Once upon a time there was a signature story

Abstract: Purpose – The term signature story was explored by David Aaker in his book published in 2018. The purpose of this paper is to further investigate, examine and build upon his concept. This will be done by examining and defining Aaker’s four criteria of signature stories for non-American brands to improve the criteria’s definition, explanation and usage. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a literature review and qualitative data collection methods. The empirical data was collected by observing marketing campaigns from global non-American brands. Eventually, an in-depth analysis was performed on six of the brands in order to draw conclusions. Findings – Our findings uncovered Aaker’s criteria to be rather obscure and coinciding which is why we scrutinised them. This resulted in adding on to the characteristics of the criteria in a more detailed manner. Furthermore, we chose to break down the characteristics of the strategic message criterion and divide it into two separate criteria: the strategic core and customer link. Based on this, we propose a new definition of signature stories which we illustrated in the signature story tree. Research limitations – This paper is limited to the amount of available literature about signature stories. Additionally, we only examine video campaigns of B2C brands which limits our findings to this specific marketing channel and companies selling directly to consumers. Lastly, our observation and analysis are solely based on subjective insights provided by us as researchers. Originality/value – Our study’s added value lies in giving a critical perspective to Aaker’s view on signature stories. Moreover, it contributes to making the concept more comprehensible.