Digital Storytelling for Marketers

Digital Storytelling Lab

Digital Storytelling for Marketers was developed by Assistant Professor Wendy K. Bendoni to meet the needs of the evolving digital landscape of marketing. The course focuses on understanding the role ‘story’ has across the digital landscape from social media to mobile applications. This course will look at emerging digital technologies relevant to storytelling and how they are used as a content marketing tool. We will explore successful brand campaigns and their adoption of entertainment and gamification in overall marketing strategies. This course will analyze the evolution of digital media and its impact on creating a more engaging brand marketing experience. In this course, students create a non-linear narrative for brands or retailers to share their stories on digital media (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.). This is a unique course that expands our students’ storytelling skills within the digital space. Students create marketing campaigns, activations, and digital strategies using virtual reality (V.R.), augmented reality (A.R.), and mixed reality (M.R.).

Immersive Hardware Used in the course include:

Microsoft HoloLens and HTC VIVE.

Cross Discipline Collaboration:

Students will work with the Media Arts department to learn more about this immersive technology.
Students will work with film department on creating a narrative and developing a brand story.

The New Frontier of Virtual Reality in The Classroom;

Exploration of Consumer Acceptance of Immersive Marketing

New Frontier of Virtual Reality in The Classroom

This course was developed with clear objectives to innovate students to tell better stories through VR. The Digital Storytelling in Marketing course focused on understanding the role ‘story’ has across the digital landscape, and through VR we enable students to create this digital space. The course presented an opportunity to introduce students to an immersive digital space that the entire class welcomed. In the most practical sense, the course assignments gave students a chance to innovate their own stories through VR’s power.

While marketing students are not typically at the forefront of media technology advances as part of the core-marketing curriculum, they almost need to provide the best-branded storytelling in their overall marketing strategies. Social media’s digital space continues to mature with the wealth of visual consumption of images, stories, and videos, but consumers’ are slowly beginning to migrate to a new virtual space. This virtual interactive space is a new territory for marketers promoting consumer-based products outside of the gaming industry, which brought the idea of creating a workspace for the students inside VR’s virtual space. Marketing scholars and practitioners struggle to keep up with the fast pace of digital mediums but non-more than the virtual world.

Immersive Experiences Hyper-Connected Consumers