Telling stories: opportunities for word-of-mouth communication.

Abstract

Word-of-mouth is an important aspect of marketing communications and can be conceived as the story-telling of everyday life. This working paper suggests that marketing communicators’ understanding of word-of-mouth might usefully be enhanced by the consideration of the tools of the screenwriter, in particular the premise and the active question. The jeopardy of the premise and unresolved nature of the active questions the premise generates may contribute to the potency of word-of-mouth messages. This working paper provides an opportunity to commence this line of thinking and proposes initial exploratory research within the context of word-of-mouth communication within students’ experiences of higher education.