| For millennia, human beings have told stories in order to form community, identity, and meaning. Today, many corporations do not simply sell products or services but also engage consumers with skillful storytelling through integrated marketing strategies. Television commercials and advertising campaigns sell stories that help build brand mythologies. In this study, the mythic rhetoric of personal electronics company, Apple, is explored in order to better understand its construction of mythic identity in its various advertising campaigns.;Using Fantasy Theme Analysis, the rhetorical method of Symbolic Convergence Theory, this study examines the rhetorical efforts of Apple in its four major television commercials and advertising campaigns for the Macintosh---1984, Think Different, Switch, and Get a Mac. The fantasy themes and rhetorical visions of each campaign are discovered, described, and interpreted, in order to see what similarities and differences exist between the campaigns and how they built upon one another in order to create Apple's branding mythology. It is argued that by studying mythic rhetoric in commercials and resulting media coverage, one is able to gain valuable insight into how companies form corporate mythologies through advertising campaigns and branding efforts. |
