Capstone Project Proposal

Benjamin M Outland

Major Joshua Iddings

Ethics in Marketing of the “Juul” Vaporizer: a Systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis

Background and Rationale

My capstone project is an amalgamation of several courses and fundamental concepts that I have taken a particular interest in over the course of my journey as an English major at VMI. Firstly, Major Idding’s systemic functional linguistic course, in which I learned the skill of performing a linguistic analysis to produce a close reading of a given text, is the backbone of my project. As a student in the course, I was blown away by how much more you could learn about  a seemingly mundane text using SFL. In tandem with SFL is the Communications and Marketing Internship I completed as part of the Fieldwork course requirement for English majors. Guided by Colonel McDonald and conducted with VMI’s own Communications and Marketing department in Smith Hall, this experience turned me onto the intricacies of marketing and shaping the narrative in order to make your product appealing to consumers. I found marketing a perfect fit for utilizing many of the skills I had learned in the major. Secondary to those primary courses, courses such as Ethics and all  rhetoric courses I have completed are also largely important to my project.

My motivations for undertaking my specific project are many. Firstly, a chance to use and demonstrate all the aforementioned skills and more that I have gained in the major is exciting. Being able to choose the topic that I believe will best showcase my academic prowess is also a somewhat new but exciting task. I am focusing on the “Juul” for several reasons: in the past few years, I have seen its popularity explode for users my age and younger. The “Juul” is an electronic cigarette released in 2017 that revolutionized the market. It is a small and concealable device resembling a flash drive, and after its release its use became widespread among middle school, high school, and college-age kids, many of them never having smoked cigarettes or other tobacco products before picking up the Juul. Given the age group of this new addicting nicotine-vaporizing device marketed for “cessation,” many questions and debates have arisen concerning the target audience of Juul’s marketing campaigns. The device has become a cultural icon for millenials, something I find concerning, as cigarettes seemed to be finally dying out in popularity. Its use at VMI is also widespread. I found it to be the perfect topic for a project of my nature; its advertisements are rich with linguistic choices, its marketing tactics have been questioned, and marketing for a product that contains a dangerous and addictive substance is also cause for debate.

Project Proposal Abstract

Despite countless FDA regulations placed up cigarette and other tobacco products in recent history, E-cigarette companies, specifically the “Juul” have used what can be seen as deceptive marketing strategies to find a loophole in these regulations. Though there have been complaints from parents and lawmakers about the explosion of “Juuling” by minors, as juul is a relatively new product, there has been little to no studies conducted on the marketing tactics by juul. A study, for example, could reveal whether or not they are nefariously targeting the youth, creating new addiction from those who were not previous tobacco users, or attempting to draw outsiders into an unhealthy community by providing a false sense of security with bogus health claims. My project will fill the gap in this literature by conducting an systemic functional linguistic analysis of Juul’s marketing efforts to unpack the language and imagery for the purpose of revealing whether or not Juul is marketing their product deceptively. I will conduct the SFL analysis primarily on Juuls online website, to include possibly showcasing a tweet from their twitter account. I also plan to examine the packaging and design of the product. I argue that Juul uses language in their marketing campaign which attempts to build a community that advocates for an unhealthy and addicting lifestyle choice. Their campaign is deceptive and leads people to believe that their product is perfectly safe and healthy. Using SFL, we can analyze this language

and imagery in a manner that will showcase how complex the linguistic profile of the advertisements actually are, and why they have made the product successful. This analysis will be a combination of both a demonstration of a complex SFL analysis, showing how SFL can be used to turn mundane/plain language which may have been otherwise unseeable into a tool that can help reveal motive. The project will also be able to use its overall framework outside of the SFL analysis to a generate a conversation on the ethics of advertising.

Annotated Bibliography

“JUUL | The Smoking Alternative, Unlike Any E-Cigarette or Vape.” JUUL | The Smoking Alternative, Unlike Any E-Cigarette or Vape, 2018, www.juul.com/.

This website is my first primary source for my project. It is Juul’s primary website and composed of many different marketing tactics. The expansive site is rich with underlying linguistic choices, and will make a prime location to go for SFL analysis. In order to further narrow the scope of the project as well as stay realistic, this site will be the place where the majority of Juul’s advertising is analysed. The product is mostly used by millennials, whos online presence is greater than other generations. The site is also highly focused on explaining the community aspect of Juul, which I anticipate as being an important aspect of my project.

Eggins, Suzanne. An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics. Bloomsbury, 2013.

One of my secondary sources will be Suzanne Eggins’ An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics. This textbook of sorts is the the main guide to Major Iddings SFL class at VMI, and I consider it essential for acquiring a basic understanding of how to conduct an SFL analysis. As it has been about a year since I have taken the course, this book will be important for me in shaking some of the rust off my knowledge of SFL. The book contains many texts, mostly everyday or “mainstream” texts, and then conducts an SFL analysis on them one step at a time. It teaches readers about the fundamentals of SFL by showcasing imperative concepts such as mood, metafunctional organization of clause, transitivity, theme, etc.

Kress, Gunther R., and Theo van. Leeuwen. Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge, 2019.

This additional secondary source discusses the language behind visual images. It talks about the images with a systemic functional linguistic background. The authors, one a professor of English at the University of London, the other a film and television producer and a professor of language and communication, include many pictures of imagery from modern advertisements such as Playstation and Ford. They explain how the images are able to convince people that they want to buy the product from a social semiotic perspective. This source will be crucial for me in gaining information and insight into conducting an SFL analysis on the many images and video as well as design elements of Juul’s website and packaging. Juul tends to rely heavily on visual imagery, so this source will be perfect in accurately analyzing the website.