EcomaginationSM: Natural Values at Work

On January 31st 2006, in the course of his State of the Union Address, George Bush announced the Advanced Energy Initiative - a 22% increase in clean-energy research. He said: “[...] the best way to free America from addiction to oil is through technology, [...] human talent and creativity”. He thus contextually announced the American Competitiveness Initiative, “to encourage innovation throughout our economy, and to give our nation's children a firm grounding in math and science”. On May 9th 2005, in the course of a press conference, Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman of the Board and CEO of General Electric Co., the American largest company but also the most widely held stock in the world, announced “GE’s commitment to address challenges such as the need for cleaner, more efficient sources of energy, reduced emissions, and abundant sources of clean water”. The company is promoting this effort with the slogan “EcomaginationSM” - a ‘green’ declination of GE’s new tagline “Imagination at work” - and with an explosive marketing campaign. The aim of this paper is to select a corpus of syncretic texts and pictures from “EcomaginationSM” campaign, in order to analyse, linguistically and semiotically, the expression of GE’s stance and authority in business discourse, in particular the new attitude toward ecology. My thesis is that GE aims to compose the eternal dispute between man and nature presenting technology as “right in step with nature” in each of its industrial business units, Aviation, Transportation, Energy, Oil&Gas, Water. In this communicative situation, the discursive strategies chosen by GE to define the participants’ mutual status portray the worldwide heterogeneous addressee of the message, as the pointer of an ideal balance, the scales of which are business and environment, while GE plays the ‘facilitator’ role helping “[...] customers balance their needs with the needs of the environment. Naturally”, of course.