This artifact was released to the media as a quasi-internal piece of Subaru corporate messaging. This artifact heavily addresses the commonplaces of “happiness”, “sustainability” and “profit” by targeting a consumer desire for sustainability and attempting to find a way to profit off of this desire. The rhetorical situation this artifact was created in response to is a growing sense that the pursuit of consumer “happiness” is tied to a sense of sustainability and environmental responsibility. The growing idea of sustainability shifting from a moral desire that an individual should hold to a societal value or commonplace that can act as a market force is a crucial idea for understanding the relations of happiness and profit that the artifact describes.

The importance of the brand identity associated with this piece of messaging is also crucial in understanding the complete exigence of this written work. Subaru as a brand has always found itself generating profit through marketing to previously unaddressed market niches. For example, Subaru is still to this day known as a “lesbian car” because of its insistence in treating the LGBTQ+ community as a viable market demographic well before many other bands were willing to do the same. This method of producing a profit by shifting a corporate identity with the moral demands of consumers produces an interesting contrast with the majority of the auto market, which has instead elected to market against the growing awareness of the need for ecological sustainability. The mission laid out to address customer happiness by understanding and shifting with consumer desires is viable until a point but there is still an underlying deceit that Subaru must acknowledge, that until profit can directly take carbon emissions out of the air, consumer happiness and Subaru’s corporate profits are opposed to each other at the core.