Inside the Story: How Narrative Structure Drives Customer Engagement Among Brand Users and Non-Users

Narrative advertising dominates contemporary brand communications, with its effectiveness often attributed to psychological mechanisms such as transportation and identification. However, the relationship between narrative structure and customer engagement and purchase intention remains underexplored, particularly in explaining why identical narratives are interpreted differently by brand users and non‑users. This study examines how the structural elements of narrative advertising shape customer engagement through the customer hero journey framework, using a deductive analysis of semi-structured interviews with these two customer groups exposed to a social media carousel advertisement. The findings reveal that each narrative phase aligns with distinct engagement mechanisms: cognitive reflection in the departure phase, affective and sensorial immersion in the journey phase, and emotional fulfilment and social belonging in the return phase. Sensorial experience emerges as a fifth, empirically distinguishable dimension of engagement. A single narrative also produced divergent interpretive pathways: non‑users followed aspirational, discovery‑oriented readings, whereas current users engaged through recognition and confirmation of existing brand relationships. These results show how a stage‑based narrative structure can evoke differentiated engagement across customer segments. The study extends narrative advertising by specifying phase‑specific mechanisms and usage‑based interpretive pathways and offers design principles for structuring stories that effectively engage both brand users and non‑users.