Gap Inc. and House of Hermès: Effective corporate communication about the planet?

This paper concentrates on relative communicative transparency and effective corporate communication about sustainability — primarily, the planet — on Gap Inc. (https://www.gapinc.com/en-us/) and House of Hermès (https://www.hermes.com/us/en/). Integrating the lenses of usability research (NN/g), multimodal analysis (Bateman 2014; Kress and Van Leuween 2020) and models of interaction in writing (Hyland 2005a, 2005b), the study suggests that Gap Inc. makes more effective decisions in the direction of communicative transparency. While adhering more strictly to principles of layout and user interface design, it offers more comprehensive and more readable content. Regarding user involvement and engagement, only Gap Inc. combines subjective naturalist images, also dynamic images that make a strong impression, with a preference for interactional metadiscourse and 1st-person pronouns in the written text.