Persuasive strategies in mission statements

Abstract

A mission statement is a brief description of a company's core purpose that conveys the corporate identity and values. Mission statements constitute a genre within the category of promotional literature (Bhatia, 2005) which has been the subject of much research in the last decades (e.g. Swales & Rogers, 1995; Leuthesswer & Kohli, 1997; Stallworth, 2008; Mason & Mason, 2012). Drawing on Swales' (1990) and Bhatia's (2014) genre theories and Aristotle's rhetoric model (included in Rapp, 2011), the present paper examines a corpus of mission statements with a view to showing how they are constructed to influence the targeted audience's opinions. We analyze their move structure and the elements of logos, ethos and pathos - the three Aristotelian modes of argumentation - which play a vital role in building or maintaining customer loyalty.