Genre Analysis
Yuwai (Brian) Wong, Emilia Kolodko, Sarah Thomas, Deea Deb
Ben & Jerry’s, an American-based ice cream company established in 1978, is considered highly reputable for its transparent engagement in corporate social justice commitments. Ben & Jerry’s employs common corporate communication practices in order to appropriately and effectively share their organizational identity and practices. As a leading American ice cream company which simultaneously endorses divisive political movements, Ben & Jerry’s successful use of genres must be analyzed to better understand and replicate in the future. The genres chosen, “About Us” page and CEO Letter, can be found on two pages of the Ben & Jerry’s website: “About Us” and “SEAR Reports.”
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The genres chosen belong to several domains of practice. Ben & Jerry’s About Us webpage highlights their history, company structure, and ethics which falls within the realms of information/social marketing, public relations, marketing, and activism, builds their credibility, and establishes them as an activist organization.
Their CEO letter in the SEAR reports is a part of their corporate communication, public relations, and activism. These letters communicate the company’s stance on several current affairs, successes, and goals.
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The “About Us” webpage genre is used by Ben & Jerry’s to communicate the company’s values and purpose-driven progress to stakeholders. The content of mission statements and CSR reports prior to the advent of the World Wide Web has been remediated into webpages, allowing them to now capitalize on the online platform’s multi-faceted capabilities. The online web medium allows the increased saturation of information as well immediate contact with international audiences. An About Us webpage is commonly nested within the company’s website, offering easy access to the company’s history. Elements including logos, banners, images and hyperlinks combine to create a multimodal and easy-to-interpret About Us web page. The substance of the genre is strategically composed to provide an immediate and comprehensive understanding of a business for both new and familiar audiences. About Us pages have become a global market standard for both corporate and marketing websites to be reliable, informative, and easy to locate.
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Ben & Jerry’s letter from the CEO is a cornerstone of their Social & Environmental Assessment Report (SEAR). The CEO letter is a genre that occurs at the beginning of annual reports and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports with similar but distinct purposes. Ben & Jerry’s CEO letter entails the company’s goals and outcomes according to its social mission and renewing annual priorities. It situates the company in a global context by referencing events within the span of that year.
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The CSR report genre provides an avenue to outwardly signal a corporation’s identity, social commitments, and company performance in alignment with progressive values. CSR reports uses multimodal elements including headings, captions, tables, diagrams, and text to strengthen diverse stakeholder connections while reporting on metric progress, environmental and social commitments, spaces for improvement and risks in a shared company-driven narrative. The Ben & Jerry’s CEO letter introduces its CSR activities and promotes the company's ethically-driven reputation, but predominately serves to preface and contextualize the report. It signifies the hierarchy of power in a company while simultaneously personalizing the otherwise uncredited swath of CSR report data. CSR reports are collaborative works of data collection and written communication with the letter from the CEO serving as a primary endorsement of its whole accuracy.
Methodology
As common corporate standards, Ben & Jerry’s generates professional examples of the chosen genres. Their application of both genres therefore contain the distinct characteristics of corporate activism to clearly embody and communicate company identity and practices. We are employing Bhatia’s critical genre analysis framework to synchronically and diachronically analyze the About Us page and the CEO’s letters.
We accessed historical iterations of the About Us page on the online website and HTML archive “Archive.org.” We collected decade’s worth of visual and textual information stored in the website’s “snapshots” catalogue by using its “Wayback Machine” search function. Ben & Jerry's CEO letters have been produced annually as of 2006. We observed them on the SEAR Reports web page in their respective Social & Environmental Assessment Reports (SEAR).
We used York University’s OMNI library to find sources that support our analysis of our selected genres.
Casañ-Pitarch explores the use of About Us pages for positive promotion to audiences and corporate identity. Tenca’s study uncovers the common characteristics of About Us web pages, finding no strict conventions surrounding the content of such pages despite their role in identity formation and promotion.
Yu and Bondi demonstrate the significance of forward-looking statements in CSR reports as situated in a global competitive context. Yu’s book investigates the form and substance of CSR reports through an extensive genre analysis across cultures.
We examined the global and local elements to see how the genre was maintained, elaborated, or modified annually. The relative consistency of the About Us page reflects a standardized relationship between individuals, organizations, and society. Companies are expected to maintain a reliable About Us narrative as stakeholder understandings of brand identity rely on online information within professional web domains. In contrast, changes and standard conventions found in CEO Letters are dependent on broader contextual shifts and societal demands from sociopolitical and economic movements.
Our synchronic analysis applies Bhatia’s theory to examine the form and substance of the genres in a fixed contemporary context. Bhatia’s four-part critical genre analysis reviews the genre’s textual lexicon, genre conventions, corporate professional practices, and company culture to uncover the multi-scalar desires and inclinations in genre usage.
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The conjunctive use of genre is interrogated by the analysis of two genres utilized under a single successful brand and business. The complete analyses of the About Us and CEO Letter genres as situated by Ben & Jerry’s help develop critical understandings toward improved writing practices.
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—Emilia Kolodko
