A joint linguistic-marketing analysis of brand and product names: the case of Unilever

Abstract – The proposed paper aims to present a qualitative descriptive study that examines brands and products commercialized by the Anglo-Dutch multinational consumer goods company Unilever from a marketing and linguistic perspective. The research is the result of a recent interest in terminology and linguistics studies applied to the field of branding. Initially, the focus is on brand identity and the communication tools used by the company to reach its consumer base. Subsequently, by drawing on linguistics and translation tools, an English-Italian inter-linguistic contrastive analysis is performed. Finally, brand and product names in both languages are analysed on the basis of six different dimensions: graphemic/phonetic, morphological/syntactical, semantic, and lexical. The utmost aim is to evaluate the overall impact of marketing and linguistic/translation choices on Italian consumers and find whether different communication strategies are used for different product types. The corpus for this study is represented by the English and Italian versions of the Unilever website, and external official websites of its brands