Adaptively Evolving Ecosystems:Green-speaking at Tesco

Adaptively evolving ecosystems – green-speaking at Tesco Nowadays, many companies rely on green economy-oriented campaigns to promote their corporate image and attract the ever-increasing number of consumers who are sensitive to environmental issues. Accordingly, ‘ecosystem’ and ‘sustainability’ have become catchwords for such companies, Tesco being a relevant case in point. Tesco – a UK fresh food business and a media-savvy company currently relying on a team of over 470,000 people in 16 markets worldwide – advertises its aims to reduce the environmental impacts in their operations and supply chain. The aim of this study is to identify and scrutinise aspects of the verbal texts and videos accessible from Tesco’s website advertising such issues. These kinds of multimodal texts require an integrated approach which utilises both the tools of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Kress 2010; van Leeuwen 2013) and the additional lens of Positive Discourse Analysis, with its emphasis on discourses about positive happenings and initiatives leading to change, in order to offer positive and inspirational models (Martin 2004; Rogers 2017). Furthermore, the use of particular lines of appeal (Fowles 1976, 1996; Dyer 1988) in Tesco’s corporate communication will be investigated, as well as the modalities of the visual composition of the images (Stinson 2012; Ascher and Pincus 2013; Bateman 2014; Chandler 2016). The results and implications of such analyses will be critically discussed.