Communicating Experiences: A Narrative Approach to Creating Service Brand Image

Abstract

The authors discuss the potential merits of taking a narrative approach to communicating service brand image through advertising. On the assumption that a primary goal of advertising should be to create a vivid image of the brand in consumers' minds, they assess past definitions of brand image and adapt them to the marketing of services. They review metaphors used previously to understand services, and emphasize that the experiential aspect of services should play an important role in how service brand image is conceptualized. Specifically, they suggest that experience is a useful conceptualization for understanding service brand image because it represents the customer's perspective of a service and the symbolic meanings created during service consumption. Using their conceptualization of service as experience, the authors discuss how to view consumers' comprehension of services, and thus how to communicate about services through advertising. They draw on narrative theory to suggest that narrative thought is a predominant cognitive mode of comprehension used by consumers to interpret experience (and hence services) and that narrative advertising should be effective in communicating service experience. Finally, they present a series of propositions linking the formal structure of advertising to responses related to the creation of service brand image.