The effects of storytelling and business customer interaction on brand experience.

Nowadays, social media is an important part of the daily lives of many individuals worldwide. Individuals are exposed to stories, narratives, promotions, or any other marketing activities on a daily basis online and offline. With social media as a platform that is always around, the emergence of social media gave new insights into the concept of telling and sharing stories. Telling stories is at the one hand, a tool for marketeers to engage with their (potential) customers, but on the other hand, a challenge in which brands and marketers are struggling to make storytelling work for their own goals and values. In order to make this study meaningful and tangible, three interesting concepts formed the basis, storytelling, business customer interaction and brand experience. Storytelling telling consisted out of rhetorical and narrative implications, business customer interaction was divided into three different categories illustrating the type of interactivity between the marketer and the customers. Brand experience describes how customers are experiencing a brand in terms of sensory, affective, intellectual and behavioural conceptual elements. The aim of this study is to understand how storytelling and business customer interaction interact to affect the brand experience of individuals on social media. The methodological approach for this study, is quantitative by nature and consisted out of an online experiment (N=151). The business customer interaction model has been manipulated by means of a cover story. For this cover story, Blue Apron figured as a brand to give the story a meaningful body. The study was built upon six manipulated conditions. The cover story was formulated as a Facebook post, therefore, the focus of social media platform for this study is set on Facebook. The foundation of the methodological approach lies in the carefully formulated research question and hypotheses. The main findings for this study showed that storytelling has a positive effect on how customers are experiencing a brand. An explicit distinction is found in the difference between rhetorical and narrative storytelling. However, business customer interaction seems to not affect brand experience at all. Remaining measures in this study were demographical and social elements which were used to measure any other effects and implications regarding 3 brand experience. Additionally, interaction effects between business customer interaction and storytelling were not found within the study. The findings and conceptual notions within this study contribute to the understanding of social media as a medium for transporting stories.