The digital scent of a lemon: Constructing product identity in Limoncello brands’ online storytelling

This article investigates how Limoncello is discursively and multimodally constructed on the websites of iconic Italian brands targeting non-Italian prospective consumers. As a geographically and culturally marked product, Limoncello offers a productive case for examining how digital brand communication shapes product identity through the interaction of verbal and non-verbal resources. The study focuses on the websites of the five main Italian Limoncello producers identified by the Consortium for the Protection of PGI Sorrento Lemons (Consorzio di Tutela del Limone di Sorrento IGP) and analyzes the lexical, semantic, visual, and compositional choices through which these brands represent their products online. Methodologically, the article combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. A multimodal digital corpus was compiled from the selected websites; verbal data were processed using TALL – Text Analysis for All, while non-verbal data were examined through a multimodal analytical framework. The findings show that Limoncello’s product identity is constructed through recurring patterns related to territorial origin, production practices, tradition, artisanal expertise, and corporate legitimacy.