Showcasing Motorbikes and Sewing Machines: Promotional Language on Husqvarna Websites

Abstract

How do companies that produce highly diverse merchandise promote their different goods and how do they target them to their consumers? The Husqvarna brand is known for containing several divisions that manufacture a wide range of products from motorbikes to chainsaws and sewing machines. Each of these companies has its own dedicated webpage, which represents an important space for self-promotion and presentation of the characteristics of their products. However, while Husqvarna has been widely studied in terms of marketing and corporate social responsibility, whether the brand’s promotional strategies relative to the diverse products are more or less the same or change accordingly remains to be investigated. The present study sets out to fill this gap by examining how motorbikes and sewing machines are described and promoted on the respective Husqvarna websites by looking at branding, targeting, and promotional language. In order to carry out our analysis, we created two corpora from the official US Husqvarna Motorcycles and Sewing Machines websites. The two corpora have been analysed following both a quantitative and qualitative approach, combining corpus linguistics and appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005). This case study will yield insights on how multidivisional companies promote their different products and how they target them for their different audiences.