Narrativity approaches to branding

Abstract

The concept of narrative is of paramount importance across various social sciences and humanities disciplines, including anthropology, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, sociology and semiotics. The "linguistic turn" that took place in the 20th C. was succeeded, as noted by Fludernik (2009), by a "narrative turn". This Chapter is an attempt at a critical overview of some of the most relevant approaches to branding from narratological or narrative points of view. "Narratology is the theory of narratives, narrative texts, images, spectacle, events; cultural artefacts that "tell a story" (Bal 1987: 3)" (Fludernik 2009: 105). The aim is to compare and contrast how narrative approaches have been imported in disciplines such as psychology and anthropology, and how they have made inroads into branding research, with a focus on semiotics.