Selling Stories: Harry Potter and the Marketing Plot
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Selling Stories: Harry Potter
and the Marketing Plot
Stephen Brown
University of Ulster
Anthony Patterson
University of Liverpool
ABSTRACT
Most families in the Western world are aware of Harry Potter, the
stupendously successful stories about a boy wizard “who lived.” Most
families are familiar with the shadow tales attached to Harry
Potter—the tales of the rags to riches author, the mega-blockbuster
movies, the forthcoming theme park in Florida, the long lines of
enthusiastic consumers outside book stores at midnight. Harry
Potter, in short, is a Niagara of narratives, a sea of stories. This paper
plots the Harry Potter stories onto Booker’s seven-element theory of
narrative emplotment and considers how consumers interact with
the Harry Potter brand phenomenon. Three consumer narratives of
engagement are evident—discovery, diachronic, and denial—as is the
disagreement between battling plots. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
ONCE UPON A MARKETPLACE
The German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin (1973) once famously bemoaned
the fallen state of storytelling. The ancient art of telling tales, he claimed, is in
terminal decline. The rise of mass production, the emergence of mass con-
sumption, and the technologies of mass communication have undermined
humankind’s ability to weave compelling yarns. “Less and less frequently,”
Benjamin (1973, p. 83) stated, “do we encounter people with the ability to tell a
tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all round when the
wish to hear a story is expressed.”
Psychology & Marketing, Vol. 27(6): 541–556 (June 2010)
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com)
© 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/mar.20343
541Although he brilliantly anticipated the advent of the Internet and although
his interwar cogitations on consumer society are now considered remarkably
prescient (Gilloch, 2002; Leslie, 2000), Benjamin’s pessimistic predictions about
storytelling failed to come to pass. We live, Fulford (1999, p. 149) observes, in a
“Niagara of narratives,” in a world where stories are ubiquitous. Stories occupy
not only our every waking hour—in newspapers and magazines, on television
and radio, at the movies and the water cooler, while surfing the net and navi-
gating the blogosphere—but, if dreams and nightmares are also included, our
sleeping hours as well (Abbott, 2002; Vogler, 1998). The kudzu vine of story-
telling has similarly invaded the sylvan groves of academe, where discipline
after discipline increasingly acknowledges that, if not quite poets who don’t
know it, they’ve been surreptitious storytellers all along (Cobley, 2001; Nash,
1994). Some even go so far as to claim that the human brain is hard-wired for
narrative (Turner, 1998). It is nothing less than “the central function, or instance,
of the human mind” (Jameson, 1981, p. 13).
According to Benjamin’s seminal essay, the ancient art of storytelling owes
much to itinerant traders, who not only circulated stories throughout the pre-
historic world but employed their sales pitch prowess to improve the telling of
the tales. This view may or may not be correct, but there’s no denying today’s
managers have been bitten by the narrative bug (e.g., Denning, 2000, 2004,
2007). The best-seller lists are replete with “beast fables” (Tolkien, 2001, p. 15),
uplifting parables about finagling squirrels, cubicle monkeys, and corporate
mice whose cheese has gone missing. The stories and myths and allegories that
advertisers concoct and brands embrace and consumers co-create are insight-
fully analyzed using every qualitative and quantitative technique in the academic
arsenal (e.g., Adaval & Wyer, 1998; Hirschman, 2000; Holt & Thompson, 2004;
Mark & Pearson, 2001; Woodside, Sood, & Miller, 2008). Textbooks too are mov-
ing away from to-do lists and inventories of take-aways and attempting to engage
readers with thrill-filled narratives, corporate conspiracies, and marketing
derring-do (Arnould, Price, & Zinkhan, 2003; Brown, 2006; Trout, 2003). There’s a
growing recognition, in short, that “for all our talk of goods-dominant and
service-dominant logic, the real driver of marketing endeavor is its story-
dominant logic” (Brown, 2007, pp. 296–297).
Nowhere is marketing’s story-dominated logic better illustrated than in the case
of Harry Potter, a multi-billion dollar brand that not only epitomizes the rags-to-
riches archetype but incorporates several seminal “master-plots” (Booker, 2004).
The aim of the present article is to consider Potter’s principal plot patterns and
to assess their implications for marketing practice. It commences with a brief
overview of the Harry Potter phenomenon; continues with an outline of Potter’s
primordial master-plots; turns to a discussion of the authors’ empirical research
program; culminates in a consideration of three key subnarratives that under-
pin consumers’ Potter stories; and concludes with some reflections on contradic-
tory narratives, arguing that inter-story strife is not necessarily a bad thing.
BRAND AND DELIVER
Few stories have attracted as much attention in the past ten years as the truly aston-
ishing story of the Harry Potter brand (Gunelius, 2008; Gupta, 2003; Terego &
Denim, 2006). A decade ago, Joanne Rowling was a penniless single parent who
542 BROWN AND PATTERSON
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/marscrimped and saved while scribbling in Edinburgh coffee bars, and whose offbeat manuscript about a boy wizard at boarding school was spurned by publisher after publisher after publisher (Smith, 2001). The book was too long, they said; the plot was old-fashioned, apparently; the market for kid-lit was moribund, don’t you know (Nel, 2001). Ten years later, J. K. Rowling is one of the richest and most influential women on the planet, with a personal fortune greater than the Queen of England. She bestrides the worldwide best-seller lists, having sold 450 million copies of her seven-book series. The six movies released to date have garnered $5.4 billion at the global box office, making Harry Potter the most profitable movie franchise in history. Approximately $1 billion worth of tie-in merchandise, everything from computer games to cuddly toys, has been sold thus far and, with a Florida theme park opening in 2010, the scope for further ancillary sales is considerable. All told, the Harry Potter brand is worth $4 billion, which is fairly inconsequential in the great marketing scheme of things but pretty impressive for a fairy story about a British teenage boy with bad hair, broken glasses, bullying stepparents, and a bolt of lightning–shaped scar on his forehead (Gunelius, 2008). Its narrative superabundance is perhaps the most striking marketing thing about the Harry Potter phenomenon (Brown, 2005). Harry Potter is not simply a single, seven-episode story of good versus evil but a veritable narrative incu- bator, where stories are rapidly hatched, batched, and dispatched across the rumor-, gossip-, and twitter-hungry Potterverse. For example, when Warner Brothers decided to divide the final novel into two separate movies, there was much discussion in the fan community about their decision (Gunelius, 2008). Some saw it as a good thing, since it meant even more Potter product to enjoy; others were dismayed by Warner Brothers’ apparent attempt to squeeze every last dollar out of the boy wizard franchise. Yet others wondered whether the teenage actors who starred in the earlier movies would be too old to play them- selves when the eighth picture went into production and, if so, who should be their replacements? Likewise, the acrimonious 2008 court case between J. K. Rowling and RDR Books, which planned to publish a compendious Harry Potter companion, divided media pundits and cultural commentators alike (Caldwell, 2008). Was the bil- lionaire author right to protect her intellectual property when author Steve Vander Ark had spent ten years of his life assembling the resource that Rowling herself made use of and commended on occasion? Was it fair to describe his anthology as “wholesale theft” or to reduce a middle-aged Potter lover to tears in the courtroom? The theme park too is much debated, not least among those who wonder why the facility is so small (20 acres); why its rides are not bespoke but refits of Universal’s existing attractions (in its Orlando operation, Islands of Adventure); and why the park is opening after all this time, when the outcome of the final episode is already known, when there’s comparatively little product in the pipeline, and when many fans of Harry Potter are, presumably, moving on to other things (Adams, 2008). Is Warner Brothers hedging its bets on Harry? Regardless of the intricacies of such discussions, stories beget stories, and the stories about stories beget stories about stories about stories. So prodigious is the swarm of stories around the wizard brand that it is easy to be deafened by the buzz. A moment’s reflection, though, reveals that the Harry Potter mas- ter narrative is made up of several subsidiary stories. These are the story in SELLING STORIES 543 Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/mar
the novels; the story of the author; the story behind the books, the story in the
movies; the story about the merchandise; the story of its critics; and, not least,
the all-important cyber story. Although these stories are far from free-standing—the
author’s experience of clinical depression, for instance, features in the early
novels, and events in the later episodes are shaped by prior cinematic
representations—the plots of these subsidiary stories are sufficiently different
to warrant separate treatment.
THROWING STORY SHAPES
According to Christopher Booker (2004), seven basic master plots occur in the
Western cultural tradition, plots that are constantly recycled in various repre-
sentational forms, from gothic novels and grand opera to computer games and
situation comedies. These plots are rags to riches, rebirth, the quest, overcoming
the monster, tragedy, comedy, and voyage and return. Booker’s classification, like
most typologies of this type, is open to question (e.g., is there any real difference
the quest and voyage and return?). Booker, moreover, is just the latest in a long
line of plot spotters, cultural commentators such as Northrop Frye (1971), Joseph
Campbell (1972), Tzvetan Todorov (1975), and Roland Barthes (1977) who for-
mulate a framework and somehow fit every story into it, usually with a bit of
gratuitous shoving and squeezing and shoehorning (Brooks, 1992). Nevertheless,
Booker’s analysis is unusually compendious and more catholic than most, inso-
far as it ranges from the highest of high culture to the lowest of the low. As
Harry Potter is a pancultural, multiplatform phenomenon, having exercised
the minds of patrician literary critics and proletarian podcasters alike,
Booker’s schema is as good as any and better than most. He even refers to
Harry Potter, albeit in a dismissive, seen-it-all-before manner (Booker, 2004,
pp. 319–320).
The most impactful stories, Booker maintains, are those that contain more
than one master plot, and the more master plots they contain the more impact-
ful they are. If this contention is correct, then it goes some way to explaining the
staggering reaction to Harry Potter, since the seven basic plots can be readily
mapped onto the seven core stories of the Harry Potter brand. As Table 1 illus-
trates, the story in the novels is an exemplar of overcoming the monster; the story
of the author is rags to riches writ large; the story of the books is rebirth plain
and simple; the struggle to make the movies is a still-unfinished quest; the story
of the tie-in merchandise is nothing if not a comedy; the story of the critics is a
tragedy in its own way; and the story of Internet activity is analogous to voyage
and return.
In addition to the archetypal master plots in Table 1, the Harry Potter brand
narrative has another important component. And that, of course, is the con-
sumer. Overstating the part that consumers play in the Harry Potter saga is
impossible (Brown, 2005). Granted, many cynics and churls have contended
that Harry Potter is a PR creation, a marketing-manufactured monster akin to
boy bands, girl power, and assorted American Idols. But billions of ostensibly sat-
isfied customers indicate otherwise. HP has been astutely marketed (Haig,
2004); however, the genuine grassroots enthusiasm for the boy wizard’s adven-
tures cannot be gainsaid. The well-attended fan conventions, the manifold trib-
ute Web sites, the wizard rock sensation (garage bands like The Moaning
544 BROWN AND PATTERSON
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/marTable 1. Plot Till You Drop.
Novels story. If ever a series of novels epitomized the overcoming the monster master
plot, it is the Harry Potter novels. From the first chapter of the first book to the final
chapter of the final book, the core story consists of the boy wizard’s struggle to defeat
Lord Voldemort, an unimaginably evil magician. The Harry Potter narrative is a clas-
sic case of good versus evil and, although there are many adventures and escapades
along the way, each individual novel climaxes with a Potter–Voldemort confrontation.
It is the uncertain eventual outcome of this David/Goliath clash that kept readers
addicted when the author herself lost the plot during the writing of book five.
Author’s story. When the American rights to J. K. Rowling’s first HP novel were sold
to Scholastic for a then-record sum ($105,000), the British media went to town on the
author’s rags-to-riches story. She was a modern-day Cinderella, nothing less than a lit-
erary lottery winner. Although Rowling has since stressed that the single-mother-on-
welfare-writing-in-a-café story was an exaggeration, it resonated so powerfully with the
press and the public that the truth has never been allowed to stand in the way of the
Pretty Woman/Ugly Duckling archetype. If anything, in fact, the rags-to-riches narra-
tive has become more and more entrenched as Rowling’s personal fortune has waxed
and waxed and waxed, alongside the exponential increase in her celebrity status.
Books story. Rebirth is the key word here. Prior to Harry Potter’s arrival on the kid-
lit scene, the entire genre was sleeping like Snow White in a drab casket of realist nar-
ratives and amateurish promotional tactics. Today’s Internet-acquainted kids,
everyone said, prefer not to read boring old books. However, Harry Potter not only
proved them all wrong but even brought teenage boys back into the eager reader fold.
The scenes of prepublication frenzy, where long lines of wand- and broomstick-wielding
Harryheads gathered at midnight for the latest release, speak volumes about the
rebirth of reading and book marketing in the aftermath of Rowling’s kiss of life. The
frog prince is alive and well and swimming the Amazon.
Movies story. Viewed in retrospect, the Harry Potter movie franchise seems like the
surest of sure things. With strong, CGI-friendly source material and a huge, ready-
made teenage audience, it is situated in the center of Hollywood’s target market sweet
spot. HP was as close to a guaranteed success as the movie business ever gets. Hind-
sight, nevertheless, obscures the enormously onerous quest that turned the raw liter-
ary material into motion pictures that met the expectations of their audience. Every
aspect of the casting, the content and, not least, the overall control of the franchise
was fraught with difficulty. The behind the scenes heroics on HP screenplays make
Heart of Darkness look like Disney’s Jungle Cruise.
Merchandise story. Comedy is the prevailing plot where tie-in merchandise is con-
cerned. This comedy is found in numerous tongue-in-cheek products that accompany
the release of the books and movies (e.g., Bertie Bott’s Beans with booger and earwax
flavors). There’s more to the comedic genre than funny ha-ha, however. The character-
istic feature of comedy is reversal or inversion, and once again the merchandising of
HP adheres to this template. Whereas most blockbuster movie franchises seek to satu-
rate the market with soft toys, T-shirts, promotional tie-ins, etc., the merchandising of
Harry Potter has been comparatively restrained. This restraint was adopted at the
insistence of J. K. Rowling, but ironically the very lack of ancillary overkill has
ensured that the market has never been sated, nor has consumer disillusion set in.
Critics’ story. Few contemporary novels have attracted as much opprobrium as
Harry Potter. It has been attacked by Christian fundamentalists, who object to the
ungodly descriptions of witchcraft and what have you; it has been condemned by liter-
ary critics for foisting badly written balderdash on impressionable children; and it has
(Continued)
SELLING STORIES 545
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/marTable 1. (Continued)
even been denounced by bona fide witches and warlocks for its erroneous portrayal
of magic. Such criticisms, most neutrals might agree, are a travesty—possibly a
tragedy—because for all her literary faults, J. K. Rowling has succeeded in turning a
new generation of children on to the joys of reading. However, the ultimate tragedy
(from the critics’ perspective) is that the attacks on Harry Potter have merely
increased the products’ appeal. Tragically, scandal sells, and the more scandalous the
product the more appealing it is to onlookers, who understandably wonder what all
the fuss is about.
Cyber story. In a world where surfing the Net is the norm and cruising through
cyberspace an everyday occurrence, it is perhaps appropriate that the I-brand strand
of the Harry Potter story should be predicated on the final primordial plot, voyage and
return. It is no accident that the inexorable rise of Harry Potter coincided with the
inexorable rise of the Internet. Chatrooms, Web sites, blogrolls, podcasts, fan fora, and
so forth have done much to propagate HP. The brand handlers’ reaction to this devel-
opment, however, is characterized by a there-and-back-again propensity. When the
tribute Web sites first appeared, Warner Brothers sought to crush the interlopers who
dared trespass on their intellectual property. Such was the online outcry, though, that
WB themselves ceased and desisted and decided to use the fan community to its pro-
motional advantage. Unfortunately, with the ending of the seven-book saga, the old
draconian mindset has reasserted itself, most notably in a 2008 court case against the
publisher of an unofficial Potter lexicon.
Source: Authors.
Myrtles), the admittedly ludicrous LARPs (live action role-playing games), and
the mile-long lines outside bookstores at midnight bear witness to Potter’s pro-
sumer power.
However, perhaps the most astonishing customer testimonial of all is the fan
fiction phenomenon (Lanier & Schau, 2007). These are full-length novels writ-
ten by Potter lovers and posted on the Web. Employing the canonical characters
and settings (albeit with occasional cross-franchise appearances from, say,
Captains Kirk or Sparrow), these works of consumer art take the Potter story-
line to places where Warner Brothers and J. K. Rowling fear to tread. So raunchy
are some of the 100,000-plus stories posted thus far that a voluntary classification
system, similar to that for movies and computer games, has been introduced in
an attempt to ensure that younger readers aren’t corrupted by the eye-popping
antics in the “slash fiction” sub-genre.
HAIL HARRY POTTER
Consumers’ storytelling propensities hardly come as news to marketing and
consumer researchers (e.g., Escalas & Stern, 2003; Fournier, 1998; Holt, 2004;
Stern, Thompson, & Arnould, 1998). What is newsworthy about Potter-related
storytelling—in addition to its sheer scale and worldwide scope—is that
consumers are telling stories about a seven-episode story, itself made up of seven
intertwined stories that collectively encapsulate every plot permutation known
to the Western literary tradition (Table 1). Harry Potter is story central and it
546 BROWN AND PATTERSON
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/marprovides a marvelous opportunity to empirically investigate the character of
consumers’ narrative urge, or aspects of that urge, at least.
The following results draw from a wide-ranging, in-depth, seven-year study
of the Harry Potter brand. This research program ranges from content analy-
sis of the marketing-replete novels, via participation in the promotional circus
during new book release frenzy, to tracking studies of media representations of
the ever-burgeoning Potterscape (on tribute Web sites, in fan fiction, though
analysis of extras on DVDs). Empirical data were also gathered (from Harry
Potter lovers, Harry Potter haters, and Harry Potter indifferents) by means of
focus groups, depth interviews, netnography, and introspective storytelling tech-
niques. This information was acquired at various points in the Potter product
release cycle (it commenced prior to the publication of the fifth book and con-
cluded in the immediate aftermath of the final episode) and involved consumers
of diverse ages, genders, and nationalities (the youngest informant was 7 years
old, the oldest 62). All told, the data set consists of approximately 1000 single-
spaced pages of empirical interviews, introspections, and suchlike, as well as
photographs, podcasts, video mash-ups, a sizable mound of press clippings, and
a collection of 34 books on the Harry Potter phenomenon, everything from
anthologies of fan letters to a spoof trilogy about “Barry Trotter.”
Although this represents the merest drop in the ocean of Harry Potter nar-
ratives, the study is sufficiently deep to hold a shoal of striking brand stories.
These stories pertain to every strand of the HP master narrative, everything from
fundamentalist Christian concerns about the irreligious ingredients in the books
to unbelievers’ fear that Harry Potter enthusiasts are themselves worryingly
evangelical about the boy wizard:
I like to think that I have managed to remain neutral about Harry Potter, but because I
am not a devout fan this can be very testing. It’s a bit like Christianity. Harry
Potter lovers feel that they must spread the message of the “good book.” They auto-
matically make a dash for non-believers with the aim of saving them from their
non–Harry Potter ways. (Irish female, 23, introspection)
TENACIOUS 3-D
Interrogating the Potter data set in accordance with established narratological
research procedures (Escalas & Bettman, 2000, Fournier, 1998; Stern, 1995;
Thompson, 1997) yields three noteworthy subnarratives: the discovery
narrative, the diachronic narrative, and the denial narrative, each of which is
made up of sub-subnarratives, sub-sub-subnarratives, and so on ad infinitum.
Discovery
The discovery narrative, as the name implies, is an account of the informant’s first
exposure to Harry Potter and the Hogwartscape generally. In keeping with the
prevailing lore of Rowling’s literary creation, most of these encounters are precip-
itated by word-of-mouth recommendation. Close friends, extended family, zealous
school-chums, enthusiastic coworkers, and even ardent casual acquaintances—
such as impassioned strangers met on planes or trains—provide the ringing
endorsement that propels most people headlong into Harry Potter. Indeed, almost
SELLING STORIES 547
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/mareveryone seems to know someone who is not only a rabid Potterite, but who
decided to convert the entire world to the boy wizard’s cause:
I was doing very well at escaping Harry mania. I could go about my daily business
with not a mention of Harry Potter. However this all changed when my “lovely”
friend Emma became a Harry maniac. I could not remember the last time Emma,
my best friend of 20 years, had picked up a book. She spent most of her time sleep-
ing or watching reruns of Sex and the City. But all this changed when Harry Potter
came on the scene. These days she is a bookworm and completely obsessed with
Harry Potter. It was Emma who raised my awareness of Harry Potter or rather
forced me to pay attention. She makes sure I know when all the books and films are
coming out and keeps me updated on the plot. And I must pretend that I am inter-
ested, as any good friend would. Every day she will give me a little snippet of Harry
Potter information. And in my head I am screaming “How do I make her stop?” (Irish
female, 23, introspection)
Word of mouth isn’t the only motivational mechanism, though. Idle curiosity
(wondering what all the fuss is about), sheer boredom (nothing else to read on
holiday), authoritarian insistence (course requirement in school or college), the
acquisition of interpersonal capital (reading to hold one’s own with—or mess
with the minds of—the HP fixated), and painfully humiliating encounters with
diehard Potterphiles are just some of the many reasons for purchasing a season
ticket on the Hogwarts Express:
Let me set the scene: it was the summer of 2003, a long hot summer where I was bored
out of my head. [My boyfriend’s] sister had just bought the fifth book and we were
all talking about it over dinner one Sunday. I tried to keep out of the conversation
as much as possible as I didn’t know a thing about the books and these people were
obviously avid fans. No matter how much I tried to keep quiet I was uncovered as a
Harry Potter virgin when I was asked who my favorite character was. The only char-
acter I knew was Harry Potter and I think they were looking for some more in-depth
answer than that. So I had to confess that I had not read even one page out of the
Harry Potter books, never mind have a favorite character!! Oh the look of shame! (Irish
female, 22, introspection)
Sheer bafflement sucks some in. Consider the case of a 30-year-old office worker
who started reading Rowling because the 8-year-old daughter of a colleague
reckoned Potter might appeal to his personality type. Huh? Who wouldn’t read
the books after a recommendation like that?
There’s more, of course, to the boy wizard than books. Contrary to pedagogues’
propaganda about Rowling’s reinvention of reading as a fashionable teenage
pastime, numerous consumers catapult into the Potterverse by nonliterary
mechanisms. The movies, the DVDs, the soundtracks, the computer games, the
media brouhaha, the soft toys and T-shirts, catching a trailer on television, or
good old-fashioned serendipity (such as being given complimentary cinema tick-
ets) are no less important points of entry than the novels themselves. Countless
consumers read the novels, or attempt to read the novels, after seeing one or more
of the movies. Others find their way to Hogwarts by a decidedly circuitous route.
One adult informant, for instance, was asked to purchase a Potter-themed gift
for a distant cousin, only to discover that the requisite item had sold out months
before. Dazzled by the array of Potter merchandise on display in a department
store and astonished that the stuff was selling like hot pancakes on Shrove
Tuesday, she was sufficiently intrigued to start reading the novels. And, hey
presto, another Potterite was born.
548 BROWN AND PATTERSON
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/marIf the vehicle that transports consumers to Rowling’s magic kingdom isn’t
necessarily the novels, there’s no denying that when people fall for Potter they
fall big. Almost without exception, informants find themselves spellbound, enrap-
tured, caught up in the wonderful world of Muggles and Mudbloods, Hagrid and
Hermione, Albus Dumbledore and Dudley Dursley. Even life-changing events like
going on honeymoon can’t compete with the Hippogriff grip of Hogwarts
fellowship:
In April this year, my girlfriend had just become my wife and we were about to set
off on honeymoon. We had an hour or two to kill in Gatwick and I did some last
minute panic buying for some holiday reading. . . . I decided to buy the first two
Harry Potter books, the Philosopher’s Stone and the Chamber of Secrets. I have got
to say I was something of a Harry Potter virgin, that is to say I had never read any-
thing by JK Rowling, hadn’t seen the films or knowingly bought any affiliated wands
or broomsticks. I was however only too aware of the publicity surrounding the books
and who the author was, as well as some of the characters. . . . When I got down to
reading, I felt the books were brilliant. I could really see how the books appealed
to adults and children alike. Needless to say that my new page turning obsession did
not go down too well with my new life partner. When on our first night in the Mal-
dives and expecting some form of conjugal rites found herself in second place to a fic-
tional 11-year-old trainee wizard and something called the Sorting Hat. (Irish male,
31, introspection)
Many informants surprise themselves by the intensity of their reaction to
Rowling’s invention, since they don’t ordinarily read or watch such stuff. The very
unexpectedness of their reaction renders it all the more intense and, as often as
not, the first hit of Harry precipitates an orgy of reading or viewing, where
episode after episode is wolfed down. Harry Potter may not be the cultural equiv-
alent of crack cocaine, but he’s a literary version of Pringles—once you pop
Potter, you can’t stop:
Moderator: What age were you when you started getting into Harry Potter?
Participant #1: I kinda knew about them for ages, and I wanted to start to read them.
But I didn’t actually start to read them until I went on holiday last year, and then
I literally couldn’t put them down. It was like one after the other. . . . (English female,
20, focus group)
Diachronic
The problem with infatuation, of course, is that it is comparatively short-lived,
and consumer narratives consistently exhibit a diachronic component. Con-
sumers’ relationship with the wizard brand is not stable. It waxes and wanes
through time. It is less of an unbreakable pact than an ongoing process. In addi-
tion to the above discovery archetype of doughty resistance and sudden sur-
render, numerous informants report that their attitude to Harry Potter has
changed considerably. Either their initial enthusiasm for the series wore off as
the stories became longer and darker and more repetitive, or their instinctive
antipathy ebbed when they actually read the books, or watched the movies, and
(grudgingly) recognized their merits:
Watching the film provided me with a glimpse of why so many older people worship
Harry Potter. On one hand it may be the idea that takes them back to their child-
hood days. I can relate to this theory. On the other hand it may be that it takes them
SELLING STORIES 549
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/maraway from the mundane reality of their own lives. As you get older it gets increas-
ingly harder to have fun. Worries about the mortgage, worries about the kids, wor-
ries about the kids having kids, and so on. So for those few brief moments I realized
that perhaps it wasn’t just a stupid childish fad; it had a real offering for the older
generation too. (Dutch male, 24, introspection)
This inconstancy is perhaps not surprising, since the Harry Potter books are
part of the Bildungsroman tradition (Gray, 1995). They are narratives of grow-
ing up akin to David Copperfield, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, or The Sorrows of
Young Werther. As the protagonist develops and matures, readers’ feelings for
the central character change in concert, either positively or negatively. The cycli-
cal character of the Harry Potter release schedule—seven books and five movies
in a ten-year period—mean that the target audience’s connection with the fran-
chise is subject to peaks and troughs and fluctuation. The children who were 11
years old when the first book about an 11-year-old boy wizard was published are
now leaving college. With childhood, puberty, and higher education behind them,
it would be strange indeed if their Potterphilia hadn’t subsided or their Potter-
phobia hadn’t tempered to some degree.
Interestingly, the much-vaunted maturation of the Harry Potter stories—
which famously get darker through time and feature “adult” themes like sexu-
ality and death—provoke a reaction that is contrary to expectation. Older readers
of Harry Potter, those who might be expected to appreciate the “grown up” sto-
ries of the later novels, invariably express a strong preference for the earliest
books, those that transport them back to the innocence of youth. This appeal to
the inner child attracts them to Harry Potter in the first place:
I got uncomfortable with the third from last one. The one that was very dark and
was more about the witchy side of things. I kind of was a bit uncomfortable with that,
because, um, I’m more, kind of like . . . the Enid Blyton innocent, um, approach, and
I felt all of that was kind of, it struck a discordant note with the other books. And it
was very dark, very heavy, and kind of depressing. . . . I think if all of the books had
been like that, I would have stopped after the first two, because that lightness was
part of the effect, um, kind of a window into childhood. (Nigerian female, 34, interview)
Younger readers, on the other hand, those whose ability to cope with the adult
themes of the darker, later books (and movies) has often been debated—to the
extent of issuing official warnings and slapping a 12A certificate (equivalent to
PG-13) on movie five—invariably prefer the later books because they are more
exciting, because they are more frightening, because they are signifiers of
grownupness:
Do you like the films?
Um, yeah, but they’re not, kind of, the same, because ever since they’ve had the first
one, they get scarier and scarier every time.
Do you find it too scary?
No. It is all right.
Would you prefer it, if it was less scary?
I like them to get scarier and scarier. Even if you have to be 12 to see them. I’m not
even scared. (English male, 9, interview)
Above and beyond the shifting of pro and anti opinion, the continental plates
of Pottertectonics contain another important diachronic component—prolepsis.
550 BROWN AND PATTERSON
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/marProlepsis is the technical term for “flash forward,” anticipating an element of the
narrative that is explained later. Obviously, much of the appeal of Harry Potter
is attributable to its proleptic power (i.e., debating what will happen next, won-
dering how things will finally work out, etc.), but even the ending of the saga
hasn’t stopped proleptic speculation, since enthusiasts wonder whether Rowling
will write more stories in due course. This prospect isn’t always welcomed,
though. Sorry as they are to say goodbye to Hagrid, Hedwig, Hogwarts, and all
the rest, many Potterphiles fear that extending the franchise beyond the seven-
book series or bringing Harry back like Sherlock Holmes or Star Wars will result
in comprising the book series’ value:
And how do you feel now that this is the end? Now that she has written
them all?
Awww. Sad. There’s this void in my life [laughs]. I don’t want it to be the end but I
know that she only planned the seven books, and the story has come to an end and
I think she would just be selling out if she started writing more books. It would just
get disappointing because the stories wouldn’t be as good. So even though I don’t want
it to be over, oooh, I don’t think I would be very happy if she started writing other
stories about them. (English female, 28, interview)
Denial
Needless to say, not every Potterite is happy to see the back of Harry. A
post–Deathly Hallows survey reported that many fans were suffering from with-
drawal symptoms, if not outright denial (Harry Potter Addicts, 2008). Refusing
to let go of what numerous consumers describe as “a close friend” is not only
understandable but very much in keeping with the brand’s signature market-
ing strategy. Denial is the watchword of Harry Potter marketing. In sharp con-
trast to the customer-centric marketing philosophy, which attempts to pander
to every revealed preference, the marketers behind Harry Potter have consis-
tently made life “difficult” for consumers by implying that there aren’t enough
books to meet the demand, by keeping the author’s personal appearances to a
minimum, and by generally tormenting the readership through cryptic hints, con-
trived “countdowns,” casting security blankets over production, forcing retailers
to sign confidentiality agreements, opening bookstores at midnight, and such-
like. The tactic continues, furthermore, in the Potter aftermath, since Rowling’s
subsequent writings, most notably The Tales of Beedle the Bard, have been pub-
lished in very limited editions, at least initially.
This denial extends to consumers themselves, in as much as they tease one
another. Those who have read the books at high speed threaten to “reveal all” to
their slow-reading brethren and thereby spoil the story for them. Or, alternatively,
they respond to urgent questions from friends, who anxiously ask “what happens
next?” with an infuriating “You’ll just have to wait and see.” In this regard, con-
sider the behavior of a Harry Potter aficionado who took a crowd of unbelievers
to see Sorcerer’s Stone and refused to tell them what the movie was about:
My sister Nuala had read the first book and had a good idea what lay ahead. But
her being her normal self would not divulge any information about what we were
about to observe. My two younger cousins were inquisitive about what they would
see. “Was it going to be scary?” Claire, who’s six, asks with her eyes wide open. “Well,
I can’t tell you that,” says Nuala, with a gentle smirk on her face. “Will it be funny
then?” she asks with the same expression. “Wait and see,” Nuala replies, laughing
SELLING STORIES 551
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/marat her. By this stage, I myself was intrigued by the whole affair. WHAT WAS HARRY
POTTER ABOUT? (Irish female, 29, introspection)
There’s more to denial than marketese, moreover. One of the most striking
things about our consumer stories data set is that almost every informant either
denies or subtly downplays their connection to the Harry Potter brand. Not only
do they refuse to admit that they are Harrymaniacs, even when surrounded by
tie-in merchandise and well-thumbed books, but they take comfort from the fact
that their obsession is really quite mild compared to some people’s. They are
admirers but not love-struck admirers, so to speak.
As might be expected, this denial narrative is more likely to be found among
adults than teenagers or preteens. It’s not cool to be seen reading children’s
books, adult covers notwithstanding, or attending kiddy movies, no matter how
popular or ubiquitous they are. However, even preteens go to great lengths to
stress that they’re not hooked on Harry, that they can take him or leave him,
that Harry is just one of their repertoire of favorites, that they’ve put away their
childish things and moved on to more sophisticated narratives:
Do you like the books?
Um, I used to really love Harry Potter. But not so much now.
Why do you think that happened?
Because I found something else that I’m more into, Dr. Who.
So you prefer Dr. Who to Harry Potter. Why is Dr. Who better than Harry?
Because it’s like . . . imaginative. Um, and it doesn’t just . . . stay with the same
thing, the same characters. Harry Potter’s got a bit less of more different charac-
ters, but Dr. Who has loads of characters . . . loads of different characters. I don’t
like Harry Potter as much because, um, that they don’t have that many, more char-
acters. (English female, 8, interview)
While it would be a gross exaggeration to state that this ritual of denial is a
profane version of Simon Peter’s biblical betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane,
it is noteworthy that consumer renunciation comes in a variety of forms. Count-
less consumers repudiate Potter, period. Many love the stories but dislike J. K.
Rowling. Some adore the books, but abominate the movies. Others enjoy the
stories, both on the page and on the screen, but draw a line at ancillary mer-
chandise. Or at the computer games. Or surfing for stuff on the net. Or writing
“ridiculous” fan fiction. Or queuing up in costume at midnight. Or reading the
copycat books promoted as “the next HP.” Or anything that smacks too obvi-
ously of marketing, branding, and all that jazz:
Although I would be loath to admit it in polite company, I am a Harry Potter fan, and
probably always will be. By the time the last book came out, however, I had gotten
wise to the marketing ploys of the publishers. Even though the hype was at fever
pitch, it didn’t really get through to me at all. I did buy it, and I have read and
enjoyed it as much as the others, but I certainly didn’t queue outside a bookstore from
12 midnight. (Irish female, 25, introspection)
Of all consumers’ denial devices, perhaps the most prevalent is irony. Numer-
ous consumers adopt a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the boy wizard and his
world. In keeping with the self-mocking spirit of the books themselves—and,
moreover, manifold Web sites (Table 2)—they take a somewhat irreverent stance
552 BROWN AND PATTERSON
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/marTable 2. Top Ten Signs Your Kid Is a Wizard.
1. You catch him in the bathroom polishing his wand.
2. His favorite excuse is that “his homework ate the dog.”
3. He’s only twelve, but somehow he’s dating Gwyneth Paltrow.
4. He refers to Halloween as “amateur night.”
5. Favorite discount electronics store: “The Wiz.”
6. He wears shiny red satin robes—and you’re praying he’s just a wizard.
7. Can turn lead into gold, but he can’t remember to take out the trash.
8. He gets busted shoplifting a newt.
9. You say, “Do you think that lawn is gonna mow itself?” But then it does.
10. When he enters a room there is a burst of purple smoke.
Source: mugglenet.com/funlists.
and are ever-ready to acknowledge the absurdity of Pottermania in general and
their personal involvement in particular. It’s only a bit of fun, remember:
All the Harry Potter novels have provided many a laugh for me but some have spilled
over into my social life. After a crowd of my mates and I went to watch the first
movie it is not uncommon for the following phrase to be shouted out randomly on a
night out. ‘You’re a wizard, Harry!’ may seem a bit strange to onlookers but believe
me it is bound to have us in stitches. And of course it is a lot funnier when you are
drunk! (Irish female, 22, introspection)
NARRATION NATION?
There’s much more to the Harry Potter master narrative than the 3-Ds of dis-
covery, diachrony, and denial (which combine into that classic anti-romantic plot,
boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy rationalizes his rejection). Aside from discrep-
ancy, consumers’ partial grasp of the Rowling canon, and deconstruction, their
propensity to ponder the Potter phenomenon per se, many consumer narratives
are decidedly dissonant. That is to say, the stories that shelter under the Harry
Potter brand umbrella—the author story, the critics story, the cyber story, etc.—
do not blend together into a coherent package. They are contradictory. They are
cacophonous. They clash and crash and negate one another. In keeping, arguably,
with creative writing 101—which contends that “conflict, conflict, conflict” is the
key to compelling storytelling (Zuckerman, 1994)—the Harry Potter uber-story
consists of a congeries of battling narratives. Agon rather than agreement is the
order of the day, whether it be those who prefer Peeves to Padfoot or Philoso-
pher’s Stone to Deathly Hallows, or the movies to the novels, or Dr. Who to Harry
Potter, period. Just as J. K. Rowling’s story is a seven-volume battle between the
boy wizard and his evil nemesis, Lord Voldemort, so too the stories surrounding
Harry Potter engage in an ongoing war of attrition.
Indeed, the very intensity of Pottermania prompts the equal and opposite
hostility to all things Harry:
The crazy over-the-top media frenzy surrounding the whole phenomenon acts as a
barrier preventing me from taking the bold step of reading a Harry Potter book or
watching any of the films. . . . Even if I was to sit down and watch one of the movies
any enjoyment would be tarnished by the continual feeling that this is a box-office
SELLING STORIES 553
Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/marhit, adored by millions and a regular feature in The Sun newspaper. . . . I think I have
this attitude simply because I’m generally a person who doesn’t like to conform with
popular opinion. It’s more fun to be different. (Irish male, 21, introspection)
If Harry Potter is in any way typical, then this story of struggles between
stories has lessons for marketing’s narrative imperative. As the management
best-sellers list indicates, recent years have witnessed a narrative turn in that
managers are urged to weave compelling yarns around their brands, their organ-
izations, their strategies (Denning, 2007). One-word positioning postures and two-
sentence mission statements are being replaced by stirring stories of the triple
bottom line. The story is not only a “machine to think with,” as I. A. Richards
(1925, p. 1) once observed, it is a “machine to sell with.”
In addition to the general agreement that narrative is the best medicine,
today’s corporate storytellers tend to adhere to the notion that brand narra-
tives should be simple, straightforward, and, if not quite simpering, certainly sym-
pathetic. Hence the frequency with which they are cast in fairytale form, complete
with once-upon-a-time home pages and happily-ever-after sales service.
Harry Potter, however, suggests that plain and simple is not necessarily the
best story-selling strategy. The problem with plain and simple is that it palls very
quickly. Suspense, surprise, struggle, and strife are crucial when it comes to
keeping readers/consumers interested, involved, and, ideally, infatuated. There
may be a limited number of basic plots, as Booker intimates, but the permuta-
tions on the plots are infinite. If there’s always something to talk about or argue
over—be it Harry Potter or Madonna or Apple or Wal-Mart—then a rolling story
will continue to gather marketing moss. Brand narratives should be allowed to
bloom and burgeon, like the proverbial thousand flowers. They should be urged
to take arms against a sea of fables and fight each other to a temporary stand-
still. They should be Whitmanesque, simultaneously multitudinous and con-
tradictory. Consistency, as Ralph Waldo Emerson almost said, is the hobgoblin
of small brands.
AND THEY ALL SOLD HAPPILY EVER AFTER
At the height of the recent Disney wars, the last remaining link to the organi-
zation’s golden era was asked to pass comment on the company’s brand propo-
sition. Roy Disney, the 70-year-old nephew of Walt, gruffly remarked that
“branding is for cattle” (Stewart, 2006, p. 354). Creating stories, he continued,
is what Disney is all about. Creative storytelling, and all the products story-
telling generates, is the indispensable ingredient of Disney’s perennial mar-
keting prowess.
Branding may well be for cattle, as Roy Disney declaimed, but today’s brands
are as reliant on storytelling as the denizens of the Magic Kingdom. This paper
has examined some of the plots that inhere in the story-stuffed Harry Potter
brand and extracted three key subnarratives that consumers share and circu-
late. Just as Harry Potter is, ultimately, a story of good versus evil, so too these
consumer stories contain positive (discovery) and negative (denial) components
that shift and slide through time (diachrony). This fluidity suggests that the tra-
ditional branding notion of harmonious core values should be replaced with a
celebration of discordant consumer narratives. “Rather than offering a consistent
554 BROWN AND PATTERSON
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Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to: Stephen Brown, Department of
Marketing, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, University of Ulster, Jordanstown, Co.
Antrim, BT37 0QB, Northern Ireland (sfx.brown@ulster.ac.uk).
556 BROWN AND PATTERSON
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