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Innovations and Implications of Persuasive Narrative

by Stephanie G. Schartel Dunn (Volume editor) Gwendelyn S. Nisbett (Volume editor)
©2020 Edited Collection XX, 270 Pages

Summary

Narratives and storytelling are how we create shared meaning and experience the world with others. Implications of narrative are vast and apply to many disciplines. The persuasive function of narrative can be seen in marketing, advertising, strategic social media, and public relations whose practitioners are using narrative based strategies to deeply engage audiences.
This interdisciplinary volume seeks to explore the range of applications and implications of using persuasive narrative and storytelling. Persuasive strategies include the use of influencers, celebrities, virtual reality, interactive games, and content marketing (among others). The authors explore the impact of the innovative strategies that persuaders are using to capture attention and actively engage audiences.
Through a variety of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative approaches, this book focuses on the application and outcomes of narrative strategy. Ultimately we see this collection as a way to inspire narrative research into new directions and applications in media, marketing, public relations, advertising, and strategic communication fields.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • List of Illustrations and List of Tables
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Contributors
  • SECTION I: Introduction and Theory
  • 1. The Narrative Persuasion Interactivity Model: Maximizing Persuasive Storytelling in the Interactive Age
  • 2. Narrative and the Inoculation Theory of Resistance to Influence
  • 3. Enhancing Platform Appreciation through Avoidant Engagement: A Theoretical and Practical Model of Interactivity and Persuasion
  • 4. The Persuasive Power of Genre as a Universal Narrative Language
  • SECTION II: Contexts
  • 5. Quantifying Celebrity and Commodifying Authenticity: The Rise of Micro- and Nano-influencers
  • 6. Long-Format Commercials in a World of Short Attention Spans: How Advertisers Create Engagement through Storytelling
  • 7. Becoming the Narrative: The Role of Narrative Transportation in Brand Communities
  • 8. Health Related Entertainment Education as Persuasive Narrative
  • 9. Exploring Animation as a Compliance Gaining Strategy for Environmental News Reporting
  • SECTION III: Application and Case Studies
  • 10. Retrospective Reflection, Real Life Projections and Narrative Engagement: A Link between Narrative Transportation, Real-Life Projections, and Identification with Characters in a Polarizing TV Drama about Transgender Persons
  • 11. Responding to Video Game Moral Panic: Persuasive Messaging in the Video Game Industry’s Response to News Coverage of Mass Violence
  • 12. “Believe” in Nike: How Embracing Colin Kaepernick Perpetuates Nike’s Illusion of Rebellion
  • 13. A Comparison of Two Narrative Appeals for Promoting Organ Donation
  • 14. Understanding Gender Differences in Political Persuasive Social Media Narratives
  • 15. The Storytelling of Trauma: #YesAllWomen and the Dawning of Feminist Digital Collectivity
  • Index

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Preface

As we were leaving AEJMC (the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication) a few years ago, we had the wild idea to put together a book. We’ve both researched various aspects of persuasion and social influence and recognized narrative as a catalyst for change. The application of narrative persuasion has implications for a variety of disciplines and can be studied with a variety of methods. Our primary goal was to put together a volume exploring narrative persuasion from several viewpoints and to highlight how the research conversation between these perspectives could further narrative research across the board. Though we didn’t know in our initial conversation, there really has not been a volume specifically exploring narrative persuasion research in the last decade. Obviously research has continued, and the conversation needs to be updated.

Transportation into a narrative is defined as “the process of temporarily leaving one’s reality behind and emerging from the experience somehow different from the person one was before entering the milieu of the narrative” (Green, Brock, & Kaufman, 2004, p. 315). Trends in marketing, advertising, strategic social media, and public relations are using strategies intended to deeply engage audiences via narrative. This interdisciplinary volume seeks to explore the range of applications and implications of using persuasive narrative and storytelling. Persuasive strategies include the use of influencers, celebrities, virtual reality, interactive games, and content marketing (among others). Through a variety of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative approaches, this book focuses on the application and outcomes of narrative strategy. Ultimately we see this collection as a way to inspire narrative research into new directions and applications.

When we began this project, we were interested in exploring the impact of innovative strategies that persuaders are using to capture attention and actively engage audiences. As we read through research shared with us, it became apparent that the conversation needed to start with a theoretical context, to understand how narrative influences and is influenced by theory. Our first section provides these theoretical perspectives. The second section provides understanding of what narrative looks like in a variety of contexts and how narrative is used to persuade across various disciplines. Finally, the third section focuses on case study examples of narrative in action.

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Acknowledgements

Initially, we would like to thank all the authors and contributors – your various research perspectives broadened our understanding of the application of narrative. It is humbling to have such an excellent group of scholars willing to collaborate with us to put together a volume representing so many aspects of narrative research.

We would also like to thank our families. Thank you for being our favorite people – we genuinely appreciate you.

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Contributors

Kari Barber is a journalist and filmmaker with an MFA in Film & Electronic Media from American University. Her research interests include nontraditional and nonlinear narrative and animation in documentary film. Barber’s documentary film and interactive media productions have won numerous awards including two “Best in Competition” awards and an “Award of Excellence” at the Broadcast Education Association Festival of Media Arts. Her films have had national public television broadcast and international film festival screenings including in Cannes, France at the Festival International du Film Panafricain. In 2018 she was a nominee for the Carnegie fellowship for her upcoming research and production on animation, audience and communicating grief. Barber is the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she is an associate professor of electronic media.

Alexandra Beauchamp studied social psychology at Ohio University and currently works as a science fellow with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Beauchamp’s research explores social cognition, person perception and group dynamics, with a focus on improving attitudes toward science and science literacy. Current projects address the relationship between trust in scientists and religious affiliation, as well as the use of intergroup dynamics, particularly marginal outgroup membership, in improving science attitudes. She is a member of several psychological associations and participates regularly in conferences, including presenting research or chairing sessions.

Garret L. Castleberry (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma) serves as Associate Professor and Program Director of Communication, Media, and Ethics at Mid-America Christian University. His scholarly training intersects areas of media studies, visual rhetoric, and semiotics. Garret’s writings combine genre studies, autoethnography, and ideological criticism to explore the rhetorical work performed by mass mediated artifacts and popular culture. Garret’s work has appeared in Cultural Studiesó Critical Methodologies, the International Journal of Qualitative Research, the Popular Culture Studies Journal, Memory Studies, Ink & Letters, Flow, In Media Res, the Professional Wrestling Studies Association, and PopMatters. His scholarly contributions also span numerous books and collected anthologies including Television, Social Media, and Fan Culture, The ESPN Effect, Communication Theory and Millennial Popular Culture, Convergent Wrestling: Participatory Culture, Transmedia Storytelling, and Intertextuality in the Squared Circle, and The Political Mel Brooks. Garret is the co-editor of the book Competition, Community, and Educational Growth: Contemporary Perspectives on Competitive Speech and Debate.

Sara Champlin is an assistant professor in the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas. She received her Ph.D. in Advertising from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on using strategic communication campaigns to promote beneficial health outcomes. She is specifically interested in health literacy—a person’s abilities to find, understand, use, and communicate about health information. Within this context she is interested in the emergence of risky behaviors and ways in which communication around these issues can be promoted. Similarly, she aims to determine the factors that impact health information seeking.

Josh Compton is Associate Professor in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College. His research explores image at two points: before an image attack (inoculation theory) and after an image attack (image repair theory). He has been named Distinguished Lecturer by Dartmouth College, has won the Outstanding Professor Award from the National Speakers Association, and has twice won the L. E. Norton Award for Outstanding Scholarship. His work appears in such journals as Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, PLOS One, and Health Communication.

Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay is an assistant professor of Communications at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications where she teaches courses on Race and Gender, Satire and Diversity, and Psychology of Interactive Media. She holds BS degrees in Brain and Cognitive Science and Comparative Media Studies from MIT as well as an MA from the School of Cinematic Arts and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from USC. Her research focuses on the psychological impact of media technologies in a variety of areas including interactive learning tools (Grunwald & Corsbie-Massay, 2006), health interventions (Miller et al., 2012), and user-generated content including selfies (L’Pree, 2015) and YouTube (Kendrat & Corsbie-Massay, in press). Her upcoming book, Consumer Verite: The American psychosocial relationship with 20th century media technology, explores how the media environment of the past century established cultural and psychological norms that continue to impact the adoption and use in the 21st century.

Laura Crosswell is an assistant professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. As a media scholar focused on persuasive health communication, her work deconstructs the implications of message framing as it relates to citizenry, society, and human behavior. Through interdisciplinary scholarship, she explores marketing models in the digital age; specifically as they relate to public trust and personal efficacy. Laura’s work is published in peer-reviewed journals such as Critical Public Health, Perspectives in Public Health, the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Organizational Studies. Her work can also be found in the Handbook of Applied Communication Research and Risk & Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment. She recently published her book Politics, Propaganda, and Public Health: A Case Study in Health Communication and Public Trust. Laura earned her doctorate degree in Media & Public Affairs from the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.

Ran Duan is a visiting assistant professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research interests span the areas of environmental, science and visual communication. Her current work particularly focuses on the use of animation in environmental news, visual communication of natural disasters, risk perception and the implications of these areas for journalism practice. Duan has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Climatic Change, Environmental Communication, Environment and Behavior, Human Ecology Review, Social Science Quarterly and International Communication Gazette. Her research has been supported by national and local funding agencies such as the National Geographic Society, Michigan State University’s Environmental Science and Policy Program and University of Nevada Reno’s Center for Advanced Media Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in media & information, a doctoral specialization in environmental science and policy and a master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

Karen C. Freberg (@kfreberg) is an Associate Professor in Strategic Communications at the University of Louisville. Freberg is also a research consultant in social media and crisis communications and has worked with several organizations and agencies such as Firestorm Solutions, Hootsuite, The Breeders’ Cup, IMC Agency, DHS, CDC, National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD), Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, and the Colorado Ski Association. This experience led her to be a 2015 Plank Center Fellow for General Motors (GM), where her responsibility was to work with the PR and social media teams forming best practices and recommendations on social media measurement strategies and influencer marketing practices. In addition, Freberg has written three books including The Roadmap in Teaching Social Media (Amazon, self-published), Digital Media Writing for Strategic Communication (TopHat with Emily Kinsky and Amber Hutchins) and Social Media for Strategic Communications: Creative Strategies and Research-Based Applications (with SAGE).

Alicia Mason is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Pittsburg State University. Her research explores social influence and persuasion in risk, crisis, health and environmental contexts. She teaches in the Strategic Communication track and is the Director of the Pittsburg State Communication Research Lab (CRL). Her work appears in journals such as the Journal of Health Communication, Health Communication, Corporate Reputation Review, Communication Monographs and Communication Quarterly.

Natalie Pagenstecher graduated in 2020 from the University of Delaware with her B.A. in Communication, B.S. in Health Behavior Science, and a Minor in Dance. As an undergraduate, she conducted research focused in the areas of health communication, risk perception, and women’s health. Natalie presented her dance minor capstone research “Embodying the Medicalization of Infertility Through Dance” at the National Dance Education Organization Conference. She is the recipient of the College of Health Sciences’ Contribution to Health Award for her active and extensive involvement in health promotion efforts both within the Department of Behavioral Health and Nutrition and at the community level. She has also been named a Woman of Promise by the University of Delaware for her dedication to academic excellence and pursuit of personal goals and challenges. In her free time, Natalie enjoys reading science fiction novels and rooting for the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.

Details

Pages
XX, 270
Year
2020
ISBN (PDF)
9781433180880
ISBN (ePUB)
9781433180897
ISBN (MOBI)
9781433180903
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433180873
DOI
10.3726/b17049
Language
English
Publication date
2021 (January)
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2020. XX, 270 pp., 2 b/w ill., 9 tables.

Biographical notes

Stephanie G. Schartel Dunn (Volume editor) Gwendelyn S. Nisbett (Volume editor)

Stephanie G. Schartel Dunn (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is an assistant professor of marketing in the Plaster School of Business at Missouri Southern State University. Dr. Schartel Dunn’s research examines mediated social influence and consumer behavior. Gwendelyn S. Nisbett (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is an associate professor of strategic communication in the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas. Dr. Nisbett’s research examines the intersection of mediated social influence, political communication, and popular culture.

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