Storytelling alchemy in marketing: unveiling future research directions with ADO TCM framework

In the landscape of strategic branding, storytelling has persisted as a dominant approach since its emergence in the 1940s. Remarkably, even in the year 2024, brands continue to leverage this narrative strategy in their positioning and this elucidates the potential of this strategy. However, despite its evident efficacy, there is a notable scarcity of review papers in this domain, and hence this paper aims to study existing knowledge of storytelling in terms of its contribution to marketing. The core objective of this paper is to review and propose a future agenda for storytelling from a marketing perspective. Through a framework-based systematic review, this paper organizes and retrospectively analyses the antecedents, decisions, and outcomes (ADO) of storytelling within the realms of marketing. Furthermore, the paper also presents a concise summary of the theories, contexts, and methods (TCM) employed to understand storytelling and concludes with a constructive discussion on the existing knowledge gaps and how they could be addressed through pertinent ideas for future marketing research on storytelling.