ISIS as a Brand Community – How Storytelling Helped Build the Terrorist Megabrand
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Authors
Date
2018
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Corporate Communication
Language
en
Pages
58
Series
Abstract
Brands have become much more than product labels or logos in our modern society. They are no longer simply just commercial entities, such as Nike or Coca-Cola, but can instead be anything that carries meanings, emotions or stories. A brand can be a country, a person, a non-profit organization – or a terrorist group. In this thesis, I argue that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is in fact a brand that uses branding tools commonly associated with other types of organizations. ISIS can be seen as a brand community, a group of individuals who share common values and respect each other and the brand. This thesis sets out to examine the brand community of ISIS by analyzing its storytelling and narratives. In recent research, storytelling has been recognized as essential to successful branding. In my research, I intend to find out answers to the following questions: What narratives are contained in selected issues of ISIS’ online magazine Dabiq that support ISIS’ brand community? How are those narratives constructed through the application of strategic use of language? I present a textual analysis of the brand narratives evident in ISIS’ communication by building composite narratives found in the empirical data. I use the theory of brand communities by Muniz and O’Guinn (2004) as a framework in my qualitative data analysis. According to Muniz and O’Guinn, brand communities have three traditional markers: consciousness of kind, rituals and traditions and moral responsibility. My analysis detects four composite narratives that describe the way ISIS strengthens its brand community via enforcing its elements of consciousness of kind, rituals and traditions or moral responsibility. The four brand narratives found on the pages of Dabiq are the Narrative of Humiliation, the Counter-counter-narrative of Two Camps, the Narrative of the Exemplary Brother and the Narrative of Love. Based on previous research, these themes are evident in communication of other brand communities, too.Description
Thesis advisor
Moisander, JohannaMalmelin, Nando
Keywords
brand communities, narrative analysis, storytelling, terrorism