Constructing hotel brands: A multimodal analysis of luxury hotel homepages

Abstract

As e-marketing has become the dominant marketing mode in the hospitality industry, this study investigates how two luxury hotels represent and promote themselves through their major e-commerce platforms (i.e. hotel-owned websites). The verbal and visual texts of 51 website homepages owned by these two hotel chains are compiled and analyzed by drawing upon the corpus linguistic approach for verbal analysis and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar framework for image analysis. The findings indicate that despite some similarities in their web-mediated communication strategies, each hotel firm has discursive strategies that reveal diverging attitudes in their choices of various semiotic resources to construct their own brand identities. This study contributes to the academic literature on web-mediated tourism discourse by showing how a multimodal analysis can add insights to brand formulation