Success story-creating songs about history! : sabaton, branding and storytelling in heavy metal music

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to portray and analyze how storytelling is used by the band as a tool of building its concept and identity. This is qualitative empirical case study aiming to discover multiple uses of storytelling by music artist. Who is responsible for building the brand? Artist, the content presented or interpretation of audience? - thesis touches upon a dialogue between brand identity and brand image. How brand identity and brand image evolves as a dialogue between the artist and audience? While looking at the creative process and stories presented by the artist more questions arise therefore study explores also what is the role of audience -in this case fans of heavy metal band? Another issue raised is to explore the dialogue between an audience and the artist, how storytelling influence stylistic content of the song and does the subject unity stimulate fans involvement in creating the stories. Storytelling is a tool to create artist identity and through presented stories clearly highlight the concept and brand. Storytelling is one of the most important elements in development of human culture and communication. Nowadays it is present in almost all areas of business. Storytelling is crucial in "identity making" for a product or a brand. Study starts with theoretical framework and referring to existing research on storytelling with greater attention paid to branding and the storytelling used in historiography. Exploring the base for a good story as a part of theoretical framework lead to most recent phenomena of storytelling used in branding and identity making.