Suffering with Joyousness? The Impact of Brand Story Types on Consumer Attitudes

Shen Mingyu; Wei Haiying; Mao Lijing

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20210519.301

Summary

In the current context of digital information overload and ad-blocking technologies, it has been a hot topic that how to tell a better brand story so as to convey brand well-being and meet consumers’ spiritual needs. Enterprises either convey the concept of seeking a happy life to consumers by showing pleasant experience, or highlight the meaningful aspects of life by juxtaposing a series of negative beliefs or facts with personal goal and achievement. The effect of these two types of brand story on consumer attitudes remains unknown. Integrating hedonia and eudaimonia, this research adopts the narrative transportation theory to reveal the effects of different types of brand story on consumers’ brand preference and word-of-mouth intention.

Three studies were designed to test the hypothesis: Study 1 was conducted with a virtual hedonistic wine brand to explore the main effect of brand story types (happy story vs. meaningful story) on consumers’ brand preference and word-of-mouth intention and the mediating effect of narrative transportation, and to verify that narrative transportation further influences consumers’ word-of-mouth intention through brand preference; study 2 examined the moderating effect of temporal orientation through an experimental manipulation of a virtual stationery brand; study 3 examined the moderating effect of temporal orientation based on the perspective of personality traits, and excluded the alternative explanatory effect of cognitive fluency and the potential impact of masculinity.

The studies were conducted by online questionnaire, and ANOVA analysis, regression analysis and bootstrap analysis were adopted. The empirical results show that meaningful stories can enhance consumer attitudes more than happy stories in which narrative transportation plays the role of mediator. This effect is moderated by consumers’ temporal orientation: For present-oriented consumers, the effect is reversed, with happy stories (vs. meaningful stories) better enhancing their narrative transportation.

This research makes several contributions to the literature: First, focusing on the new context of well-being, it examines the effects of different types of brand story on consumer attitudes from an affective perspective, promoting the application of narrative transportation theory in the marketing. Second, it explores the differences and connections between hedonia and eudaimonia through empirical research, enriching the theories related to well-being. Third, by integrating the framing perspective and the personal trait perspective, the moderating role of temporal orientation is proposed and verified. It finds effective boundaries for the impact of brand story types on consumer attitudes, advances research of temporal orientation and emotional experience, and provides theoretical support for differentiated marketing and all-age marketing. The conclusion can help marketers to create better stories and improve brand well-being.