This paper explores the historical development of protein-enhanced foods in Great Britain and how they were marketed by food manufacturers to convince consumers that protein was essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It focuses particularly on Plasmon and Emprote -the two biggest brands of the early twentieth centuryand uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to identify how semiotic resources are used to embed products in scientific rationality, promote health discourses and develop concepts of masculinity in accordance with the two strands of the physical culture movement. It argues that, just as today, food manufacturers capitalized upon the growing middle-class interest in functional foods and presented protein as an "elixir" that consumers should take to safeguard their health, the health of their families and the state of the nation. Overall, this study demonstrates that, even with today's strict legislation on food packaging and advertising, protein food manufacturers still use similar techniques to sell their products. In gaining a better understanding of the historical use of semiotic resources in food advertising, we can assess the legitimacy of current food regulations and ensure that people make informed choices when shopping.
We study the marketing of radioactive products in Sweden from 1910 to 1940, using a dataset of newspaper and magazine advertisements. We use multimodal critical discourse analysis to show how marketers harnessed the meaning potentials of language and semiotic resources to embed radium in discourses of science and technological development, and thus convince consumers of its health benefits. We find that canny marketers continuously colonized, shaped, and remarketed radioactive products in response to greater scientific knowledge and growing safety concerns. These techniques highlight the challenges of distinguishing legitimate/illegitimate applications of discoveries when science and entrepreneurialism move at the same pace.
This paper explores the marketisation of 'pure' from the late nineteenth century to modernday using examples of food packaging and advertising. Adopting a sociohistorical approach to the theoretical perspective of social semiotics, it draws attention to the arbitrariness of the term and demonstrates how, over time, advertisers have constructed a particular discourse that equates the purity of a food product with a physical, mental or spiritual type of purity. In doing so, they invest food with a moral authority and legitimacy that leads consumers to understand commodities through marketing discourses and buy into the lifestyle and cultural value that the product promises, although it may not be true. In emphasising how purity has historically been used as a rhetorical device to sell products, the study hopes to encourage consumers to challenge food advertising and be aware of the myths that it can create in order to become empowered and make informed choices about supposedly healthy products.
This paper conducts a case study of the marketing of Virola malt extract preparation that was popular in early twentieth-century Britainusing advertisements from British newspapers. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, it explores how marketers drew upon linguistic/semiotic resources to embed Virol in discourses of scientific knowledge and how these discourses were made to appear true. Through targeted marketing campaigns, Virol established consumer bases framed around three health concerns: malnutrition, constipation and anxiety. Using testimonies, buzzwords, photographs and infographics, Virol created an illusion of scientific rationality, yet the studies or authority figures behind their findings were never explicitly specified, leaving consumers to make assumptions about the product's benefits using their own limited understandings. As women were the primary household shoppers, 'scientific motherhood' (and 'wifehood') was also drawn upon, producing a dichotomy that framed women as responsible for their families' health, yet incapable of this responsibility without expert intervention.
This paper reflects on the importance of archival research to the analysis of historical multimodal texts. Specifically, it put forwards a “multimodal ethnohistorical” approach, offering a guide to the key principles and resources that underpin the methodology and using examples from past research to demonstrate its effectiveness. The paper argues that multimodal ethnohistory can help address many of the criticisms around text-based multimodal analysis and its lack of attention to the broader social practices, processes and people involved in the production or reception of texts. The proposed methodology, thus, hopes to open up a debate about the need to gain a greater appreciation of the past to place contemporary multimodal texts within a broader trajectory of patterned practices and uses, thereby fostering a deeper awareness of how certain semiotic and compositional choices are rooted in earlier historical conventions of meaning-making but have evolved over time in response to technological change.
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