Leveraging social storytelling to foster consumer brand engagement

Storytelling's potential to mentally transport consumers and influence their attitudes, behaviors and beliefs has been traversed by researchers from diverse fields, including anthropology, psychology, and marketing. In addition, the effects of brand stories on consumers have been tested in contexts ranging from television commercials, to print advertisements, to travel brochures. The popularity of social media usage among brands and consumers alike suggests a need to explore storytelling within this relatively new context. In 2017, an estimated 90% of U.S. companies were harnessing social media to increase brand awareness, and of an estimated 4.57 billion internet consumers worldwide, about 3.6 billion use social media (Clement, 2020a, 2020b). Yet, there is limited research on using social storytelling to develop engagement between consumers and brands. This dissertation relies on a quasi-experimental study to investigate if social storytelling ads that use narrative structure can foster consumer brand engagement (CBE), specifically when narrative transportation, self-brand connections and co-creation serve as mediators. Further, it explores the moderating role of self-referencing during the storytelling process. Four significant research findings are presented: 1) social storytelling advertisements led to consumer brand engagement when mediated by narrative transportation and partially mediated by self-brand connections; 2) self-brand connections, effectuated through storytelling, served as an antecedent to consumer brand engagement, despite being conceptualized by prior literature as only an outcome of CBE; 3) through narrative transportation, social storytelling led to co-creation; and 4) self-referencing did not significantly strengthen the positive relationship between storytelling and narrative transportation. These contributions offer marketing practitioners meaningful insights about leveraging social storytelling to foster consumer brand engagement