Vol. 15 No. 29 (2025): Situare il sapere: sfide epistemologiche e questioni di metodo tra nord e sud
Open Essays and Researches

Comunicazione aziendale e sostenibilità: uno sguardo critico sul green advertising

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  • Luna Provenzi
Luna Provenzi
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. Italia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/cambio-16390

Published 2025-10-06

Keywords

  • green advertising,
  • environmental sustainability,
  • environmental discourses,
  • corporate communication,
  • Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

How to Cite

Provenzi, L. (2025). Comunicazione aziendale e sostenibilità: uno sguardo critico sul green advertising . Cambio. Rivista Sulle Trasformazioni Sociali, 15(29), 199–213. https://doi.org/10.36253/cambio-16390

Copyright (c) 2025 Luna Provenzi

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Green advertising promotes products and services using pro-environmental claims that present for-profit organizations as concerned about environment problems. This article presents evidence from a sociological investigation on the Italian market, based on a sample of 35 commercial advertisements dealing with environmental sustainability, which have been analyzed through Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA). The goal of the research is threefold: 1) to pinpoint the features of green ads discourses; 2) to illustrate their role in building the reputation of for-profit organizations; 3) to identify connections with the dominant ideas of consumption, nature and environment issues. While the representation of specialists and data make discourses sound trustworthy, storytelling and language appear incomplete, ambiguous and construable. Since MCDA focuses only on visual and linguistic categories, I propose new thematic ones, such as man-nature relationship and consumption role, in order to make the analysis more systematic and its results easier to compare.

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