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Journal of Strategic Marketing

Special Issue Call for Papers

Strategic Brand Storytelling
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2019

Brands are stories. Stories are brands. Branding is storytelling, and storytelling is marketing. Brands are stories that have been attached to products and services (Twitchell, 2004), and the strategic act of storytelling has become essential to modern branding (Herskovitz & Crystal, 2010). Stories are the lifeblood of value-based marketing: the products we buy and sell are simply the props in the brand story – tangible manifestations of brand’s promises.

Stories are critical to marketing, not only with respect to how they are received and by the consumers, but also with respect to how they are created and told by marketers (Woodside, 2010). Brand storytelling is the use of literary storytelling techniques and narrative discourse applied specifically to marketing communications in order to promote brands to consumers in an engaging and meaningful way. Stories add symbolic value to products, and differentiate brands by adding emotional components (Lundqvist et al., 2013). By nature, people think about and process their worlds in narrative form, and customers interpret their experiences with brands in a narrative process (Abbott, 2002; Escalas, 2004).

The use of stories in branding has been approached from a number of perspectives. Customers use brand stories to interpret (Escalas, 2004) and even create product experiences (Chiu, Hsieh, & Kuo, 2012; LaTour, LaTour, & Brainerd, 2014). Brand stories may actually motivate purchase behavior (Merchant, Ford, & Sargeant, 2010). Beyond purchase and consumption, stories are used to convey brand values (Fog et al., 2010; Lundqvist et al., 2013) and build cultural capital with customers (Batra et al., 2000; Özsomer & Altaras, 2008).

Although brand storytelling management practice has become popular in practitioner outlets, very little research explores brand storytelling as a strategic, firm-centric process. Most research on brand storytelling in marketing is in the field of consumer behavior, not strategy. While the stories consumers tell about brands, and how and why they tell them, are of critical importance to managers, so too are the stories that the brands themselves tell. The understanding of what that the brand story really is, and how and why it is told by the firm, is of great significance to strategy formulation. The marketing strategy literature on brand stories and storytelling is comparatively thin, and it is to this area that the current special issue strives to contribute.

We thus seek a broad range of submissions related to the strategic use of stories in branding and marketing in a managerial context, including, but not limited to: the role and influence of stories in branding, the tactical construction of stories, the role of storytelling in brand communications. Theoretical manuscripts are welcome.

Submission

Articles submitted should not have been published before in their current (or substantially similar) form and should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Please see the journal’s originality guidelines for further details. Authors should please ensure that their work is formatted according to the journal’s requirements, available at

The due date for submissions is December 15th, 2019

Manuscripts should be submitted to

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Please indicate the name of the special issue via the drop-down menu. For questions regarding the content of this special issue, please contact the guest editor: Dr. Adam J. Mills, Loyola University New Orleans, ajmills@loyno.edu

 

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