The Language of Archetypes in Film Franchises: Exploring symbolic consumption structures through narrative archetypes

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this study is to explore potential ways of how consumers are affected by archetypes in visual media franchises with a particular focus on how they enable symbolic consumption. This includes the process of how consumers extract meaningful difference from the archetypal symbols in visual media such as movies or associated merchandise. Additionally, it explores how the ability to gain value from the presence of archetypes is affected by other symbolic meanings such as age, gender and ethnic signs. The goal is to connect the symbolic consumption and archetypal storytelling fields and to contribute with pragmatic implications for the movie and wider marketing industry. To analyse how archetypes in visual media franchises enable symbolic consumption The Lord of the Rings franchise was selected as an empirical case, to identify archetypes in the story and how they are reflected in the merchandise. This was done using a thematic analysis method on the movie scripts of the original trilogy and visual semiotic analysis on four merchandise items. Furthermore, to explore the consumer perspective eight semi structured interviews were conducted.The findings show that movie franchises may enable symbolic consumption through the communication of values through social movie watching. Furthermore clothing, tattoos or other visual alterations can tie the archetypal meaning of the movies to the identity of the wearer. Additionally, items with functions that reflect the archetypal meaning can create highly meaningful experiences. However the findings also show that alternative culturally constructed meanings may have unanticipated impacts on how consumers understand the symbolic meaning of a product. Factors such as age, gender, ethnicity and status signs as well as marketplace ideologies surrounding different practices and the connection with the movie industry itself can synergise with archetypal meanings but also undermine them. If the consumers personally relate to the archetypes or if they simply enjoy them in an external sense was also shown to play an important role.