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

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 men-tally enter a world that a story evokes. Despite the relevance of narrative trans-portation 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 ante-cedents and consequences of narrative transportation but also a multidisciplinary framework in which cognitive psychology and consumer culture theory cross-fer-tilize 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 un-published articles and identify fruitful directions for further research. The one who tells the story rules the world.