Despite its benefits as a powerful form of

Despite its benefits as a powerful form of communication (see Barker & Gower, 2010; Hegarty, 2011, p. 95; Smith, 2011, p. 27), the fact is that stories remain a largely unconventional means of brand communication (Barker & Gower, 2010). In the III National Conference of Retail that took place in Barcelona in May 2015, it heme oxygenase was highlighted that storytelling has arrived very late to Spain in the field of marketing. Thus, the objective of this research is to examine how storytelling is being used by Spanish brands. More specifically, the following research questions are formulated:
Storytelling
Method Since the purpose of the current research is to explore the content of brand stories, a content analysis is performed. This is a common method in the analysis of communication messages (Bigné & Royo, 2013) and, in particular, with respect to Internet and website content, because of its flexible nature (Allen, 2014; Okazaki, 2004). Content analysis is described as an objective, systematic and quantitative way of exploring information about communication content, and has been successfully used in previous studies on brand storytelling (e.g., Janssen et al., 2012; Spear & Roper, 2013).
Analysis and results Finally, a cluster analysis was conducted to classify the stories and identify natural groups of stories that shared certain characteristics that we would otherwise not have been able to detect. To group the stories, we used as variables the four characteristics of a good story proposed by Chiu et al. (2012) and the total number of these characteristics that each story included. Each identified group is also described in terms of the specific characteristics of each story (what the story is about, type of archetype, type of plot and so on), as depicted in Appendix A.3.
Discussion Authenticity is suggested as one element of a good story. However, Cluster 3 was made up of stories that lacked this attribute; nevertheless, it could be that the reader/viewer would consider them good stories based, among other things, on their aesthetic value. Ads that appeal to fantasy to transport the customer into an alternate world (for example, Nina L’eau by Nina Ricci; see https://youtu.be/tUrCrXpdP_0) may be as efficient as other types of stories, despite the fact that they are not based on real events.
Conflict of interest