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‘I am a very happy, lucky lady, and I amfull of Vitality!’ Analysis of promotionalstrategies on the websites of probioticyoghurt producersNelya Koteyko aa Institute for Science and Society , West Wing, Law and SocialSciences Bldg, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD,UKPublished online: 30 Apr 2009.

To cite this article: Nelya Koteyko (2009) ‘I am a very happy, lucky lady, and I am full of Vitality!’Analysis of promotional strategies on the websites of probiotic yoghurt producers, Critical DiscourseStudies, 6:2, 111-125, DOI: 10.1080/17405900902749973

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‘I am a very happy, lucky lady, and I am full of Vitality!’ Analysis ofpromotional strategies on the websites of probiotic yoghurt producers

Nelya Koteyko�

Institute for Science and Society, West Wing, Law and Social Sciences Bldg, University of Nottingham,Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

This article studies the Internet advertising of food and drinks containing probiotics –potentially beneficial bacteria marketed as a means to strengthen the body’s ‘defencemechanisms’. Using the framework of critical genre analysis, I describe discursive andsemiotic means by which probiotics emerge as a credible ‘tool’ for building the ‘innerarmour’ of immunity and as a locus of interlinked discourses on biomedicine, science,nutrition and the body. In my analysis, I examine the multitude of strategies with the helpof which texts placed on the websites of probiotics producers promote the companies andtheir products, and in this process formulate different visions of the body’s relationship withfood, construct scientific facts as an exclusive guide for individuals on what foods theyshould and should not be eating, and position responsibility for the management ofwellbeing with the individual.

Keywords: probiotics; functional food; critical genre analysis; Internet advertising; strategiccritique

Introduction

In modern westernised societies issues of diet and disease have become increasingly interlinked,

from obesity to food hygiene and dangers to the immune system posed by a modern lifestyle. At

the beginning of the 1990s a new product became widely available which was associated with

hopes and promises rather than fears and anxieties: probiotics – live micro-organisms generally

known as ‘friendly bacteria’ or ‘good bacteria’. Probiotics are regarded as a type of ‘functional

food’ with specific health benefits over and above their usual nutritional value (Food Standards

Agency, 2004, p. 111), and have an uncertain status between food and drugs and between

‘natural’ and ‘engineered’ foods. Living fermenting cultures are already added to milk to

produce yoghurts, but yoghurts which are nowadays labeled probiotic normally contain additional

cultures such as Lactobacillus casei Shirota, L. casei Immunitas or Bifidobacteria.

Despite the fact that their benefits for healthy people are highly uncertain and contested

(Senok, Ismaeel, & Botta, 2005; Walker & Buckley, 2006), probiotic drinks have become the

most successful products in the category of functional foods, with estimates that the probiotics

sector will earn revenues of US$1.70 billion by 2013 in North America alone (Frost & Sullivan,

2007). In the UK, from the first introduction of probiotic drinks in 1996, other companies and

products have entered a growing market, such that an estimated 3.5 million UK residents

consume some form of probiotic product on a daily basis (Senok et al., 2005). A substantial

advertising budget has aided this growth (Sloan, 2004).

This article sets out to analyse the online advertising strategies of the producers of foods and

drinks containing probiotics. As corporations seek to value-add ‘health’ to products to

ISSN 1740-5904 print/ISSN 1740-5912 online

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DOI: 10.1080/17405900902749973

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�Email: Nelya.koteyko@nottingham.ac.uk

Critical Discourse Studies

Vol. 6, No. 2, May 2009, 111–125

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distinguish them from those of their competitors, ‘the symbolic value of health, acting as cultural

capital, is used to accumulate finance capital’ (Dixon & Banwell, 2004, p. 126). What is open to

question, however, is just how are these different values being built into the products, and how

does this promotion of probiotics function within a wider context of the cultural politics of health

and illness? After a brief outline of this context in the next section, the framework of critical

discourse analysis will be employed to address these concerns.

Until now analysis of the discursive construction of probiotics benefits has been limited to

the thematic analysis of print and TV adverts (Burges Watson, Moreira, & Mirtagh, in press).

Whereas in the past probiotics producers mostly used television advertising, more recently

the proportion spent on Internet advertising has been growing (Wharton, 2007). The Internet rep-

resents a novel advertising channel that offers many advantages, such as a widely shared access,

interactivity and non-linearity (Janoshka, 2000; Warnick, 2007) and probiotics producers have

been rapidly setting up or updating the company websites to use these new ways of capturing

attention, conveying the message and persuading the consumer. With the ongoing increase in

online usage for both personal and professional activities this strategy has a substantial potential

payoff (Levy, 2007). For example, a website of one company producing probiotic yoghurts had

91,000 visitors in the month of August 2007 alone.1 This study seeks to examine how textual

artefacts, placed on these advertising websites in mixed or embedded forms, are designed to

achieve the complex pragmatic purposes of probiotics promotion.

Probiotics in the context of ‘the politics of life’

In recent years the health and wellbeing of citizens has become both a primary concern for

society at large, especially Western governments engaged in ‘reforming’ peoples’ unhealthy

lifestyles, and a primary concern for individuals as isolated entities who are exhorted to interna-

lise such messages and become self-governing health bodies (Rimke, 2000). The increasing

autonomisation, marketisation and responsibilisation characterise, as Nikolas Rose asserts, a

particular contemporary form of life and governance referred to as ‘advanced liberalism’

(Rose, 1989). Another novelty of contemporary ‘politics of life’ arises from the perception

that there has been a qualitative increase in our capacities to engineer ‘our vitality, our metab-

olism, our organs, our brains’ (Rose, 2007, p. 4). As Rose further explains: ‘A politics because

all these developments are highly contested. And “life itself” because it is not just illness that is

involved, nor even the maximisation of health – it is the management of human vitality itself. To

deem an aspect of human life biological today is to suggest that it can be transformed through

technology’ (Rose, 2007, p. 15).

This shift towards self-governance and ‘the politics of life’ is reflected in a conceptual shift

undergone by the term ‘immune system’ which has become centrally implicated in this process.

During the mid twentieth century, prevailing Western folk models of vulnerability placed the

boundary between environment and body on the body’s surface, e.g. ‘germs’ and ‘chills’ pene-

trated via unprotected body parts such as abrasions, wet hair and so on (Greenhalgh & Wessely,

2006). Later, the ‘boundary’ became more internal as it was believed that the body may be wea-

kened from within, for example, by bacteria and viruses and, more recently, by unhealthy diets

(Wood, 2007). In this way, maintaining the immune system’s balance, seen as the boundary

between the inner body and the outer environment, became a task for individuals increasingly

engaged in self-policing this boundary.

Promotion of probiotics can be broadly situated within this advanced liberal project,

although it is just one element in a chain of genres linked to the strategy of disseminating and

institutionalising the new political-economic regulative fix. Although the link to health is

assumed as the primary motivation that underscores the use of probiotics, given the

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controversies over facts and myths about their efficacy, their promotion can be situated within

the future-oriented ‘regimes of hope’ (Moreira & Palladino, 2005) rather then regimes of truth

(linked to established practice and proven evidence). According to Burges Watson et al. (in

press) this leads to speculation about ‘the ways in which “raw biological vitality”, in this case

bacteria as fragments of more complex systems, may be mobilised for new health uses and

given a marketable exchange value’, or so-called biovalue (Waldby, 2002, p. 313).

‘Bio-values’ and promissory statements have been a popular topic in the social study of bio-

medicine (Waldby, 2002; Rose, 2007). However, sociological enquiries rarely take into account

the linguistic and discursive context in which such promissory statements are made. In contrast,

this study pays particular attention to linguistic and discursive structures of the advertising web-

sites. Such analysis should lead to reflection on and questions about social and cultural aspects of

probiotics promotion and contribute to a clearer understanding of ‘the politics of life’ in practice.

Data

Four websites of producers of probiotics (Yakult, Danone Activia, Actimel, and Muller),2 listed

as market leaders (Sloan, 2004), were chosen for analysis. The texts placed on the websites of

probiotics producers are similar to the category of ‘hybrid ads’ as they were created both to

advertise the products and to promote the companies’ profiles. Whereas earlier the primary func-

tion of corporate advertising was ‘goodwill’ and its subdividing topics were ‘public relations,’

and ‘public services’, currently, the demands of the marketing environment require that corpor-

ate image advertising continue to promote goodwill, but also the message being conveyed has to

be more strategic (Stanton, 1964). This has led to the creation of ‘hybrid’ ads – advertising that

combines promotion of products and services while communicating a general message about the

company.

Websites present many challenges for analysis as they represent a particular form of ‘multi-

modality’ (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) combining different semiotic modalities such as visual

imagery (real pictures, cartoon characters), video (trailers) as well as language. Another diffi-

culty has to do with the non-sequential format of the website: visitors to the website find them-

selves at the cross-roads of many different paths, and it is up to them to choose the order and the

number of paths to visit. To mitigate these difficulties, information placed by companies on their

websites was analysed selectively. First, from a wide range of sections available, I selected only

those mentioning probiotics and studied them in the order of their placement on the website

menus (left to right or top to bottom). Second, the selection was further restricted to texts,

which resulted in the exclusion of advertising trailers and moving and static images (Koteyko

& Nerlich, 2007). The latter were used to supplement particular categories that emerged from

the analysis of texts, but were not analysed in detail in terms of their placement and interaction

with text. The webpages (n ¼ 36), accessed in the period from September to November 2007,

were saved and stored on a computer.

Method and conceptual framework

Whereas traditional media sources such as newspapers, television and magazines have been well

researched outlets in which diverse exhortations for the achievement of wellbeing are made (see

Livingston, 2006 for an overview), the amount of discourse analytic work done on web-based

sources has so far been relatively small (e.g. Lemke, 2002; Warnick, 2007). As the websites

are a form of media that contributes to the ongoing negotiation of social meanings of health,

and the discourses they reproduce are also symptomatic of wider cultural and economic

changes, this paper uses the framework of ‘critical discourse analysis’ (Fairclough, 2003;

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Wodak, 2001; Weiss & Wodak, 2003) which includes critical genre analysis (Bhatia, 2002) to

study the promotional discourse of probiotics producers.

In order to capture attention, convey the message and persuade the consumer, texts advertis-

ing probiotics use a range of linguistic and discursive devices (or ‘discursive strategies’; Reisigl

& Wodak, 2001). Analysis of how discourse works to legitimate such advertising strategies

represents a form of ‘strategic critique’, which focuses on ‘how discourse figures within the

strategies pursued by groups of social agents to change societies in particular directions’

(Fairclough, Graham, Lemke, & Wodak, 2004, p. 2). Of particular interest to this study is the

textual form of strategic critique based on a dynamic view of text as ‘texturing’, as one form

of productive action within a larger strategic project (Fairclough, 2004, p. 5). According to

this form of discourse analysis, primacy is given ‘to action over representation and identification,

to genres over discourses and styles’ (Fairclough, 2004).

With the invasion of new media and electronic modes of communication in public life,

‘appropriation of lexico-grammatical resources and discoursal strategies across discourse

communities and genres is becoming increasingly common’ (Bhatia, 2002, p. 12). Fairclough

(1995, 2003) and Bhatia (1993, 2002, 2004) give extensive coverage to this aspect of discourse

manipulation by expert members of professional communities. Here I will adopt their methods

of critical genre analysis to study the textualisation processes of the Internet advertising genre in

order to relate them to the broader context of discursive and social practices (see Figure 1).

According to Bhatia (2002, p. 7), genre analysis aims to understand the realities of the world

of texts rather than seeing them as something pure with established boundaries and limits. This

real world is ‘complex in the sense that it incorporates texts of various kinds, serving overlapping

and at the same time conflicting communicative purposes’. Such an approach is particularly

apposite for the study of Internet advertising, where persuasion is the dominant but definitely

not single communicative function. As Cook (2001, p. 10) points out, advertisements ‘may

also amuse, inform, misinform, worry or warn’. These ‘informing’, ‘educating’ and ‘amusing’

functions of advertising are especially visible in the recent change from the direct, strictly

‘push’ process of Internet advertising in which the customer receives messages about products

to a more indirect one in which the customer takes a more active role by searching for infor-

mation (Buckner, Fang, & Qiao 2002). The company websites, of which probiotics websites

are an example, represent this later trend of indirect advertising as customers themselves

choose to visit the websites as they seek out information about a product or service.

Figure 1. Three-dimensional view of discourse, from Bhatia (2002, p. 17). # Vijay Bhatia. Reproducedwith permission.

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As can be seen from the menus of the websites under study, the probiotic producers advertise

themselves and their products through a series of steps, which usually begin with the introduc-

tion of the company, offering information about the products and inviting further response from

customers. Each of these steps represents a website section with a specific design (for example,

the ‘Company profile’ section has the predominant generic characteristics of presentational and

informational genres). All of these ‘communicative steps’ are organised into a certain rhetorical

structure to serve the overall purpose of company and product promotion. Thus, the first stage in

the study is devoted to exploring the rhetorical structure of the websites from a genre-analysis

perspective, paying particular attention to strategic ‘appropriation’ and ‘embedding’ of generic

resources (Bhatia, 2004) by the dominant advertising genre. Next, the analysis focuses on the

most salient linguistic and discursive features of texts within each section, with a twofold

objective: on the one hand, to unveil the relation between the form of linguistic resources and

the functional aspects they textualise in discourse; and, on the other hand, to explore how the

advertising of probiotics is connected with other discourses of biomedicine, health and the body.

Selecting three of the many different linguistic or rhetorical means employed by the website

authors, I orientate myself to the following questions:

. What terms or concepts are being used when introducing or referring to probiotics? (Refer-

ential or Naming strategies).. What traits, characteristics, and features are attributed to them? Predication, or evaluative

attributions of negative and positive traits, is ‘the basic process and result of linguistically

assigning qualities to persons, animals, objects, events, actions and social phenomena’

(Predicational strategies).. By means of what arguments do the producers of the websites try to justify and legitimize

their claims? The different claims made by the producers of probiotics can be discussed

inter alia by means of topoi which serve as justifications of positive or negative attribu-

tions. Within argumentation theory, ‘topoi’ can be described as parts of argumentation

that belong to obligatory, either explicit or inferable, premises (Argumentative strategies;

for more information on discursive strategies see Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, pp. 44–45).

Last but not least, as ‘strategy is at once imbricated with ideology and with rhetoric’

(Fairclough, 2004, p. 6), the above methods associated with linguistic criticism of texts are

combined with a more sociological perspective (Lupton, 1992, p. 145) to discuss the social

and cultural aspects of the probiotics advertising.

Websites and audiences

Following Lehtonen’s (2003) study of the user experiences of new media, this article views the

people, on the one hand, as objects of market economy and technology, but on the other hand,

they are also capable of taking critical distance to these (Lehtonen 2003, p. 382). Focus group

discussions with members of the public therefore constituted a crucial next phase of our research

project as they may show reception or rejection of discourses articulated on the websites.

Internet product and company advertising: aspects of generic structure

In this section I will outline the communicative purpose and structural description of the web-

sites. The communicative purpose of indirect Internet advertising of probiotics is accomplished

through a series of steps or rhetorical ‘moves’3 (Bhatia, 1993) which gives this genre of company

and product promotion its typical structure.4 The main function of the websites advertising pro-

biotics and their producers is persuasive, in the sense that their corporate authors try to elicit a

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specific response from the viewers. To achieve this complex pragmatic aim, the websites have to

focus on the following additional purposes: (a) capture the attention of their viewers; (b) offer

appraisal of the product in accordance with the perceived needs, interests and values of potential

viewers; and (c) establish contact with their customers, as, from a marketing point of view, Inter-

net-based contact can be a cost-effective means of getting to know the individual customer’s

wishes, and at the same time informing them of a company’s latest developments.

Now let us move to consider in what way the selected websites work to satisfy the above

requirements. Using Bhatia’s framework, one may assign the following structural description

of the websites in terms of moves used by the corporate authors to achieve their communicative

purposes:

(1) establishing credentials (menu section: ‘Company profile’ or ‘Company history’ or

‘About Us’ or ‘Company’);

(2) introducing the product:

a information about the brands (menu section: ‘What is Actimel?’/’About Activia’/’Product’/subsection ‘What?’/’Products’);

b essential detailing of the product characteristics, demonstrations with images and trai-

lers (‘How it works?’, ‘What are probiotic bacteria?’);

c indicating value of the product (‘Product’/subsection ‘Why?’, ‘What’s the evi-

dence?’, ‘Why Activia’), which provides scientific reports or links to studies support-

ing the health benefits of probiotics;

(3) offering health information, advice, and entertainment (‘Advice and tips’, ‘Healthy

Living’, ‘Health’, ‘Staying Healthy’);

(4) establishing the relationship between the company and consumer (sections: ‘Further

Contact’, ‘More Information’, ‘Share your experience’, ‘Receive some news’).

Below I look at the first three of these moves in greater detail (see the above description of

the methodological steps) to see in what way they help the corporate writers to fulfill the overall

promotional purpose.

Establishing credentials: histories and profiles of the companies

This section introduces the companies to potential visitors of the websites and is therefore domi-

nated by the presentational aspect of the website design (Fleming, 1998)5 that conveys how the

companies want to be perceived by the public. Here the style of informational writing follows the

expository text structure typical of company brochures, where facts, events or concepts are given

in order of occurrence.

One way of capturing the attention of the prospective visitors to the website is to indicate that

the website is set up by a company that has a well-established reputation in the market by high-

lighting the achievements of the company or the long experience it can boast of in producing the

products. Therefore, in this section the producers of probiotics stress their long history, and

normally there is a ‘grandfather’ figure – a figure of trust and wisdom – who pioneered pro-

duction of dairy products with probiotics. In particular, the Muller website says the company

dates back to 1896 ‘when yoghurt-loving Ludwig Muller first established his little Bavarian

village dairy’, projecting an image of a pastoral or rural idyll. Similarly, Yakult is focusing on

its long-established Japanese heritage but also stresses its current success in the dairy market

(‘1935 – The first little bottle of Yakult. In 2007 we are a global leader in probiotics’) and its

scientific credentials by referring to research by the microbiologist Dr Shirota, who is said to

have succeeded in ‘isolating a particular lactic acid bacteria, which had the unique ability to

survive the harsh conditions of the stomach’ back in 1930. In both cases, credibility is sought

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to be established through a figure of authority linked to wisdom or scientific knowledge (I will

come back to this strategy of legitimation through reference to authority later in the paper).

Introducing the product

Having established the company credentials in the eyes of the website visitors, the website

authors go on to introduce the products they are promoting. In three to four sections they intro-

duce the brands, inform the website visitors about the essential characteristics of the products,

like what they consist of, how they work, who can benefit from them, and indicate in what

way the products can be valuable for the intended visitors. Below I shall study each of these

sections in detail as they form the most important part of the promotional effort.

Information about the brands: introduction

The section devoted to the introduction of the brands is information packed as it contains product

descriptions and sample print and media adverts, combining informational and entertainment

website designs in order to introduce the brands in the most favourable light.

Today’s proliferation of ‘infotainment’ programmes on television, where the news discourse

is ‘penetrated by the discourses of entertainment or even ordinary conversation’ (Toolan, 2002,

p. 84) demonstrates that the boundary between information and entertainment is becoming

increasingly blurred. This trend is even more transparent in the online environment where the

possibilities to entertain abound. The website authors promoting probiotics use this opportunity

to create a multi-sensory introduction to their products, appealing to what Thorlacius (2007)

calls ‘postmodern values’ by using various graphic, stylistic and aesthetic effects. In particular,

Yakult and Actimel websites give priority to the eclectic, experience-oriented design as they

provide numerous games for children and interactive tests for adults both in this section and

in the sections providing ‘health advice’ and informing about the probiotic bacteria (see below).

The switch to the entertainment design also entails register consequences: the style is infor-

mal and conversational, and form of address is direct and straightforward as evident from

ellipses on the Yakult website (‘The ingredients? Only what needs to be in. Enough bacteria

to keep your belly happy. Enough taste. . . to taste’), short and punchy ‘personal stories’ on

the Muller website, and the wide use of second person pronouns on all the websites. These

attempts to imitate real speech are typical advertising devices aimed at establishing proximity

with the audience (Goddard, 1998; Fairclough, 2003). In particular, the use of ellipses serves

to ‘create an illusion of closeness’ (Carter, Goddard, Reah, Sanger, & Bowring, 2007, p. 211)

as speakers who know each other well ‘don’t need to be explicit about their meanings,

because they know the other person will fill in the gaps as a result of shared knowledge and

shared story’ (Goddard, 1998, p. 107).

In this introductory section, the website authors indicate their perceptions of the needs of

potential consumers as their frequent use of the word ‘help’ points to the underlying assumption

that it is desirable to ‘build up natural defences’ and in this way optimise one’s health:

Actimel is a delicious probiotic drinking yogurt with unique L.casei Imunitass cultures, which canhelp support your body’s defences by topping up the levels of good bacteria found in your gut.

Two naming strategies can be observed from the introduction of the brands and probiotic strains:

(1) creating names by using existing words (including proper names, compounds, foreign words)

such as Muller Vitality, or inventing new words with recognisable links to existing words such as

Danone Actimel and Activia [active,activity], and the pseudo-scientific names Bifidus Essensis

[essence] and Bifidus ActiRegularis [regulate] invented by Danone’s marketing department

for strains of bacteria used in its Activia range of probiotic yoghurt. In the present day

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context of semiotic overflow, name creators attempt to combine originality with multiple

cultural references in order to create a distinct corporate identity of a company or product.

The addition of existing words with positive connotations such as vitality to the company

name as well as creation of new names with the root activ is intended to associate probiotics

with values of good health, the well-known paths to which include exercise and nutrition.

Numerous features of the multimodal design of the advertisements examined in this section

echo this image of ‘vitality’ characteristic of functional products that are primarily promoted on

the basis of their perceived health benefits. The links between health, happiness, ‘elan vital’ or

vital force and probiotics made through lexical choices (life as in the alliterative expression ‘lick

the lid of life!’, vitality as in personal stories on the Muller website where an elderly lady ‘shares’

her experience of eating Muller Vitality yoghurt: ‘I am very lucky, happy lady – and I am full of

Vitality!’ and ‘happy, active life’ in the introduction of the Activia yoghurt) are intensified and

re-created through images of active (playing, exercising, laughing) adults and children. In this

way, consumption of probiotics, just like exercise and weight management, is linked to issues

of self-regard through text and images that link a slender, ‘managed’ body to a happy and

fulfilled life.

Essential detailing of the product characteristics

Addressing the promotional text to the needs, interests and inhibitions of the potential customer

is one of the important maxims of successful selling. Having indicated the needs of potential

consumers in general terms in the introductory section, the next strategic move is to point to

the value of the product in terms of these perceived needs (1) by detailing the products charac-

teristics and (2) by bringing in the evidence for their ‘effectiveness’.

The section ‘How it works? on the Actimel website combines the aspects of informational,

entertainment and educational genres in order to present the details of the products being pro-

moted. The entertainment design/format provides opportunities to play games and be enter-

tained, whereas the educational pages provide the opportunity to learn how probiotics ‘work’

through running the interactive images of the digestive system, simulations of bacteria in the

colon, etc. The Yakult and Danone Activia websites also have a specific section with information

on probiotic bacteria, offering popularised definitions of probiotics with illustrations, guides and

interactive demonstrations and tests. Although appearing to be designed along the conventions

of educational and entertainment genres, these sections are designed to work consistently with

‘indicating the product value’ move in that they do not simply provide information on and dem-

onstrations of what probiotics are, but explain why people should buy just these probiotics.

The educational and entertainment designs are therefore subservient to the overall purpose of

promotion (and thus explicit and implicit evaluation), which can be discerned, inter alia, through

the study of lexico-grammatical choices. It is therefore time to pay attention to the use of pre-

dicational strategies as, in order to claim any social use value for a product, the advertiser is

‘bound to leave the area of factual information and enter the area of persuasion’ (Vestergaard

& Schroder, 1985, p. 9). As can be seen from the quotes below, producers of probiotics empha-

sise the ‘uniqueness’ of particular strains (unique, the only) to claim the exclusiveness of their

potential health benefits. Different bacterial strains can be ‘uniquely designed’ to offer (the hope

of) energy and vitality to different groups: students, the elderly or women (for example, strains in

Actimel products are particularly suitable for the elderly and children, Danone Activia seem to

work best at alleviating bloating in women, etc.).

Danone Activia is a creamy, probiotic yogurt that contains a unique culture called Bifidus ActiRe-gularis. Activia is the only probiotic yogurt that is scientifically proven to help improve slower diges-tive transit. [. . .] Bacteria is naturally present in many yogurts but don’t be fooled into thinking that

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all yogurts are the same! Activia is the only yogurt that contains Bifidus ActiRegularis, the uniquelive culture specially selected for the health benefits it offers to digestive health.

These frequent predications of singularity/uniqueness, of identity or similarity/difference form

the first step towards positive self-presentation aimed at delineating the company and its

products from competitors. Next on the list of strategies of positive self-representation is the

use of emphatics (right, positive).

Probiotics are ‘friendly bacteria’ which are added to some foods and drinks to work naturally to helpmaintain the right balance of bacteria to have a positive benefit on your digestive system.

The ‘unique’ probiotic products also continue to be referred to as human ‘helpers’ in the modern

struggle for health – in other words, the struggle either to prevent the loss of or to regain energy

and vitality. Here the ‘helping’ role of ‘good bacteria’, as opposed to ‘bad bacteria’ that cause

illness, comes to the fore, as probiotics are said to ‘supplement’, ‘aid’ or ‘balance’ digestion:

Yakult is a probiotic. What is a probiotic? Good bacteria that supplement the natural bacteria in yourgut.

Staying as healthy as possible is important but you can also give your body a helping hand by drink-ing Actimel. It’s a good way to help support your body’s defences.

The emphasis on ‘long tradition’ and ‘naturalness’ is also brought into the picture in order to

counterbalance the ‘engineered’ side of probiotic yoghurts; e.g. Activia brand is introduced as

a ‘natural way of regulating the digestive system’ and Actimel emphasises ‘your body’s

natural defences’. As a result, probiotics seem to offer consumers an opportunity to shape

their immune system in a ‘natural way’ just like it has become common to shape one’s body

through diet and exercise. They can thus take charge of their protective ‘inner armour’ and

overall health.

Traits, characteristics or responsibilities conveyed through predication are often used in

argumentation, functionally employed as warrants (Toulmin, 1958). It is to these argumentative

strategies that we turn next to study how the various health claims associated with probiotics are

legitimated. The analysis of typical content-related argument schemes used in argumentation for

the consumption of probiotics can be achieved against the background of the following, though

incomplete and not always disjunctive, topoi: topos of advantage, topos of danger and topos

of authority (see also the legitimising strategies of rationalisation, moral evaluation and

authorisation in Van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999).

Based on the ‘problem–solution’ structure typical of advertisements, texts promoting

probiotics offer a technological (but mostly represented as ‘natural’) fix in the form of specific

bacterial strains to potential consumers who want to improve their health through ‘strengthening

of the immune system’. Here the topos of usefulness is employed to rationalise the advantage of

using probiotics. The indicated benefits range from supporting ‘vital’ functions of the organism

to ‘life long protection’, as is evident from the following passage on Danone Activia website:

Why eat probiotics? An increase in ‘good, friendly bacteria’, from eating Activia everyday, helps tosupport a healthy digestive system. This is important because one of the vital functions of your diges-tive system is to absorb nutrients from the food we eat, which helps allow us to lead an active andhealthy lifestyle. This is one of the many ways the digestive system can influence your wellbeing.

Vitality, this mysterious ‘principle of life’ (Oxford English Dictionary online), is something that

everybody should want, despite the fact that nobody quite knows what it is and has not known for

many centuries.

A related topos of danger is employed as well. The websites refer or allude to a particular

source of danger that a modern individual has to deal with and which might threaten their

‘vitality’ or weaken the ‘immune system’, from hectic lifestyles to germs (‘bad bacteria’) in

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the environment. Thus, the Yakult and Danone Actimel websites list reasons for eating probio-

tics, drawing on both discourses where balanced diet and exercise feature prominently as the

means to achieve the norms of health, and on the risks and fears common to the age of moder-

nity, such as worries about harmful effects of stress and ‘chemicals’ and dangerous microbes:

A healthy digestive system is important for your, well . . . health. Unfortunately, various aspects ofeveryday life can upset the health of our gut. Common culprits include inactivity, antibiotics, stress,excess alcohol, a poor diet, smoking, overseas travel and lack of sleep. That’s where Yakult comesin. It is a probiotic. It tops up the good bacteria that occur naturally in your system. And it helps keepthe bad ones at bay. And by maintaining the healthy balance of the gut flora, Yakult enables yourbody to maximise its own natural defences.

Nature has given our body a complex system of barrier and defence mechanisms to help tackle bac-teria. [. . .] 70% of your body’s immune system is in your gut and it can be weakened by a hecticlifestyle, lack of sleep and/or a poor diet. This is where Actimel can help to support your body’s3 lines of defence.

Based on the underlying assumption that people are surrounded by dangers caused by their life-

styles as well as by dangers harbouring at their environment the above passages suggest that

pro-active individuals should manage the risks by strengthening their immune systems. In this

way, ‘supplementation’ and ‘balance’ of individual nutritional intake (self-regulatory practices)

are intertextually constructed as being the key means through which to achieve a ‘healthy’

immune system and avoid what can be called the dangers of ‘modernity’. The use of the tran-

sitive verbs ‘top up’ (existing bacteria) and ‘maximise’ (one’s own natural defences) augments

the sense of individual agency and suggests that the advertisers assume that their potential

consumers are already healthy and thus require advice on how to increase the effectiveness of

their self-improvement behaviours (and this advice is readily provided further on the

website). Furthermore, as we will see below, the website texts employ the topos of authority

to promote the idea that, with the help of scientific understandings of food and the consumption

of probiotics, one can regulate safety and wellbeing.

The ‘science’ behind probiotics

Such sections of the websites as ‘What is the evidence?’ (Actimel) or ‘Publications’ (Yakult)

contain numerous references to microbiology articles and excerpts with figures, and frequent

use is made of terms such as ‘research shows’, ‘experts suggest’ and ‘studies have found’,

e.g. ‘Stress – research shows this can upset your gut’ (Danone Actimel), ‘One new line of

research is investigating the use of probiotics to manage food related allergies’ (Yakult). Here

arguments appealing to the authority of science are prevailing (researcher/research says that

X is true; X is true). Mimicking the dry, factual language of the genre of scientific reporting

where numbers speak for themselves, the Activia website ‘informs’ the readers about the

results of ‘the Activia trial’:

The results from the people that have already taken the 14 day Challenge speak for themselves: 82%of people with digestive discomfort said they felt better after eating Activia everyday for 14 days.

Whereas the effects of Danon Activia seem to be limited to benefits for the gut, Actimel goes

further, as the website makes explicit claims that probiotics are scientifically proven to ‘modu-

late your immune system’. A range of studies is cited dealing with the effect of Actimel on the

elderly, sportspeople and ‘active people’, who appear to be people undergoing periods of

‘intellectual stress’. The results are reported to have shown that daily consumption of Actimel

‘significantly increased the presence of some type of immune cells which are vital in maintaining

and supporting your body’s defences and immune system’. In this way, probiotic yoghurts

provide a good example of how the symbiosis of science (research on nutritional benefits of

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certain substances and engineering different combinations of nutrients) and nature (‘do-good’

benefits inherent in food) is employed in the promotion of functional foods, as they allow the

placing of emphasis both on ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’/’century old’ benefits of yoghurt, and

on ‘well researched’ benefits of ‘good bacteria’.

This section conveys assurances that probiotics are products that can be trusted, as they have

a direct reference to the role of science. As Stacey (1995, p. 23) argues, the nutritional status of

foods has been particularly salient to food producers over the last century in a context where

scientific eating is equated with eating ‘correctly’. The nutritional qualities and health benefits

of probiotic yoghurts are an important ingredient in the fight for competitive advantage, but

claims of this nature must be backed by a credible source. As food companies are not believed

to be a reliable information source on healthy eating or food safety, they seek endorsement from

those with medical or health professional credentials to attract ‘conferred expertise’ status

(Fairclough, 1989).

Advice on healthy living

Reflecting the increasing role of expertise in the governance of contemporary societies (Burchell,

1996) there is a plethora of ‘lifestyle’ advice from health specialists in today’s media, ranging from

eating ‘five (fruit and vegetables) a day’ to exercising ‘at least 30 minutes’ daily. The websites

under study reproduce such health tips in a special section that utilises the instructional genre

of ‘magazine medicine’ (Bunton, 1997) in order to associate the ‘novel’ probiotic products

with health improvement behaviours that have become traditional. Indeed, the purpose of this

section is made transparent on the Actimel website which includes ‘drinking Actimel’ as one

important aspect of already well-known regimens for health improvement:

. eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day;

. drink plenty of fluids;

. take regular exercise;

. try to limit the stress in your life;

. drink Actimel every morning.

Here the use of the imperative, just like the above-mentioned use of ellipses and the second

person pronouns, evidences the construction of a personalised relationship between producer

and consumer. In this case, the imperative form has to be understood as an invitation or

recommendation, not as a command or an imposition.

The above quote from the Actimel website, along with Yakult’s slogan ‘maintain your

digestive system’, shows that whilst the functional food industry might encourage reliance on

the knowledge and practices developed by ‘experts’, they still view maintenance of the

immune system to be the responsibility and personal desire of a pro-active ‘health conscious’

individual. Consumption of probiotics is positioned as an element in the broader political

project of constructing the ideal self, as website visitors are given the opportunity to monitor

their own health requirements with reference to the ‘expert advice’. Such positioning is yet

another reflection of how, as Rose (2007) notes, ‘our somatic, corporeal, neurochemical

individuality’ becomes ‘a field of choice, prudence, and responsibility’ (p. 40).

Discussion

This paper proposed to carry out a ‘strategic critique’ of the discursive construction of probiotics

benefits in the context of the advanced liberal ‘politics of life’. In order to reveal the ways in

which various health related values are being built into probiotics in the online environment,

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I analysed the strategies pursued by the producers of probiotics within the multi-perspective

framework of genre analysis, where discourse is studied on three different but interrelated

levels – that of text, genre and social practice (Figure 1). In this section I will first discuss the

results of the close textual analysis and then proceed to outline the issues of the social context.

This study paid particular attention to how semiotic resources and constraints are employed

to achieve the mix of complimentary objectives of indirect Internet advertising. The diffusion of

high-speed Internet along with the wide-scale penetration of bandwidth into American and

Western European homes has changed the nature of online advertising. Once limited to such

formats as banners and pop-ups, advertisers are now able not only show a wider range of

stimuli in mixed formats (text, images, audio or video) on their websites but also use different

possibilities for interaction with information-seeking consumers which involve clicking on texts

and images, entering search terms, answering quizzes, etc. (Doherty, 1998). The analysis of

lexico-grammatical choices and the generic structure of the websites in this study showed

how the websites have been corporately designed to persuade their visitors about the values

of probiotics through ‘informing’ them about the company, ‘educating’ them about medical

and ‘scientific’ properties of probiotic bacterial strains whilst also ‘entertaining’ them along

the way.

The study of the lexico-grammatical choices also helped to reveal the ways in which probio-

tics are promoted as a means of maintaining, enhancing and ‘managing’ one’s physical health

and ‘vitality’. Based on a vision of health through diet, probiotics are promoted as a means to

maintain and enhance one’s physical appearance. The ‘immune-boosting’ and ‘natural’ qualities

ascribed to probiotics with the help of naming and predicational strategies offer the opportunity

to construct signifiers that appeal to modern consumers bombarded with messages about ‘slim

and attractive bodies’ on the one hand and about risks of unhealthy lifestyles and chemicals

in processed foods on the other. More importantly, probiotics are also positioned as means of

‘shaping’ or ‘balancing’ one’s immune system to achieve ‘vitality’. At this level then, everything

about our health and vitality appears, in principle, to be intelligible, and hence ‘open to calcu-

lated interventions in the service of our desires about the kinds of people we want ourselves and

our children to be’ (Rose, 2007, p. 4). The use of argumentative strategies enables the legitimi-

sation of these claims through references to the utility and the well-researched status of

probiotics.

The above linguistic analysis of the companies’ self-representation strategies leads to reflec-

tion on and questions about social and cultural aspects of the discourses of functional food pro-

ducts. The themes common to all the websites analysed here are ‘vitality’ and ‘responsibility’,

which is indicative of the changing cultural politics of health noted in the research on other forms

of media (Lupton, 1998; Rimke, 2000). Lupton, for example, argues that today’s consumers

have the ‘responsibility to deal with risks, to seek out knowledge about them and deal with

them individually by engaging in self-regulation’ (Lupton, 1998, p. 205). The growth of the

functional food market seems to exploit a related emerging trend – the increased appeal by

society to individuals to take responsibility for their health and wellbeing by seeking knowledge

about benefits rather than just avoiding risks. The benefits of probiotics are promoted in turn as

managing a specific part of individuals’ bodies which serves as a boundary between self and

society/environment, namely the immune system, which, consumers are told, needs to be

strengthened. Furthermore, it seems that this strengthening can only be achieved by ingesting

particular foods rather than avoiding particular foods or food ingredients. This then should

lead to changes in purchasing behaviour and consumption patterns and in the final analysis

produce profits for the producers of the functional food products. Emphasising personal obli-

gation not only to avoid becoming sick but also to seek knowledge about various means of

improving one’s health/increasing energy are part of this overall marketing strategy.

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Conclusion

Whereas the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were characterised by the ‘politics of health’,

and the politics of death dominated the modern era, the twenty-first century is characterised

by ‘our growing capacities to control, manage, engineer, reshape and modulate the very vital

capacities of human beings as living creatures’ (Rose, 2007, p. 3). The analysis carried out in

this paper shows that the probiotics advertising discourse, being ridden with claims that bacteria

in yoghurts and drinks can help the consumers improve their health through ‘strengthening’ of

the immune system and managing their ‘vitality’, typifies this increasingly naturalised ethics of

self-care and self-improvement. By framing ‘friendly bacteria’ as a personal armour that can

(and should) be worn in the general struggle for health and wellbeing, the websites prioritise

a political potential to mobilise the ‘intrinsic’ capacity of audiences to become responsible,

pro-active and self-directed citizens (Rimke, 2000; Rose, 1989). In this process of battling for

products’ survival corporate power ‘becomes allied with the technical-rational power of science

to shape our core understandings of what is ‘good for us’ (Dixon & Banwell, 2004, p. 128).

Unlike most sociological enquiries this article did not only focus on the emerging themes,

but also paid special attention to the structures of text that play a role in the presentation of

knowledge for non-specialised readers in the online environment and the specific ends to

which these linguistic structures are deployed. The study of web-based rhetorical structures

together with the analysis of discursive strategies demonstrates how promises surrounding the

products with uncertain, future-oriented benefits are created and manipulated on the companies’

websites, and is intended as a contribution to knowledge that can facilitate reflection about the

effects of employing particular textual practices in the online environment.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Ronald Carter and Professor Brigitte Nerlich as well as two

anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The article

was written as part of the ESRC project ‘Enlisting the help of friendly bacteria: Probiotics

and visions of health, nutrition and science in a modern world’. Grant number: RES000222289.

Notes on contributor

Dr Nelya Koteyko is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Science and Society, University of Nottingham.Her research interests include discourse analysis, the relationship between corpus and discourse studies, andmedia representations of health and illness.

Notes

1. The publicly available data is provided by Nielson Netratings, the global standard for Internet audiencemeasurement and analysis (www.nielsen-online.com).

2. The websites: www.yakult.co.uk; www.actimel.co.uk; www.danoneactivia.co.uk; and www.muller.co.uk.3. Moves are seen as ‘discriminative elements of generic structure’ and strategies as ‘non-discriminative

options within the allowable contributions available to an author for creative or innovative genre con-struction’ (Bhatia, 1993, p. 32, original emphasis).

4. However, this is not to imply that there is a rigid underlying structure. The dynamic character of genreallows for subtle differences, as long as the communicative purpose of the entire construct remains thesame. The analysis here is therefore not offered as a prescriptive and all-inclusive list of generic featuresbut as a starting point for consideration of the functional aspects of the indirect Internet advertising ofcompany and products.

5. According to Fleming’s (1998) functional categorisation of website designs into e-commerce sites,community sites, entertainment sites, presentation sites, educational sites and information sites, thewebsites of probiotics producers are a mix between presentation, information, entertainment and

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educational designs. The websites therefore represent a typical instance of a mixed genre where the moredominant advertising genre subsumes other generic resources.

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