The stories in the basis of human life and the culture of societies have been mediated by the fact that individuals have been able to make sense of their own selves for centuries. Similarly, stories are important for brands to identify their own identities and to recognize their target groups: Stories that accurately reflect the personality of the brand play an important role in the formation of the brand image and identity. As a marketing tactic, storytelling is based on the proposition that people remember information better when it is described as a story rather than as a fact list. The most important purpose of advertising is to stay in mind and even dig in the memory of its recipients. For this reason, the repetition of the product name, slogans and logos are no longer enough alone in today's communication-overloaded and heavy-competition conditions. In this study, based on the concept of narrative and its origins, an evaluation of both traditional and transmedia narrative formats related to the process of creating a brand story and the narrative use in advertising has been made.
TopNarrative And Storytelling
In the Oxford Dictionary, the term of narrative is defined as “a series of linked events that are said or written; a story” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016). In the Communication Dictionary (1995), Erol Mutlu describes narrative as the transfer of two or more events (or a situtaion and an event) that are logically interconnected into a consistent issue (pp. 41-42). Looking at these definitions, it can be seen that the concept of narrative is used together with the concepts of story and plot.
In fact, the narrative perspective as a rhetorical method is attributed to Walter R. Fisher, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California. Basically, the narrative perspective focuses on the innate nature of mankind to understand and interpret the world around us through storytelling (Sellnow, 2018, p. 37). The narrative, which is as old as the history of humanity, is at the basis of the phenomenon of communication. Like language, narrative is one of the basic elements of culture. There is a narrative in all types of written and oral expression such as story, painting, cinema and novel (Atabek, 1992: 339). Narratives are the essence of human beings and are found in different areas of daily life. Sharing experiences in verbal format means a relationship between individuals and this is the sharing that constitutes the essence of man (Dias and Dias, 2018, p. 50).
Storytelling is a storyteller's telling the story to the audience. Basically, stories are the basic activities of every human being. Even if they talk to themselves, it means they're in the process of telling a story. Storytelling can be considered the oldest and most recent branch of literary sciences. Storytelling aims to provide the audience with information to recognize their feelings and to improve their skills in problem solving (Martinus and Chaniago, 2017, pp. 202-203). According to Buckner and Rutlage (2011), people are natural storytellers. In this sense, storytelling can be expressed as an ancient art. According to this; we use and investigate stories because stories provide us with a context of time and space and an emotional framework. They enable us to make sense of the world around us and, more importantly, to understand our place in this world. McColl and Legorburu (2016) describe storytelling as sharing the events, sometimes with improvisation or adornment, with words, images, voices and /or experiences, and say that human being has a natural ability to relate and make sense of events that seem unrelated. According to them, we connect with spaces and people through stories, and we perceive the world in this way. The stories have always taken an important place in the history of mankind and have enabled us to understand and organize the complexity of our existence in our struggle for survival (pp. 29-43).