3I Green Brand Marketing In Corporate Environmental Reports

In a world prevailed with eco-imbalance, social instability and injustice, economic development sluggish, it is important for corporations to take up the role of social citizenship. Moreover, under such background, customers expect more than high quality products or personalized service, they want responsible corporations who protect the environment, solve social problems and in the meantime propel economic growth. Therefore, to attract customer loyalty and fulfill citizenship, more and more corporations are investing in sustainable development and reporting their performances to customers through corporate social responsibility reports. Scholars have found the relationship between corporate economic benefits and social responsibility; still, few researches have been done from the aspect of language analysis. To discover how companies are employing corporate social responsibility reports as a tool for brand marketing, the author selects Corporate Environmental Reports of 20 top recognized green corporations to uncover the 3I brand marketing strategies in their generic structures and transitivity features. At the macro level, the generic structure can shed light on the communicative purposes of discourse by presenting the moves and steps. At the micro level, the transitivity features show the mental pictures(including communicative purposes) of writers through process types, participants and circumstances. It is found that the Corporate Environmental Reports consist of three moves: Establishing Credentials, Introducing Sustainable Initiatives and Enhancing Reliability. At the macro level, each move relates to a brand strategy in 3I marketing strategy respectively: with Establishing Credentials identifying the brand as green business runners, Introducing Sustainable Initiatives keeping the brand integrity and Enhancing Reliability establishing the brand image. At the micro level, the most dominant process types are material process, mental process and relational process. So, the analysis of transitivity in this research is focused on the three types of processes and their different usage in each move. Material process enjoys the highest usage across the whole corpus, which is a normal phenomenon for reporting genre. However, the percentage of process types and verbs used still vary from each move to each move and it is this difference helps market a green brand image. The high rate usage of mental process(3.39%) in the first move indicates that companies recognize the importance of green planning and they are green business runners; the high rate usage of relational process(17.97%) in the second move shows the progress of environmental activities thus keeping the companies as honest green ones, finally, the usage of material process(83.33%) in the last move demonstrates the performance, the admission of violation and the recognition of achievements of companies thus building a green brand image for companies. Verbs in the first move express the similar meaning of “ introduce, plan”, while verbs in the second move are focused on “ conduct, progress, and perform”. In the last move, verbs cover a more broad meaning range, but the most frequently used are “ achieve, be, admit, receive, practice” or verbs with the similar meaning effect. Therefore, the verbs and frequency of processes in each move help enforce the marketing effect respectively. Through the language analysis of Corporate Environment Reports, the author discovers that companies indeed intend to market a green brand image by the reports when mapping on to the 3I marketing theory. Moreover, practically speaking, the analysis in this thesis helps Chinese companies to better communicate their green brand image by reporting their performances in global competition and in the meantime helps customers and scholars to better understand the communicating purpose of Corporate Environmental Reports; while theoretically speaking, the discourse studied in this research enlarges the corpus for genre analysis and provides a more complete generic structure of CERs.