Following the emergence of stakeholders’ societal awareness, retailers adopted different types of social actions and have recently begun to publish social reports to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and social responsibility in order to be perceived as good corporate citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and to discuss approaches adopted by retailers in communicating about their societal commitment through their non-financial reports.

Using a qualitative methodology, we found that these reports are purely informative for some retailers, whereas for others, they are a societal positioning tool allowing retailers to differentiate themselves from competitors.