Analysis of the brand personality and stories on cultural context

This thesis aims to analyze how brands of different cultures reflect the cultural codes where they belong, their archetypes, and personalities through the brand stories. I study on this thesis the way of expressing the brand personality through brand stories, and the way of introducing the culture where they belong via the archetypes and the personality type consulted on the process of creating the brand story. Main purpose of this study is to show the usage of brand stories based on cultural values in advertisement. This thesis presents that using archetype and storyline in brand ads creates a strong brand personality. In line with this, it is emphasized that brand stories are created on cultural values following the theories of Geuens et al. (2009) and Mark and Pearson (2001) on the features of brand personality. In the analysis of brand stories on cultural context, brands from four different countries such as Apple from USA, Mercedes-Benz from Germany, Samsung from South Korea and Toyota from Japan ranked as best global brands by Interbrand in 2019 are chosen and it is studied on their different storytelling. In the study, I benefited the narrative analysis of Riessman and its thematical and structural functions. According to the results of the analysis of brand stories, it has been concluded that brands from different cultures have used mostly emotional messages.