Shopping as ‘best practice’ – analysing Walmart’s sustainability policies

Nowadays, companies increasingly rely on green-economy oriented campaigns, in order to engage the growing number of ethic, environment-friendly consumers. Indeed, expressions evoking environmental friendliness are becoming ever trendier. Walmart, the American multinational corporation and the largest retailer in the world, is a relevant case in point, since its explicit, advertised goals are perfectly in line with the contemporary ‘green-oriented scenario’. Interestingly enough, Walmart’s advertising campaigns seem to echo the Sustainable Development Goals, as declared through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the United Nations Summit on 25 September 2015. Against this background, our study examined the Walmart’s videos (retrieved from YouTube) on ‘sustainability’ with their variety of communicative strategies, where ‘responsible’ Walmart positive attitudes to fundamental issues are advertised. Walmart made a major commitment announcing goals to create zero waste, use only renewable energy and responsible sourcing, sell products that sustain people and the environment. In gist, the company’s commitments are to expand the business while at the same time improving communities. Our integrative approach to the analysis of aspects of contemporary Walmart corporate communication relies on a broad (Positive) Discourse Analysis (DA) perspective. The focus is on both the values of social esteem/capacity as classified in the Appraisal Framework, and the specificity of language of advertising with its lines of appeal. Furthermore, insights from ecolinguistics and multimodal DA resources were taken into account. This study highlighted how the fluid YouTube medium, fully exploiting the grammar of visuality, allows Walmart sustainability campaign to achieve an all-pervasive effect and make its goals ‘visible’ and presenting shopping at Walmart as a best practice. In terms of PDA, Walmart advertising foregrounds positive production and distribution models to imitate, through an intentional exploitation of multimodal representational resources, so as to construe a persuasive vision of a better world. From an ecolinguistic perspective, the study clarified how Walmart’s communication tends to align the virtual customers by getting them onside with the widely shared sustainability values, especially by representing its actions as an inspiring ongoing story of progress. Issues of credibility were also discussed.