Abstract
As environmental concerns began to emerge, companies started to target toward the growing ‘green market’ to launch their green products. Companies’ green advertising played an important role in facilitating corporate green marketing and fuelling the desire for environmental-friendly commodities. Applying a Critical Discursive Perspective, this study focuses on corporate environmental advertising in order to illuminate their discursive strategies and the process through which corporate green advertising generates and symbolically structures the necessity of green consumption. The comparison of constructive characteristics and constructed meanings of green advertisings identified embody distinction in Western and Chinese cognitive style and process.
Highlights
Public concerns over environmental issues have produced a dramatic increase in the introduction of ‘green’ or environmentally friendly products, and many companies are engaged in environmental marketing (Bahn and Wright, 2001; Leonidou et al, 2011; Dangelico and Vocalelli, 2017)
Based on the selection criteria, four companies that advertise their environmentally friendly product through corporate websites have been selected for data collection: general electric (GE) in China, Unilever in China, BiYaDi (BYD) Auto, and Landsea Real Estate. These four companies are categorized into two groups for comparative analysis: Category One as multinationals (MNCs) subsidiaries (GE and Unilever) and Category Two as Chinese indigenous companies (BYD and Landsea). To study these corporate websites in detail, we focus on discourse from Products/Services Introduction page, as well as the “green” content from their Home, Introduction, and Sustainability/corporate social responsibility (CSR) web pages
In the Product page of GE’s website, all green products are introduced as a subfield category under the main theme of ‘ecomagination.’ GE launched their ‘ecomagination’ campaign in 2005 in order to promote their energy-efficient technology products and services, and to construct the company’s public image as a leading socially responsible company
Summary
Public concerns over environmental issues have produced a dramatic increase in the introduction of ‘green’ or environmentally friendly products, and many companies are engaged in environmental marketing (Bahn and Wright, 2001; Leonidou et al, 2011; Dangelico and Vocalelli, 2017) In this context, corporate green advertising has emerged to manifest the combination of the globalized ‘green movement’ and corporate marketing. ‘Green advertising’ is defined as commercial advertising that uses an environmental theme to promote products, services, or corporate public images (Banerjee et al, 1995) In developing economies such as China, marketers are beginning to make an effort to target the increasingly lucrative green segment of the Chinese population (Chan, 2004). The corporate green advertising discourse connects consumerism to environmentalism and seems to deliver consumers a particular type of commercialized environmentalism
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