One late afternoon in May 2013, while I was sitting and surfing on YouTube in a small public library in Dublin, I stumbled over one advertisement that perhaps has had a tremendous impact on the topic of this thesis. The ad depicts an old man sitting on the floor tying a jogging shoelace for an old lady who is sitting on a chair. The old lady asked the man what his name was. He answered, “you don’t remember me, but I remember you”, and the whole story started. It turned out that they were married and living together, but the old lady could not remember the old man because she had Alzheimer. Yet whatever she did, her husband would be there to support her and take care of her just like what he had promised her on the day that they got married. The three-minutes-long ad also reveals enjoyable moments that they shared both in the past as well as in present. When it finished, I found myself sitting on the very same chair with tears, making the person sitting next to me wonder who might have put the onions on the table.
After the moment of awkwardness, I started to realize that it was an advertisement for a life insurance company in Thailand. But somehow, I did not feel that it was an advertisement. To me, I felt more like I had just seen a great movie of somebody‟s eighty years‟ worth of life in about three minutes. “This is fantastic!” I thought. How come I cry for them even though I don‟t even know them? Yet, I feel as if they were somehow closely related to me, as if they were part of my life or my family.
This is perhaps the power of narrative transportation that narrative can have on us.
Narrative transportation refers to the situation when we are psychologically drawn into the world of a narrative that makes us forget about the real world and experience strong emotions, which eventually influences our attitudes. People who are transported into a narrative tend to lose sense of their physical surroundings. In addition, they may become attached to and identified with the characters in the story. In some situations, they may even imagine being the characters themselves. In the most extreme case, their values of living their lives are likely to become congruent with the values presented in the narrative.
In other words, the narrative world gradually and eventually becomes the world that they think or perceive they live in.
The topic of narrative transportation involves me in two aspects. At a personal level, narrative transportation gives me a moment of epiphany as if I had experienced a moment
of some great discovery that were so exciting and appealing. As humans, we are affected by what we read, hear, and see, and being drawn into a narrative can influence how we think about the world and accounts for some reasons that make us believe and act in a certain way. Therefore, I am curious and motivated to learn more about the subject as well as what the outcome might be. Moreover, being able to immerse oneself in the world of narrative is a talented gift that every one of us was born with. Narrative transportation gives us freedom to elaborate based on our own imagination. In the world of narrative, you can be anyone you like, do anything you want, and still be able to come back from that experience to the real world. And every time we come back, we always bring something with us, i.e. the reflection and learning experience which help us learn about other people, but most importantly, it helps us learn about ourselves. In other words, it is a part of who we have become today.
Moreover, this topic also involves me at a professional level. I find it relevant to the field of marketing, particularly when it is used in advertising. This is perhaps due to a growing interest in academic research in the field of narrative transportation combined with the growing popularity and usage of social media and online advertisement in the 21st century.
These growing interests in academics and social media technology have helped advance technology in narration which in turn challenges the nature of storytelling, i.e. how stories are told both from the author‟s side as well as from the recipient‟s side. Hence, it makes it possible for both brands and consumers to become a potential storyteller simultaneously.
My goal of writing this paper is not to cover everything possible about narrative transportation, but rather a specific area of the subject that interests me most. Among other researches in the field of narrative transportation, I find the ones from Green & Brock (2000), Brock, Strange, & Green (2002), Green, Brock, & Kafman (2004) and Kinnebrock
& Bilandzic (2006) most inspiring. The first three authors explain the concepts of narrative transportation and its process. The latter authors study the concept more in depth and provide a better understanding of how a transportive experience can be enhanced through specific narrativity factors.
Previous research in narrative transportation related to marketing rely heavily on the type of media being studied, be it books, printed ads, TV commercials, online games, and other virtual media platforms, etc. However, these researches seem to neglect the type of product being studied, specifically in terms of the level of product involvement. Some products can
be more highly-involved than some other products simply because the decision to buy that product is riskier and more expensive than other products. For instance, a car is a high involvement product while an ice cream is a low involvement product i.e. consumers are more likely to put more time and effort to search for information about the car than they would have done for the ice cream.
Based on this information, one can ask: how do we know if narrative transportation works the same way for both high and low involvement product? In this paper, I would like to focus on the author‟s point of view i.e. the brand promoter. Specifically, how do brands use narrativity factors to engage their target audiences when advertising for high vs. low involvement products? The way I see it is that this question arises because the two theoretical fields (narrative transportation and product involvement) are being treated separately. What if we can address both fields simultaneously? What would be the outcome? In other words, if we examine narrative transportation by being aware of the level of involvement that consumers may have toward the product, be it high or low, would it reveal something different from what we have known before?
To do this effectively, I will need an analytical tool that can help me unfold how narrative can be used to enhance narrative transportation. Narrativity factors become my first choice of tool as it will allow me to magnify the case. This leads me to arrive at the main research question which is:
1.1 Main research question
“How are narrativity factors used to enhance transportive experience in advertising for high vs. low Involvement products?”
In order to answer this research question, I will first review literature from the two fields:
narrative transportation and product involvement, in order to understand the principles of both fields. Then, I will describe the methods and techniques used in this paper. Next, I will present the cases and publish the findings based on the analysis from using narrativity factors to solve the research question. The thesis will then be concluded with the answer to the main research question, recommendations and opportunities for future research.