A Picture Can be Worth a Thousand Stories: Interpreting Advertising Differently in 10 Countries

Abstract

Storytelling is an old human activity which became a well-known marketing tool both for research and communication. The narrative mode deals with the dynamics of human intentions because people seek to explain events by looking at how human actors strive to do things over time. The purpose of this paper is to investigate which stories respondents from different countries can narrate from one simple stimulus such as a print advertisement with no text. Our research draws on Ogden and Richard’s Triangle of Meaning (1923), for the analysis of the advertisement and on Greimas’ Actantial Model (1983) for the plot.