The Influence of Ecolinguistic Discourse on Shaping the Product Relationship Management

Ecolinguistic studies deal with the socio-ecological contexts, actors and factors involved in producing, perceiving, and practicing a language. Being supported by immense scholarship about the power of language in shaping the receivers' mind, culture, and lifestyles, including shopping, a shift toward sustainability can start by employing ecological linguistics in marketing communications to attain both profitabilities which is the end goal of marketing, and sustainability which is the ultimate condition of survival and living. Therefore, the present study addresses the question of what ecolinguistic discourse strategies can be proposed for developing marketing and product development contents in Product Relationship Management (PRM). To answer the question, a mixed method including an experiment, and a questionnaire survey was employed, to investigate the effectiveness of using a chosen rhetorical device in ads about preserving natural resources and re-commerce for selling selected products in retail businesses. Re-commerce is short for "reverse commerce," referring to the practice of selling previously owned or used products through online or physical marketplaces. In the experiment employed in the present study, an ecological ad containing the rhetorical question was given to the experimental group, and a purely commercial ad about the same customer good for the control group. The results gathered from 80 potential customers (participants) showed that using the rhetorical questions had a significant and distinctive effect on the purchase intention of the participants.