Storytelling has become increasingly of interest for marketing and management in the last years and promises both aesthetic design and effecting consumers’ perception of fashion brands positively. Nevertheless, the complexity of story design, still being rather focussed by the humanities, and its effective adaption for luxury fashion brands regarding value perception and related behavioural consequences are still poorly understood and have not been explored so far. We seek to fill this research gap.

In our study, we chose a luxury brand’s existing story and applied story concepts of narratology to rearrange plot, characters, and style first. In a second step, we examined the effect of applying the story concepts by testing the perception of three different groups (no story, original story, and rearranged story). Using PLS path modelling, we proved our hypotheses empirically.

Our examination suggests that an application of narrative concepts for creating fashion brand stories has a measurable impact on consumer’s reception and behavioural outcome. On the one hand, this involves dimensions of luxury value, such as financial, functional, individual, and social consumer perceptions as well as an overall likability perception of the brand. On the other hand, this perception obviously impacts consumption habits regarding luxury fashion as much as it is related to recommendation behaviour, willingness to pay a premium price, and purchase intentions.

Our findings strongly advice to consult established theories, concepts, and models of the humanities for storytelling in marketing and management. While measuring specific elements already proves their applicability, it will be a major task for theoretical and qualitative research to discuss existing material for the demands of marketing and management as well as (fashion) brands. Even for professionals in brand management, our study advices to have a closer look on traditional storytelling concepts to create effective campaigns.

The particular value of our study is to present and empirically verify design elements of storytelling with respect to theoretical narrative approaches, which may have specific impact on certain luxury values and their causal effects on luxury fashion consumption. Our results reflect remarkable implications for luxury brand management as well as future research in luxury fashion, brand management, and marketing storytelling. A luxury company may stimulate purchase behaviour with a storytelling campaign. Nevertheless our study proved that a rather appropriate design, respecting research approaches of narratology, is able to increase the impact on consumers’ perception and behavioural outcome.

• Janina Haase(Leibniz University Hannover, Germany)
• Nadine Hennigs(Leibniz University Hannover, Germany)
• Jan C. L. König(Leibniz University Hannover, Germany)
• Klaus-Peter Wiedmann(Leibniz University Hannover, Germany)