This study examines how audiovisual brand stories both invite and enable consumers to enact heroic archetypes. Integrating research on the archetypal structure of narratives with research on the event structure of narratives, we distinguish singular plot stories (i.e. stories that show a Hero’s Journey) from embedded plot stories (i.e. stories that not only show but also tell one or more Hero’s Journeys) and develop a conceptual and narratological framework to analyze their structural elements. Application of the framework to 20 brand (...) stories representing 8 different brands reveals meaningful variation in elements between the singular plot stories and embedded plot stories. Differences in the expression of archetypes and event structure are argued to evoke different types of Hero enactment which in turn result in different outcomes. We specifically hypothesize that the enactment of heroic archetypes in singular plot stories primarily results in catharsis (pleasure), whereas the enactment of heroic archetypes in embedded plot stories primarily results in an outcome we describe as phronesis: a form of moral sense making of the self that advances one’s practical wisdom and prudence. The final section of the paper discusses how cathartic and phronetic outcomes of hero enactment may foster the psychological bonding between brand and consumer, and invite consumers to align their moral values with the values that are reflected by heroic character traits. The central aims of the analysis presented are to provide an exploration of narrative phenomena in a reasonably broad range of brand story videos and foremost to provide a conceptual framework with an applicable instrument suited to analyze relevant categories in these brand stories. The present study is interdisciplinary in its approach to a contemporary, developing marketing phenomenon, applying psychological modeling of archetypes and heroic values with narratological insights on perspective-taking and story structure. Its contribution is to systemize, from a narratological viewpoint, how various narrative archetypes in brand video stories may contribute to the development of brand-consumer relations. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that the use of indirect reports in Dutch crime news stories has decreased significantly over the past 150 years. In this study we explore possible explanations for this decrease by assessing variations in the degree of intertwinement between the voices of journalist and news source in a corpus of 528 indirect reports. Results indicate that in indirect reports from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the journalist’s voice was typically either dominant over or strongly intertwined (...) with the news source’s voice. In later periods, the voices of journalist and news source seem to have become disentangled. The decrease in indirect reports in Dutch news stories might thus be explained by an increased avoidance of the subjective intertwining of voices and, correspondingly, an increased separation of responsibilities between journalist and news sources. In this sense, the pragmatics of indirect reports became similar to the pragmatics of direct reports, causing the grammatically embedding indirect mode to lose its distinctive function. (shrink)