The Twitter Crier: A Comparative Discourse Analysis of How British Grocery Retailers Target Their Market Through Microblogging

The present research examines the discursive features employed by British grocery retailers in their social media communications over Twitter and outlines how they address and construct their target customers in terms of social class, buying preferences, and lifestyles. For the purposes of this chapter, Christmas time was selected, as it represents the peak selling season of the year in the western world, involving tradition and consumerism and disclosing social differences or aspirations (see Pitts et al. 2007). A corpus of posts including pictures published in December 2016 by thirteen UK supermarket chains, roughly distinguished by their target in the macro categories of upper market, middle market and lower market, was collected and investigated from a genre, content, and multimodal perspective. Results were compared with the data on social stratification and cultural taste in the UK collected in “The Great British Class Survey” (Savage et al. 2013).