Making Climate Communication Matter: The Discursive Construction of Sustainability

Abstract

The dichotomy between a perceived apocalypse and a newfound ‘hope for tomorrow’ has inspired a sustainability trend of increased consumer expectations to the reliability of brands. This leaves a complex communications ecosystem for brands to navigate, and a heightened incentive to develop nuanced climate communication. This thesis integrates contemporary cases of marketing communication from Ace & Tate, H&M, and Burberry to explore how understandings of sustainability are discursively established in the broader context of recent social change. The study is theoretically and methodologically grounded in the social constructivist research tradition, and thus the premise that the world as we know it, is constructed through language and discourse. Accordingly, Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis has a particular contribution to make; perspectives on how language and discourse can construct meanings of a concept like sustainability, how actors of society demonstrate and negotiate such notions, and what social conditions influence these power relations. The study is comprised of three analytical dimensions, 1) a text analysis that illustrates how each case brand constructs different realities of sustainability, 2) an analysis of discursive practice that displays how the brands through production, expression and interdiscursivity demonstrates and negotiates different conceptions of sustainability, and finally 3) an analysis of the social practice, in which the sustainability discourses are analysed in a societal context. We develop an analytical framework to help concretize the discursive expressions in the context of audience receptions on social media, and eventually illustrate the discursive power of new media, legislation, and regulatory policies, as well as the influence of certain intangible brand assets on discursive possibilities. Readers will come away with an enriched understanding that there is no single way to communicate on sustainability; rather the concept of sustainability is dialectically related to several external influences and actors of society, and thus subject to change – ultimately, making climate communication and sustainability discourse increasingly complex to endeavour.