The role of language in shaping brand identity and consumer perception in Marketing

In contemporary digital markets, branding is increasingly shaped through language and multimodal communication, particularly on visually driven social media platforms such as Instagram. As brands compete for attention and credibility, they rely on the strategic integration of linguistic, visual, and interactional resources to construct brand identity and engage consumers. This study investigates how global skincare brands use linguistic and multimodal strategies on Instagram to shape consumer perception. It also examines how audiences respond to and participate in these branding practices. By focusing on brand-consumer interaction, the research aims to illuminate how meaning and brand personality are discursively and visually constructed in public digital spaces. The study adopts a qualitative mixed-methods approach that integrates corpus-assisted discourse analysis with multimodal discourse analysis. The dataset consists of six interrelated corpora. Three corpora of Instagram captions and hashtags produced by three global skincare brands—La Mer, COSRX, and La Roche-Posay—and a corpus of consumer comments responding to the brands' posts. Using AntConc, the corpus analysis identifies recurring lexical patterns, evaluative language, stance markers, and interactional strategies employed by both brands and consumers. This corpus based analysis is complemented by an in-depth multimodal examination of selected Instagram posts. It focuses on the interaction between visual elements such as colors, imagery, and composition and accompanying textual features including captions and hashtags. The findings indicate that branding on Instagram is realized through coordinated multimodal ensembles rather than through language alone. Brands strategically combine visual aesthetics with linguistic stance taken to communicate expertise, authenticity, luxury or scientific authority, depending on their market positioning. Consumer responses further demonstrate that audiences actively engage with brand discourse by endorsing negotiation or challenging brand messages within comment sections. Thereby contributing to the ongoing construction of brand meaning and credibility. Overall, the study shows that effective branding on Instagram depends on the strategic alignment of linguistic and visual resources within interactive audience engagement. Consumer responses play a central role in reinforcing or destabilising brand credibility, highlighting the importance of dialogic communication in platform-based branding. These findings address the problem of how brand meaning is constructed in a social media context and offer insights for analyzing and evaluating brand communication practices in digital marketing environments.