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Part V. Digital Media and Storytelling in University Courses | 159 current values of the company, and their critical reflections. In an ideal organization, employees collectively shape the identity of the firm instead of being controlled by the board (Moss, 2017). The use of DST can contribute to the creation of this common identity. In Koh’s experiment, the use of DST fostered self-confidence in employees who rarely talked about themselves. At the same time, business employees learned how to communicate meaningfully and effectively in a narrative structure. DST has also been used in workshops in Singapore in the areas of brand dissemination and the improvement of elevator pitch speeches (Koh, 2017). Companies not only promote their products in a narrative structure for outside sales but also aim to influence decision makers and investors. Narrative structure helps to convey the point through synthesis, supporting verbal information with music or images. The use of data-driven storytelling is an effective tool for presenting market research findings, and business students would greatly benefit from incorporating this complex form of data visualization into their training. At the same time, learning the rhetorical turns of narrative can also be useful for future business professionals. Including narratives in presentations, analyses and research reports is not only persuasive, but also increases audience engagement and encourages purchase. In such a narrative, the context of the story is the current state of the market, which determines the storyworld. The narrative can reveal demographic profiles and transport trends of well-defined groups of characters whose relationships to each other can be depicted episodically; the narrative can then be brought to a close with a complex conclusion. The protagonist is the client, the consumer, whose best friend is the service or product, while the antagonist is the challenge which the product or service helps to overcome (John, 2022). Ihe structure of external promotions is informed by market research, the primary aim of which is to assess the target groups attitudes and value preferences toward services and products. In the first stage of brand design, researchers use narrative interviews to uncover consumer stories and experiences that influence customers to purchase a product or service. The interviewees also reveal their purchasing motivations and the meanings that they attribute to the product. Based on these interviews, further advertising narratives are created that are perceived as authentic by consumers, and thus facilitate their identification with the product (Andreasen, 1985, Mick & Buhl, 1992; cf. Mitev, 2015). In storytelling marketing, narratives are used to present common sense or nostalgic experiences related to a brand or product. A storytelling promotion can be an entire narrative (e.g., when a housewife tries a variety of washing powders but none of them wash her clothes to her satisfaction except the advertised product), or it can be based on a single scene in which a mood is associated with a product (e.g., an advertisement showing the steaming of
