The stories consumers report and tell in which they use luxury brands as props or as anthropomorphic actors, increasingly form a key part of personal and community weblogs. These stories represent drama enactments, enabling the storytellers to experience powerful myths consciously or unconsciously. These are simple stories with compelling characters and resonant plots that help consumers make sense of the world. The stories reported on the weblogs are often unsolicited and self-reported stories representing the voice of the consumer rather than that of the advertiser or brand manager. Researching the stories on weblogs is useful for advertising executives because it helps to clarify and deepen the knowledge of how people resolve paradoxes triggered in their minds by a conscious feeling of unease, awareness of a problem or opportunity arising from conflict.
The brand stories consumers tell on purchasing-consumption require a protagonist consumer to experience an `inciting incident' that focuses attention and results in action in response to this incident. This notion of an `inciting incident' is based on the work of Robert Mckee, the famous Hollywood scriptwriter. Since stories help make sense of the world around us, it is not surprising that consumer storytelling about brands covers a wide spectrum of high risk consumption acts and the more mundane and improvizational presentations of self in everyday life. These presentations of self on a weblog will inevitably include others, not only friends but also strangers, who can view the weblog.
The consumer storytelling theory builds on the view that dramatic consumption experiences must be scripted either by experiential service providers or within the institutional structure of a consumer subculture. There are two key dimensions that relate to crafting a good story: the landscape of action and the landscape of consciousness. The latter requires further discussion. |
