"What happened was ..." Broadening the Agenda for Storied Research

This paper identifies three key understandings of the nature of story. Firstly, story is a factual report of events. Secondly, story is myth; a myth describes the storyteller's readily construed version of events. Finally, story is narrative, and narrative is a means of coming to understand events and constructing their reality. The paper reviews extant work in marketing and management fields to show how the analysis of story differs across these three understandings and to illustrate the types of knowledge that can be generated within each understanding of story. The paper argues that, in marketing research, story has predominantly been seen as report and analysed through the critical incident technique and that an extension of marketing's use of story can make a useful contribution to marketing knowledge.