The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Narrative Transportation

TLDR

Stories that transport audiences are central to human life and consumption, yet research on narrative transportation remains poorly systematized. The article reviews two decades of research on narrative transportation and proposes the extended transportation‑imagery model, integrating insights from anthropology, marketing, psychology, communication, consumer, and literary studies. The authors develop the extended transportation‑imagery model and test it via a quantitative meta‑analysis of 132 effect sizes from 76 studies. The meta‑analysis confirms the model’s validity and highlights promising avenues for future research.

Abstract

Stories, and their ability to transport their audience, constitute a central part of human life and consumption experience. Integrating previous literature derived from fields as diverse as anthropology, marketing, psychology, communication, consumer, and literary studies, this article offers a review of two decades worth of research on narrative transportation, the phenomenon in which consumers mentally enter a world that a story evokes. Despite the relevance of narrative transportation for storytelling and narrative persuasion, extant contributions seem to lack systematization. The authors conceive the extended transportation-imagery model, which provides not only a comprehensive model that includes the antecedents and consequences of narrative transportation but also a multidisciplinary framework in which cognitive psychology and consumer culture theory cross-fertilize this field of inquiry. The authors test the model using a quantitative meta-analysis of 132 effect sizes of narrative transportation from 76 published and unpublished articles and identify fruitful directions for further research.