Notebook 3. Barthès and the New Structures of Luxury Storytelling
On why modern consumers increasingly experience brands less as stories to follow than as systems to navigate
Before I became a content strategist, I was a literature scholar who spent way too much time reading literary criticism. (Fun times. No jobs.) Yet, as I moved into the worlds of marketing and editorial, I found myself asking the same fundamental question about the definition and role of storytelling: What does a given narrative structure ask of or need from its audience?
Conveniently, in S/Z (1970), Roland Barthes answered this question for literature. The distinction he makes between the readerly text (a text that guides, resolves, and consumes its reader) and the writerly text (a text that activates, requires, and produces them) is by far the most useful analytical frame I know for critically evaluating how a marketing campaign functions at a structural level. (S/Z, 3)
As Barthes notes, “The goal of literary work is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.” (S/Z, 4)
In marketing, most campaign briefs default to the readerly mode through the mechanism of a linear, Aristotelian narrative arc (ie, a beginning, middle, and end), usually aided by a Proppian helper (ie, Vladimir Propp’s definition of a character or force that helps the hero), and resolved, closed resolution that ends the story. This is the familiar, inherited logic of Western storytelling. From “once upon a time” to “the end,” we all can recognize this logical, sequential formulation in fairy tales, movie plots, and TV shows.
When I think about this formulaic approach and see it in action in marketing contexts, the same thought jumps into my mind about whether it is the right structure for audiences whose content consumption patterns are now distinctly different and more native to non-linear, platform-fragmented experiences.
The thing is, to pull back to Barthes, the marketing campaigns that I think are doing structurally interesting things are operating in writerly modes rather than readerly ones when you look a little closer.
Take Dove’s 2013 Real Beauty Sketches campaign (https://www.dove.com/uk/stories/campaigns/real-beauty-sketches.html). This campaign withheld a clean emotional resolution through sustaining the gap between how women perceive themselves and how others perceive them, leaving the audience to inhabit and complete that tension rather than resolving it neatly on their behalf. Structurally, it resists the conventional arc of narrative closure and instead activates participation through identification and self-reflection.
Then, there was the Hermès 2018 Silk Mix campaign:
In this campaign, there is an almost complete absence of sequential storytelling. Instead, you get a modular, almost rhizomatic structure (for those fans of Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus) in which no single viewing order for the films is privileged above another. Each film exists as a complete aesthetic and narrative fragment in and unto itself, whilst concomitantly contributing to a larger ecosystem of meaning. To move through the campaign, the audience is forced to navigate laterally rather than linearly, if you will.
Finally, there was Loewe under Jonathan Anderson. Take the brand’s the Spring/Summer 2024 pre-collection campaign:
This campaign requires the audience to be active participants, rather than showing meaning directly. References are partial; symbolism feels unresolved; and connections are associative rather than explanatory. This kind of participatory marketing necessitates the audience as an active interpreter in constructing meaning rather than being simple receptors. In Barthesian terms, it is writerly in the strictest sense.
Where am I going with all this marketing literary criticism?
Millennials and Gen Z have vastly different expectations for brand storytelling than any generation before them. They experience content and stories in fragments and moments, pieced together across and within channels. With these generations projected to account for roughly 70% of luxury spending by 2030, it is worth considering alternative models of brand storytelling given the inherited dominance of linear storytelling models in modern marketing.
I am neither arguing against storytelling nor saying that we should just stop with linear narrative. It still works for many brands and brings clarity, progression, and emotional resolution, especially in moments where trust, reassurance, or broad accessibility matter. My point is that linear or Aristotelian storytelling models have become the default in modern marketing and less a strategic choice, nauseatingly reproduced across campaigns regardless of audience behaviour and content consumption habits, platform requirements, cultural context, or even brand vision and values.
What I find the most interesting is whether modern audiences, especially digitally native luxury consumers, are increasingly experiencing brands less as stories to follow rather than as systems to navigate. That is, audiences move across fragments, aesthetics, moods, references, screenshots, creators, stores, social feeds, recommendation engines, physical experiences, and algorithmically assembled encounters that rarely arrive in a stable or sequential order. This is a lateral accumulation of meaning. Narrative coherence is no longer produced only through linear modes like chronology, but through association, repetition, atmosphere, symbolism, and pattern recognition.
All of this changes the structural demands that we place upon storytelling itself.
A marketing campaign designed around closure assumes audiences are willing to watch patiently from beginning to end. Barthès’ writerly mode and, in turn, modular storytelling models assume something else entirely: audiences that are capable of assembling meaning from dispersed narrative pieces and that increasingly expects to participate in interpretation rather than simply receive it. (This is why for our clients I spend so much time talking about the need to understand “received value,” or the value customers actually get from you, vs “perceived value,” or the value what your brand thinks or projects that they get.)
Luxury brands are particularly vulnerable to this shift because luxury consumption is irrational and has always depended upon acts of interpretation. Look, desire is rarely generated through pure information transfer. It evolves through implication, ambiguity, cultural signalling, aesthetic positioning, and the feeling that a consumer has discovered or understood something for themselves rather than merely been told it. In this sense, many luxury brands have historically functioned in Barthès’ writerly mode long before digital culture gave us the language to describe it.
Digital fragmentation and AI-mediated discovery have only intensified the critical importance of more modular brand storytelling structures. Brands no longer control discovery and are no longer encountered primarily through carefully curated sequential campaigns. They are experienced in pieces and moments through excerpts, selections, recommendations, search results, generated summaries, TikTok edits, retail spaces, influencer interpretations, Reddit threads, moodboards, AI interfaces, and isolated visual assets detached from their original narrative container. Increasingly, audiences—and, yes, with the advent of AI, now machines—assemble the brand story themselves.
This means that brand narrative strategy begins with a structural question that is inherently literary before it becomes commercial: what mode of storytelling does a specific brand, this audience, and this cultural moment require? This is not only a matter of what story should be told; but rather it directs how meaning should unfold, how much interpretive participation should be demanded from the audience, where ambiguity is useful, where clarity matters, and whether closure itself is even desirable.
All of these are foundational literary questions with enormous commercial consequences.
from its audience?
Conveniently, in S/Z (1970), Roland Barthes answered this question for literature. The distinction he makes between the readerly text (a text that guides, resolves, and consumes its reader) and the writerly text (a text that activates, requires, and produces them) is by far the most useful analytical frame I know for critically evaluating how a marketing campaign functions at a structural level. (S/Z, 3)
As Barthes notes, “The goal of literary work is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.” (S/Z, 4)
In marketing, most campaign briefs default to the readerly mode through the mechanism of a linear, Aristotelian narrative arc (ie, a beginning, middle, and end), usually aided by a Proppian helper (ie, Vladimir Propp’s definition of a character or force that helps the hero), and resolved, closed resolution that ends the story. This is the familiar, inherited logic of Western storytelling. From “once upon a time” to “the end,” we all can recognize this logical, sequential formulation in fairy tales, movie plots, and TV shows.
When I think about this formulaic approach and see it in action in marketing contexts, the same thought jumps into my mind about whether it is the right structure for audiences whose content consumption patterns are now distinctly different and more native to non-linear, platform-fragmented experiences.
The thing is, to pull back to Barthes, the marketing campaigns that I think are doing structurally interesting things are operating in writerly modes rather than readerly ones when you look a little closer.
Take Dove’s 2013 Real Beauty Sketches campaign (https://www.dove.com/uk/stories/campaigns/real-beauty-sketches.html). This campaign withheld a clean emotional resolution through sustaining the gap between how women perceive themselves and how others perceive them, leaving the audience to inhabit and complete that tension rather than resolving it neatly on their behalf. Structurally, it resists the conventional arc of narrative closure and instead activates participation through identification and self-reflection.
Then, there was the Hermès 2018 Silk Mix campaign:
In this campaign, there is an almost complete absence of sequential storytelling. Instead, you get a modular, almost rhizomatic structure (for those fans of Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus) in which no single viewing order for the films is privileged above another. Each film exists as a complete aesthetic and narrative fragment in and unto itself, whilst concomitantly contributing to a larger ecosystem of meaning. To move through the campaign, the audience is forced to navigate laterally rather than linearly, if you will.
Finally, there was Loewe under Jonathan Anderson. Take the brand’s the Spring/Summer 2024 pre-collection campaign:
This campaign requires the audience to be active participants, rather than showing meaning directly. References are partial; symbolism feels unresolved; and connections are associative rather than explanatory. This kind of participatory marketing necessitates the audience as an active interpreter in constructing meaning rather than being simple receptors. In Barthesian terms, it is writerly in the strictest sense.
Where am I going with all this marketing literary criticism?
Millennials and Gen Z have vastly different expectations for brand storytelling than any generation before them. They experience content and stories in fragments and moments, pieced together across and within channels. With these generations projected to account for roughly 70% of luxury spending by 2030, it is worth considering alternative models of brand storytelling given the inherited dominance of linear storytelling models in modern marketing.
I am neither arguing against storytelling nor saying that we should just stop with linear narrative. It still works for many brands and brings clarity, progression, and emotional resolution, especially in moments where trust, reassurance, or broad accessibility matter. My point is that linear or Aristotelian storytelling models have become the default in modern marketing and less a strategic choice, nauseatingly reproduced across campaigns regardless of audience behaviour and content consumption habits, platform requirements, cultural context, or even brand vision and values.
What I find the most interesting is whether modern audiences, especially digitally native luxury consumers, are increasingly experiencing brands less as stories to follow rather than as systems to navigate. That is, audiences move across fragments, aesthetics, moods, references, screenshots, creators, stores, social feeds, recommendation engines, physical experiences, and algorithmically assembled encounters that rarely arrive in a stable or sequential order. This is a lateral accumulation of meaning. Narrative coherence is no longer produced only through linear modes like chronology, but through association, repetition, atmosphere, symbolism, and pattern recognition.
All of this changes the structural demands that we place upon storytelling itself.
A marketing campaign designed around closure assumes audiences are willing to watch patiently from beginning to end. Barthès’ writerly mode and, in turn, modular storytelling models assume something else entirely: audiences that are capable of assembling meaning from dispersed narrative pieces and that increasingly expects to participate in interpretation rather than simply receive it. (This is why for our clients I spend so much time talking about the need to understand “received value,” or the value customers actually get from you, vs “perceived value,” or the value what your brand thinks or projects that they get.)
Luxury brands are particularly vulnerable to this shift because luxury consumption is irrational and has always depended upon acts of interpretation. Look, desire is rarely generated through pure information transfer. It evolves through implication, ambiguity, cultural signalling, aesthetic positioning, and the feeling that a consumer has discovered or understood something for themselves rather than merely been told it. In this sense, many luxury brands have historically functioned in Barthès’ writerly mode long before digital culture gave us the language to describe it.
Digital fragmentation and AI-mediated discovery have only intensified the critical importance of more modular brand storytelling structures. Brands no longer control discovery and are no longer encountered primarily through carefully curated sequential campaigns. They are experienced in pieces and moments through excerpts, selections, recommendations, search results, generated summaries, TikTok edits, retail spaces, influencer interpretations, Reddit threads, moodboards, AI interfaces, and isolated visual assets detached from their original narrative container. Increasingly, audiences—and, yes, with the advent of AI, now machines—assemble the brand story themselves.
This means that brand narrative strategy begins with a structural question that is inherently literary before it becomes commercial: what mode of storytelling does a specific brand, this audience, and this cultural moment require? This is not only a matter of what story should be told; but rather it directs how meaning should unfold, how much interpretive participation should be demanded from the audience, where ambiguity is useful, where clarity matters, and whether closure itself is even desirable.
All of these are foundational literary questions with enormous commercial consequences.