Green Lies: Multimodal Pragmastylistic Analysis of Greenwashing

Greenwashing is the corporate practice of misappropriating terminology from ecological discourse (“greenspeak” or “ecospeak”) to present a misleading image of the brand as being environmentally responsible. The present study analyses a micro-corpus of communicative acts from mainstream fashion brands (Primark, H&M, Mango, etc.). Online communication (social media) will be examined along with the hitherto understudied phenomenon of product labelling (Gossen et al., 2022). The distinction between “claim greenwashing” (falsifiable claims) and “executional greenwashing” (a subtler form that evokes notions of ‘nature’ through visual cues in order to promote a perception of ‘greenness’) has shown that there is a need for methodologies which can examine both explicit and executional cues (Parguel et al., 2015). The texts will, therefore, be analysed according to a hybrid multimodal pragmastylistic framework, drawing principally from practical ecostylistics (Virdis, 2022a) and multimodal pragmastylistics (Payrató, 2017). The analysis aims to identify the communicative strategies used and to determine to what extent these can be considered misleading. The preliminary findings suggest that the multimodal pragmastylistic framework may be of use in increasing consumers’ ability to discern false or misleading claims and could provide some helpful guidelines for more transparent brand communication.