“What is most important … in storytelling” – Analysis of the Allegro Brand Christmas Spot in the Light of Bo Bergström’s Narrative Theory

Abstract

“Narration” – a concept rooted in literary studies, has attracted the attention of many other disciplines since the 1960s, and as Martin Kreiswith stated, the humanities were even “obsessed with stories”. Myths, legends, fairy-tales and other forms of narrative are omnipresent in the everyday experience of most participants in culture and thus they contribute to their competence of receiving stories in various forms. Perhaps this is one of the factors leading to the extraordinary popularity and success of storytelling in advertising. The principles of creating a good, effective, and attractive story derive from the old forms of narration and they are today commonly used in many narrative media. The article presents the proposal of the Swedish researcher of visual communication – Bo Bergström, who differentiates the narrative into dramatic and non-dramatic. He seesthe patterns of both kinds as as based on the rules present in genre cinema and author’s Aleksandra Żukowska 152 cinema, respectively. The author calls this dimension of advertising a formal system, next to which the stylistic system, i.e. the means of artistic expression used in the message, is equally important. The article will analyse both systems in the Allegro brand Christmas advertisement from 2021 in the context of the storytelling assumptions.