"Promoting Augmented Reality in the Food Industry: A Linguistic Analysis of Web-Based Communication"

Augmented reality (AR) is currently being used as an effective marketing strategy in several domains. The reasons behind its success is to be ascribed not only to its novelty and to the wide range of potential applications, but also to the fact that it is perceived as a “pull”, rather than “push”, form of advertising. AR is used both by well-known brands that have adopted pull marketing strategies for a long time and new, small producers who are encouraged by the easy access to and free availability of AR and QR generators. From this perspective, AR is a democratic medium, one which ensures good results with little investments. Augmented reality is based on interactivity: customers no longer need to be attracted by the brand but deliberately choose to submit to the interactive experience provided by the product. In this case, the QR or QR tags that appear on the package or label can be read by a digital camera and, after being decoded by special downloadable apps, give access to games, virtual imagery, or simply connect the consumer to related online contents. This technology allows to condensate a virtually unlimited amount of information in a limited space. In the food industry, AR is acquiring increasing momentum. However hesitantly, augmented reality menus, labels, packages, etc. are making their appearance in restaurants and food stores. The advantages are diverse: beside the informative and ludic scopes, AR can be used for educational and medical purposes, or to enhance affordances, for instance by providing aural information about food to the visually impaired. The aim of this paper is to investigate the linguistic strategies adopted in web-based communication to promote AR information-systems within the food industry and to analyse online examples of feedback to the introduction of this technology. The corpus of texts will be collected among articles, blogs, tag clouds and videos. In so doing, the research will also highlight the connection between AR and identity. In fact AR deeply affects the relationship between the individual and the surrounding context, owing to its inherent interactivity, to the overlapping of actual and virtual levels, to the sharing of experiences related to food in virtual communities and to the constant traceability of both products and consumers in the actual world.