A Multimodal Ecolinguistic Study of Soft Drink Advertising in Pakistan

Abstract

This study examines the multimodal strategies employed in Pakistani soft drink advertisements and critically evaluates whether these strategies construct beneficial, ambivalent, or destructive ecological discourses. Soft drink advertising in Pakistan draws heavily on natural imagery of water, ice, and freshness to promote a product associated with high environmental costs, including plastic waste and high water consumption, creating a discursive contradiction that remains largely unexamined in existing scholarship. Guided by Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) framework of multimodality and Arran Stibbe's (2015) ecolinguistics model, this qualitative, text-based study analyses selected soft drink advertisements including Cola Next, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola sourced from official company channels. The analysis proceeds in two stages: first identifying the multimodal strategies (representational, interactional, and compositional) used across visual, verbal, and audio-visual modes, and then interpreting these strategies through Stibbe's ecolinguistics categories of ideology, metaphor, evaluation, identity, and erasure. Findings reveal that the advertisements consistently deploy celebrity-driven gaze, symbolic colour (particularly red), high salience, and weak framing to position the beverages as inseparable from energy, celebration, and social identity.  From an ecolinguistics perspective, all three advertisements construct predominantly destructive discourses, promoting a pro-consumption ideology and a recurring "Drink =Life" metaphor while systematically erasing plastic waste and health risks associated with sugar content. The study demonstrates that multimodal and ecolinguistics meaning making operate together rather than separately, with visual and linguistic resources jointly naturalising consumption and obscuring environmental and health consequences. The research contributes an integrated analytical model to the underexplored field of ecolinguistics advertising analysis in a Pakistani and South Asian context, with implications for advertisers, regulators, and media literacy initiatives.