CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background Introduction
The present study intends to investigate how the language in Corporate Environmental Reports helps to market a green brand image by studying the generic structure and transitivity features. CERs (Corporate Environmental Reports) are part of a company’s CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Reports in which company addresses last year’s performance in social, environmental and economic areas. By reporting such initiatives and performances to in-group stakeholders (stoke holders, employees) and outside members (customers, governments and citizens) at large, companies are following the new trend of responsible corporation standard. People nowadays ask more from companies than supplying qualified products and service; instead, they prefer “companies that embrace social responsibility” (Dawkins & Ngunjiri，2008). However, scholars are finding that CSR Reports are more than channels of declaring their responsible activities, as at root the business of companies is business. Corporations that reduce CSR reports to philanthropy and merely approach the concept as a way to gain public appreciation fall short of noticing the broader potential (Verboven，2011). Socially responsible corporate conduct and policies can further marketing and business goals if they are managed from a strategic marketing perspective (Van de Ven，2008).
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1.2 Definitions of CERs and 3I Marketing Strategy
Till now, there is no universal compulsory standard for compiling CSR reports but three popular socially recognized modes for CSR reporting: G3 of GRI (Global Reporting Index), SA8000 of Global Accountability International and AA1000 of Institute for Social and Ethical Accountability (Shen, 2008). Most companies, according to the corpus in this research, employ G3 mode. In this mode, 3 basic components: economic responsibility, social responsibility and environmental responsibility are defined as obligatory. Each part of the CSR Reports is a relatively independent chapter; hence, the completeness of the extract is not influenced and could be treated as an independent genre while in the meantime reflects some features of the whole report. In this research, the environmental responsibility part that announces environmental performances is extracted for analysis and defined as CERs (Corporate Environmental Reports).
In CERs, companies introduce their contribution to environment protection in different areas covering water conservation, emission cutting, recycling and so on. In the first place, like other forms of company reports, CERs are designated to inform stakeholders of the performance of last fiscal year, especially in environment protection. They inform readers of the companies’ projects, product designs, transportation and package of products, green office and so on to indicate that they tried to protect the environment in every step of their business. On the other
