Data-Weight-loss advertisements

Drawing on Van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework and the visual grammar developed by Van Leeuwen and Kress, this manuscript investigates the persuasion strategies used in the weight-loss advertisements, with its data sourced from China’s WeChat platform. The significance of this study lies in revealing how weight-loss ads capitalize on multimodal resources to construct a discourse of ‘legitimacy’ in order to bolster the appeal of the advertised products, which, therefore, leads consumers to the perception of regaining the ‘ideal’ body.