PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF STORYTELLING ADVERTISING IN THE MARKETING OF BEER BRANDS: A STUDY OF OWERRI METROPOLIS, IMO STATE, NIGERIA

Beer marketing in Nigeria no longer sells taste or price alone; increasingly, it sells a story. Brands lean on culturallyrooted narratives to build emotional bonds with drinkers, and this paper looks closely at how that plays out amongbeer consumers in Owerri Metropolis, Imo State. Two things are of particular interest: how well people recall andengage with these storytelling advertisements, and how much cultural pride the ads stir up when they draw onindigenous symbolism. The study leans on three theories Narrative Transportation, Consumer Culture Theory, andSelective Perception and follows a descriptive, cross-sectional survey design. A structured five-point Likertquestionnaire was administered to adult beer consumers around Owerri, and after data cleaning, 66 valid responsesremained for analysis. Respondents showed strong recall and engagement with storytelling advertisements (mean =4.25), and an equally strong sense of cultural pride when ads leaned on symbols such as the Igbo apprenticeshiptradition (Nwaboi) or ancestral motifs like Hero Lager's O'Mpa (mean = 4.20). Because the two scores sit so closetogether, it appears that cultural resonance and recall are reinforcing one another here, although not every respondentreacted the same way a reminder that perception is never perfectly uniform even within one city. The paper closes byrecommending that brewers keep leaning into culturally grounded storytelling in the South-East, but do so with ethical care, and it flags the need for a larger, more statistically robust follow-up study across Owerri and comparable South-Eastern cities.