Who owns the story when fans join in?
By Fiona van Iersel
Minerva Empowerment
E-Services Marketing
5 June 2025

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire offers a useful way to think about self-identification in marketing. Quizzes, poster puzzles and character journeys invite people to find their own place in a story. Persistent, pervasive, participatory and personalised experiences become more convincing when those labels connect to something the audience can actually do.

Choosing a character or a district resembles the appeal of Hogwarts houses: the audience is partly choosing its own segment. Personal relevance can emerge from identity rather than a marketer assigning everyone to a demographic box (Kotler et al., 2021).

But participation creates a responsibility to manage the space people enter. Community boards can deepen involvement, while user-generated material can also pull the brand’s meaning in unintended directions. Moderation matters. So does access: offline elements can welcome people who do not live on the campaign’s digital platforms.

I am particularly interested in what happens when a villain’s aesthetic becomes more appealing than the intended heroic story. Suppose the Capitol’s glamour captures a fan’s imagination more strongly than the rebellion. That is a question about narrative meaning, not proof that all fans read the story that way. Escalas (2004) offers a useful starting point for thinking about the relationship between narrative and brand connection.

Dexter and Sons of Anarchy show why the question feels familiar to me: audiences can be drawn to morally complicated characters. A brand that opens its story to participation should expect interpretation, including versions it did not plan.

The same challenge could apply to Apple, Starbucks or another brand outside entertainment. How might story archetypes and customer personas help people find a route through the brand’s world? And how much freedom can that world offer while still feeling coherent? That is where personalised storytelling becomes a strategic question rather than simply a creative flourish.