Magugu, Mandilive2025-11-192025-11-192024https://hdl.handle.net/10566/21431Nando’s is one of the fastest-growing fast foodscapes in South Africa and Zimbabwe. It competes with other fast foods as a business. Whilst literature in Language and Communication, and Food Studies has concentrated on exploring many topics ranging from semiotics related to food in cuisines, recipe books, pop culture, unhealthy consumptions, food typologies and systems to mention a few, there has been little on trying to understand the semiotics of foodscapes. Precisely, how fast foodscapes position themselves including the semiotic resources and discourses they draw upon to sell products including consumers’ consumption discourses. In Africa, many prominent fast foodscapes are originally Western brands. However, Nando’s is one of the growing fast foodscape brands that originated from South Africa. This study therefore investigates the semiotic resources and brand identity positioning strategies employed by Nando’s fast food restaurants in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Through a comparative analysis, the research examines how Nando’s positions itself as a foodscape in Africa, specifically in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The researcher investigated the branding and consumption discourses and marketing strategies Nando’s uses to craft a distinctive identity within the fast-food industry, including looking at the customer perceptions of Nando’s in response to its engagement and consumption discourses. The researcher collected data using a qualitative-interpretive approach, such as document analysis and virtual ethnography. The researcher applied Critical Multi-semiotic Discourse Analysis (CMDA) framework to showcase how Nando’s uses language and other semiotic elements to present particular ideologies and negotiate meaning in its branding strategies in South Africa and Zimbabwe. This thesis therefore presents analyses of the linguistic and non linguistic material from a sample of Nando’s restaurants in both countries, with an emphasis on signage, which represents all the semiotic resources found in Nando’s restaurants that are part of the customer dining experience. The study’s findings suggest that themes of Afro-Portuguese heritage, local cultural adaptation, multiculturalism, local language use, collaboration with local creatives and addressing serious issues using humour are evident in Nando’s branding identity and positioning strategies. Nando’s repurposes semiotic resources such as Barcelos Cockerel, the African Bird’s Eye Chilli, Nando’s Hand’s, peri-red just to name a few. The results show evidence of how these unique semiotic resources and branding discourses create favourable ideologies about the brand. When creating selling discourses, Nando’s borrows from different discourses that fit the advertising style of its African environment whilst acknowledging the identity of the businessmen who started it. Nando’s selling discourses in South Africa draw from social, economic, and political discourse, and issues of diversity to make meaning humorously. It takes serious issues the country is grappling with and repurposes such discourses as meaning-making resources for selling its food. Whereas Nando’s selling discourses in Zimbabwe are created using family discourses, the Zimbabwe farming landscape, activities and produce, local identity, and social media text. The findings also show that the perceptions of customers about Nando’s services, branding and consumption discourses vary depending on the place of operation. Nando’s customers in South Africa mostly focus on the intertextually borrowed text which relates to the social, economic, political and diversity-charged commentary. While Nando’s customers in Zimbabwe focus on the primary message which relates to food, services, and the environment in which the foodscape is positioned. Nando’s is able to capture the attention of its customers through its branding and consumption discourses in South Africa. Using social, economic, and political issues, while this can be entertaining it may cause irreversible harm. In contrast, branding and consumption discourses in Zimbabwe entertain and focus on growing the local economy. The study has therefore contributed to the gap in the fields of Linguistics, Business, Marketing and Food Studies by concentrating on Nando’s branding and positioning of semiotics and discourses as a foodscape.enBrand identityConsumption practicesDiscourseMulticulturalismFast-foodscapesThesis