2025/08/01 by Joachim Scholz
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Media, Gender, and Advertising #Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification #Digital Games and Media
paper · doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2025.08.003
Compelling visuals are vitally important for successful brand storytelling. Yet even though the importance of visual content has exploded in recent years – driven by the ease through which consumers, influencers, and managers can create and share brand-related visuals thanks to social media and now generative artificial intelligence – comprehensive advice on how brand strategies can be visually executed has remained scarce. This article introduces the EPIC framework for translating nuanced brand meanings into concrete visual content. Integrating the literatures on visual storytelling, archetypes, and critical visual analysis, the framework details four interlocked steps to operationalize archetypes for visual storytelling: Defining the essence of the brand, personifying the brand essence into suitable archetypes, inflecting archetypes towards the brand via themes, and cataloguing visual elements into a SMART instrument to guide visual content creation in a bottom-up process. Brands that employ the EPIC framework can bridge the strategy-execution gap in visual storytelling and unlock two particular benefits: (1) a more consistently enacted archetypal gestalt, and (2) differentiation through more distinct and clearly composed images.