Shopping as "best practice" - analyzing Walmart’s sustainability policies

Significantly, the assistants keep smiling, and the customers react accordingly, thus, in terms of PDA, a persuasive narrative of fruitful teaching, resulting in positive cooperation between the Walmart-ASDA corporation and their customers, is shaped. From an ecolinguistic perspective, both the notions of spreading green-oriented awareness and of real improvement in sustainability-oriented behaviour are repeatedly shown at multi-modal level. Making explicit the themes of cooperative teaching-learning in the ASDA campaign, by contrast, mainly relies on the verbal level.

Concluding remarks

Apparently, Walmart Corporation and its associates' promotional communication prioritises their green-oriented, sustainable image. Their advertised efforts tend to encourage more responsible production practices, which (should) provide high quality, more affordable products, as reported on the websites and videos. As we have seen, Walmart's videos shape attractive and empathic multimodal narratives of vibrant, dynamic interventions, which include the production of clean energy, and reprocessing cycles. The development of Community Life-based programme also plays a strategic role in Walmart's campaigns, which aim at reaching out to the local communities (of customers). Indeed, the rhetoric of solidarity is straightforward in Walmart's sustainability campaigns, as Walmart's recent Restorative Justice (RJ) programmes also show. Such programmes aim to promote a socially engaged image of the company.

Furthermore, the fluid YouTube medium, by fully exploiting the grammar of visuality, allows Walmart sustainability campaign to achieve an all-pervasive effect and make its goals visible. The multimodal messages from the videos come down to this: by purchasing the advertised goods, metaphorically laden with positively configured and evolving values of sustainability, billions of people can `save money, and live better healthier lives', thus emerging out of poverty, and ultimately saving the planet. In gist, shopping as best practice.

In terms of PDA, Walmart advertising displays positive production and distribution models to imitate, through the exploitation of multimodal representational resources, so as to render a persuasive vision of a better world. The contemporary (stereotypical) all-pervasive perception of the need for `sustainability' and `green-washing' is thus skillfully and synergically foregrounded both at verbal and audio-visual levels for advertising purposes -- one level enhancing the other. From an ecolinguistic perspective, we can notice 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.

Which further contribution can ecolinguistics provide to the analysis of communication on the human relations with the environment? Apart from identifying the linguistic and visual resources and workings of such communication, can ecolinguistics make a difference? Largely, ecolinguistic scholars share a strong ideological motivation to promote positive change on the anthropic impact on the planet. As Stibbe (2016) made clear, “Scholars who study environmental communication are particularly concerned with the ways people communicate about the natural world because they believe such communication has far-reaching effects at a time of largely human-caused crises [and thus they encourage] the search for new stories to live by [our italics]”. Now, in the advertising of Walmart's sustainability efforts, the sustainability challenge is prioritised, and the goal to give billions of people better and healthier lives is captivatingly foregrounded. Hence, an alluring new story to live by is provided. However, credibility is an important issue in this and analogous stories, thus the next step for an ecolinguistic research on Walmart's sustainability videos could be to verify the influence of such stories on the audiences through cross-media investigations.

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