Selling Stories: Harry Potter and the Marketing Plot

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.

Keywords: Harry Potter