Storytelling and narrative tools in award-winning advertisements in Turkey: an interdisciplinary approach

ABSTRACT

Traditional marketing strategies are now no longer seen as effective in communicating with today’s sophisticated groups. Today, companies employ knowledge from disciplines other than marketing – such as psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics – when communicating with their target audience. In this study, the content analysis method is used to analyse Effie Turkey gold award-winning advertisements in order to determine the storytelling elements used in advertisements. In order to show the increasing use of storytelling elements in advertisements, the 2011–2013 and 2017–2018 award winning advertisements are studied. The analysis reveals that seven basic plots are used extensively in advertisements to create empathy. We also analysed the archetypes used in the advertisements, and found that the caregiver type is the most commonly used archetype, followed by Jung’s explorer type. According to the findings of this study, among all aspects of language syntactic structure seems to play the most important role.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital Marketing
• storytelling
• linguistic Elements
• psychology
• neuromarketing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fatih Kılıç

Fatih KILIÇ graduated from Istanbul University, Business School (GPA 3.21). He has recently completed his master’s studies with the GPA of 3.92 at Bahçeşehir University, department of Marketing. He has started  to the  Marketing Ph.D program at Istanbul University in 2019.   His primary research interest is, but not limited to, crossdisciplinary research including marketing, consumer behavior, digital marketing psychology, neuroscience and linguistics, all of which have been integral parts of content analysis method in his thesis.

Elif Yolbulan Okan

 Elif Yolbulan OKANAfter graduating from Middle East Technical University with a B.Sc. degree in Business Administration (1995), Dr. Yolbulan Okan earned M.Sc. in Marketing degree from University of Salford, Manchester (1997) and a PhD degree in Marketing from Yeditepe University (2007). She worked at T.E.B and Osmanlı Bank between 1998 and 2001. She was a faculty member of Department of Business Administration in Yeditepe University between 2002 and 2016. Since 2018 September, she has been working as an Associate Professor of Marketing at Bahçeşehir University. Her research interests include marketing, brand management, marketing theory and consumer behavior. Dr. Yolbulan Okan’s research has appeared as book chapters, case studies in books, and articles published by reputable national and international publishers.