Brand storytelling: how brands tell about themselves on social media
Abstract
Internet and social networks have changed the rules of brand storytelling and the way they see the role of the consumer. Brands are becoming more and more storytellers, and their aim is not so much to describe the product, but to increase brand awareness. In this sense, brand storytelling is the development of a story that can excite and create an identity; a story that links the consumption of the products to experiences, relationships, values and habits. In this way, the reader/consumer can identify himself with the story of the brand. In the last years, semiotics has shown the different ways in which advertisement develops brand storytelling, but social media have led to new narrative principles, to a communicative relationship – advertiser and not advertiser – that is mainly visual, in which the story is told more through images than through verbal language. The images follow the rules of narration as the verbal stories, but they are more direct, evocative, with an immediate impact. This article investigates some brands storytelling on Instagram, a social networking platform where the chosen sequence of pictures and videos creates a text that, during time, produces a reality, with the aim of governing the brand image. Through visual storytelling, brands create their own lives, illustrating the type and quality of experience that consumers would have buying their products.
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