A "neurobiological" approach to storing in advertising communication

Homo narrans, the "story-telling human", is an important concept that emphasizes the intrinsic role of storytelling in human culture and identity. Stories are the nature of human communication, the essence of the human mind. Storytelling serves as a vital mechanism for transmitting knowledge, cultural values, and collective memory across generations, making it fundamental to the ability to create, share, and interact with stories. Recognizing the interest in stories and telling, advertising communication practitioners are making extensive use of storytelling in advertisements. Narrative advertising, a marketing strategy that uses storytelling to influence consumers, is used to create emotional connections and increase brand recall. This study investigates why and how narrative advertisements are more effective than logically persuasive argumentative advertisements. It attempts to explain the factors that make narrative advertisements more effective than argumentative advertisements by investigating the emotional biochemistry of individuals, which is not yet widely used in advertising communication. Blood and saliva samples were taken from 84 participants by phlebotomists to measure physiological responses and neurochemical changes in blood and saliva that motivate action before and immediately after exposure to a narrative and argument. The study examines the levels of oxytocin, tryptophan/kynurenine and tryptophan metabolites in the saliva and blood of individuals who watched different advertisement models. In the literature, there are not many studies examining storytelling in advertising communication with data from neurobiological markers. The study also aims to contribute to closing this gap in the literature and to support studies to be conducted at an academic level. The study supports the previous literature on narrative advertising due to the increasing importance of narrative advertising in advertising and marketing strategies, re-evaluates it from a neurobiology perspective and aims to predict consumer behavior and fill in the missing pieces. In this study, where participants who watched advertisements containing stories and enriched with emotional content were compared with participants who watched informative advertisements adorned with arguments, the results did not reveal a significant difference in the hormone levels of participants in the story and argument groups. The experimental results of this study showed that, in comparing narrative advertisements with non-narrative advertisements, after watching the narrative content advertisement, there was a slight increase in the participants' oxytocin levels compared to the baseline level, but the change did not reach a significant level.