Corporate Self-Representation on Official Websites: Strategic Signifiers and Sentiment Profiles

Organizations communicate across many channels, yet official websites remain a controlled, authoritative space where firms articulate identity and strategy. This study examines how Croatia’s top enterprises (n = 100) describe themselves on their websites and which emotional tones they use to signal strategic intent. Our goal is to identify recurring strategic signifiers and map distinct sentiment profiles in corporate narratives. We compiled company descriptions from official sites; texts were originally in Croatian and machine-translated into English, and all analysis was conducted on the English corpus. Using lexicon-based sentiment methods (AFINN, Bing, NRC), we quantified polarity and discrete emotions, aggregated scores at the firm level, and applied k-means clustering to normalized emotion vectors. Results show a consistent emphasis on mission–vision–values language and a dominance of positive emotions—especially trust and anticipation. We interpret, based on cluster exemplars, that higher trust/anticipation tones can function as soft governance cues, while transparency about negatives characterizes an issue-addressing regime without eroding overall positivity. Cluster analysis reveals three stable profiles: optimistic consumer-oriented narratives, transparent issue-addressing messaging, and low-affect technical descriptions. We conclude that sentiment profiling offers a practical audit tool for aligning website copy with stakeholder expectations and governance communication, supporting benchmarking, and future tests linking narrative tone to investor behavior and firm performance.