Shopping as ‘best practice’ – analyzing 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. Expressions evoking environmental friendliness are becoming ever trendier and there is a widespread awareness that value-based needs rather than simple material needs must be met, in order to satisfy the consumers’ wishes more effectively. Accordingly, popular words such as ‘sustainability’ have been variously re-contextualized/re-framed and have become an ‘ought-to’ for media-savvy companies ‘with a vision’. 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’.Walmart launched a global commitment campaign to sustainable agriculture, aiming to strengthen local farmers and economies, while providing customers access to affordable, high-quality food, and made a major commitment to environmental sustainability, announcing goals to create zero waste, use only renewable energy and sell products. Against this background, our study aims to examine the Walmart’s videos on ‘sustainability’ with their variety of communicative strategies, where ‘responsible’ Walmart positive attitudes to fundamental issues like Energy, Waste, Products and Responsible Sourcing are promoted. From a broad Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) approach, we will analyse the ways in which Walmart’s videos convey the messages of ‘sustainability’, and of ‘green-oriented’, ‘environment-sensitive’, ‘consumer-friendly’ productive and commercial activities, for the advertised purposes of creating a better, healthier society in a better and more just world.When dealing with multimodal texts, such as Walmart’s Sustainability videos, which rely on the synergic interaction of many different communicative codes (shapes, images, colours, lighting, composition, perspective, music, words, rhythm, sequence, setting, etc.) the issue of using comprehensive methodology/ies comes to the foreground. Furthermore, since these videos also include discourses and talks in the fields of attitudes, emotion languages and advertising, an integrated methodology seems to be the more practical choice. In other words, we need to face the analytical challenge of utilizing the tools and resources from different approaches. Hence, our main approach to the analysis of aspects of contemporary Walmart corporate communication relies on a MCDA perspective (Kress 2010, van Leeuwen, 2013, Martin 2004), which enabled us to analyse both the audio-visual and the verbal components of the multimodal texts under investigation, since it is an intrinsically comprehensive and inclusive methodology