Language Talks: Multimodality and the historical use of science in food advertising

Join us to learn more about how language is used in food marketing

The importance of nutritional research for the marketing of food and beverages should not be undervalued. Historically, and in countries across the globe, nutritional research findings have been, and are still key towards making products appear as “good” and healthy options. In the last couple of decades, we have seen a growing market for products promoted as healthy or with some kind of association with wellbeing. By stressing single nutrients and exploiting the elasticity of the concept of health, food marketing uses research findings to promote products as good options, apt for healthy ways of life. While it is seldom stated clearly in language that ‘this will make you healthier in a specific way’, the way an advertisement or a food package is designed by the use of color, fonts, textures, symbols, materials, etc., play an important role to convey such ideas.

With this in mind, in this talk I will put forward two key claims. The first is to stress the importance of studying how science is used to convey food or drinks as healthy alternatives in different marketing contexts, both historically and contemporary. The second claim is to highlight the importance of approaching marketing from a discourse perspective and more specifically by using a multimodal discourse approach.

Join the meeting via Zoom

The speaker

Göran Eriksson is a professor of Media and Communication studies at Örebro University, Sweden. He works in the field of discourse analysis and his current research is linked to the sociology of health and is concerned with multimodal representations of healthy food and healthy eating in different settings. Ongoing studies look at marketing and are especially interested in how science and scientific expertise is communicated. He publishes extensively in international peer-reviewed journals and is currently editing the book Food Marketing and Selling Healthy Lifestyles with Science (with Lauren Alex O’Hagan). Göran is associate editor of the SSCI- indexed journal Discourse, Context and Media.

About the series

"Language Talks" are presentations by leading and emerging voices in the field of language and applied linguistics, selected and introduced by colleagues in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics (LAL) at the Open University.