Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.1002/mar.22011

Publication Title

Psychology & Marketing

Volume

41

Issue

8

Pages

1805-1819

Abstract

Consumers are inundated with opportunities to become engaged with marketing-generated stories, from watching an influencer detail her adventures abroad or a commercial about a military service member who makes it home just in time for the holidays. When consumers become so engaged with a story that they begin to connect with the story characters and imagine what will happen next, they experience a process known as narrative transportation, which has significant positive outcomes for marketers. Given the value that narrative transportation provides to marketers, we conduct a systematic literature review to both synthesize and provide direction on the literature of narrative transportation. From our analysis of 95 peer-reviewed articles, we identify relevant theoretical foundations and concepts (antecedents, outcomes, and moderators) employed in these articles. Using these results as our foundation, we detail how narrative transportation has evolved in terms of both the presentation of the story and the antecedents that affect narrative transportation. Further, we present a conceptual model that will represent the next iteration of the narrative transportation framework and suggest avenues for future research. In doing so, we enable researchers to continue the exploration of the narrative transportation construct.

Rights

© 2024 The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

ORCID

0000-0001-8832-703X (Thomas)

Original Publication Citation

Thomas, V. L., & Grigsby, J. L. (2024). Narrative transportation: A systematic literature review and future research agenda. Psychology & Marketing, 41(8), 1805-1819. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.22011

Download

Share

COinS