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Selling stories: Harry Potter and the marketing plot

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>06/2010
<mark>Journal</mark>Psychology and Marketing
Issue number6
Volume27
Number of pages16
Pages (from-to)541-556
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Most families in the Western world are aware of Harry Potter, the stupendously successful stories about a boy wizard “who lived.” Most families are familiar with the shadow tales attached to Harry Potter—the tales of the rags to riches author, the mega‐blockbuster movies, the forthcoming theme park in Florida, the long lines of enthusiastic consumers outside book stores at midnight. Harry Potter, in short, is a Niagara of narratives, a sea of stories. This paper plots the Harry Potter stories onto Booker's seven‐element theory of narrative emplotment and considers how consumers interact with the Harry Potter brand phenomenon. Three consumer narratives of engagement are evident—discovery, diachronic, and denial—as is the disagreement between battling plots.