Constructing Healthiness as a sense effect: A sociocultural semiotic analysis of Naturalness and Lightness on fruit drink packaging from Uruguay

In order to expand research on how marketing communications influence consumers’ behaviour, this article adopts a sociocultural semiotic perspective focusing on text and social discourse to study fruit drink packages from Uruguay. Analysing the packages of fruit drinks usually referred to as ‘juices’ and fruit-flavoured waters, it demonstrates how producers strategically use visual and verbal semiotic resources expressing the values of Naturalness and Lightness, as these are effective in constructing a sense effect of Healthiness. Examining how visual resources such as figurative imagery of fruits and botanical elements, colours, fonts, shapes and the spatial disposition of design elements, together with verbal resources such as nutrient content claims (NCCs) are used, the analysis shows how an equivalence is established in this discursive genre between the values of Healthiness, Naturalness and Lightness, masking the industrial origin and processing of the products.