Fact versus Fiction: Blending Storytelling with Product Attributes in Advertisements

Prior research on persuasion has explored whether marketers benefit more from choosing to advertise via stories, which invoke narrative transportation, or choosing to advertise via facts, which involve argument-based processing. The present research proposes that marketers need not treat such a decision as an either/or trade-off. Rather, it is possible to blend story-based and argument-based processing to produce effective persuasion. In particular, while prior research suggests that dispersing arguments throughout a narrative might be more persuasive, the current work reveals consolidating arguments within a narrative—clustering the presentation of arguments together—can enhance persuasion. Four main experiments and one supplemental experiment demonstrate that consolidating arguments increases elaboration of those arguments without disrupting transportation. As a result, when arguments are strong, consolidating arguments within a story can be an effective means of blending fact and fiction.