within a research project held between 2022 and 2024. The project, which included the collection of both oral and written documents, interviews, and visits to the plant, aimed to investigate the company’s sustainability initiatives and policies to produce a bilingual glossary of sustainability. As part of this broad project, the present study considers the English ‘Sustainability’ page from Caffè Motta’s website to answer several research questions about the choice of specific images to represent corporate sustainability. The first part of the analysis provides a multimodal analysis of both verbal and visual elements. Subsequently, the analysis reflects on whether these texts and images effectively convey the company’s sustainability messages, given its wide range of initiatives and actions currently implemented. Finally, the paper discusses the role of culture in the construction and interpretation of sustainability images, as well as the function of sustainability in corporate identity building, particularly considering Italy’s renowned ‘coffee culture’. Overall, this study aims to complete the mapping of the company’s available sustainability information, also in light of the forthcoming glossary to be used for the company’s sustainability communications.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Alessandro Adinolfi, Camilla Mastromartino, Fabrizio Avagliano, and Michele Pugliese from Caffè Motta for their kindness, time, and generous availability during each visit to the plant and throughout the partnership period.
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Disclaimer: The images reproduced in this paper are used with the express permission of Caffè Motta. All images are reproduced solely for academic purposes. Proper attribution to the original source is provided in accordance with copyright and fair use policies. All rights remain with the original copyright holder.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Use of inscribed objects in roleplay training sessions at a Japanese insurance company
- Visual and multimodal literacies in secondary education in Spain: voices from English language teachers
- The marketization of higher education in China: a comparative multimodal genre analysis between top-public and international universities
- Sustainability as an element of corporate identity: multimodal analysis of an Italian coffee company’s website
- Communicating political achievements: a semiotic analysis of political posters in the linguistic landscape of Tanzania
- From aspiring to authentic engineers: prioritizing real people and real problems in engineering through service design methodology
- Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality: a corpus analysis of motion events in global comics
- Sharing experience or selling service?: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of self-proclaimed Hong Kong female PhD student identity in Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book)
- Professors’ perception of body language in the aftermath of the Covid-19 online teaching period
