O'Hagan, L.A. orcid.org/0000-0001-5554-4492 (2021) Blinded by science? Constructing truth and authority in early 20th-century Virol advertisements. History of Retailing and Consumption, 7 (2). pp. 162-192. ISSN 2373-518X
Abstract
This paper conducts a case study of the marketing of Virol – a malt extract preparation that was popular in early twentieth-century Britain – using 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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
Keywords: | history of science; marketing; modality; multimodal critical discourse analysis; advertisements; Great Britain; health |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 07 Sep 2021 13:56 |
Last Modified: | 15 Mar 2022 11:25 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/2373518X.2021.1983343 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:177422 |