Narratives are central to consumers’ understanding of brands especially during change. The financial crisis that began in 2008 offered a changing marketplace from which to develop two managerially useful frameworks of consumer narratives. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Consumer focus groups, interviews with bankers and qualitative consumer surveys were used to gather consumers’ narratives about retail banking. The narratives were examined through frameworks from both the humanities and psychology (narrative identity).
The individual consumer narratives were used to create first a possible cultural narrative or bird’s eye view and later archetypal narratives of groups of consumers for a ground-level view of the changing marketplace.
Like all early research, the findings must be examined in other contexts to improve generalizability.
The narrative results revealed the impact of change on consumers’ identities, views of other entities and retail banking activity to yield managerially actionable information for segmentation, target marketing, branding and communication.
Frameworks are developed for consumer narratives which are shown to be useful tools in examining consumers’ reactions to changing markets and in formulating marketing responses.
