Consumers’ Narratives of consumption, a window to consumers mind a Systematic Literature Review approach

Subject Areas : Jounal of Marketing Management

Mohammad Rahim Esfidani ¹ , Datis khajeheian ² , Mahmoud Mohammadian ³ , Emad Rahmanian ⁴

1 - Assistant Professor, Department of Business Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
2 - Assistant Professor, Department of Business Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
3 - Assistant Professor, Department of Business Management, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran
4 - PhD Student in Marketing Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Received: 2020-08-17 Accepted : 2020-11-15 Published : 2020-11-21

Keywords: Consumer behavior, Systematic literature review, narratives, consumption narratives, consumer research,

Abstract :

Narratives is an essential part of human communications and has been used to transfer knowledge and experiences by humans. This provides an exceptional opportunity for marketing practitioners to use narratives as a methodological tool to better understand consumer behaviors. Consumption narratives as a mean to understand consumer behavior gained popularity in the early 90s. A vast body of researches providing several definitions and features led to ambiguity on the subject. Also, there are not many resources available in Persian for researchers. Hence, to summarize the literature and providing a comprehensive definition and introducing this topic to Persian management literature, marketing practitioners; a systematic literature review approach was employed. This study, qualitative in nature, uses a systematic literature review to select the most prominent and influential articles to come up with a comprehensive definition. Several scientific databases were chosen and based on inclusion/exclusion criteria articles were selected. After a careful and deliberate residing, different definitions and features of consumptions narratives were extracted to formulate the final definition. A comprehensive definition based on several studies is presented. Also, features of different definitions are summarized to shed some light on the different aspects of consumer narratives. Finally, the classification of consumption narratives are provided for the first time in Persian management literature. Also, the method provided in this article might be used as a guideline to perform systematic literature reviews in future endeavors by other researchers.

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