Edinburgh Napier University

  In recent years, ‘story-telling’ has increasingly come into the limelight in the context of branding and advertising as marketers try to build emotional connections to their brands. The liminal space between ways to engage the imagination and those needed to establish credibility and personal relevance is under scrutiny as we “buy” into some stories but not into others. Story-telling is a need for human beings across the globe and as such has universal appeal. But there are also variants and differences. What marketers offer us in advertising is a rich seam of investigative material of myth-making for selling goods, services and behaviours. This paper examines the ways is which story-telling in promotional discourse is context-dependent. It uses the forum of a post-graduate university course on cross-cultural advertising to show how advertising can be used as ‘text’ to investigate how personal connections are sought and by extension to generate reflections and discussion among multicultural groups of students on existing and emerging cultural patterns throughout the world. The paper will draw from examples of contemporary advertising across the world to illustrate various interpretative frames.