The Power of Storytelling : Quantifying the Same-Side Effect of Daily Recommendations on Consumption Patterns in Mobile App Store

Storytelling, as an emerging and novel product recommendation format, has been credited for eliciting consumers’ emotional response during decision making. Due to consumers’ limited personal involvement with mobile apps, storytelling is gaining traction as a means of promotion in mobile app stores. As a promotional mechanism, storytelling is particularly amenable to the context of mobile app stores by giving affective meaning to the focal app being promoted and strengthening its association with other apps available from these stores. To this end, we construct a research model that not only posits how consumers’ demand for related mobile apps is shaped by similarity in functional and visual attributes between these apps and the focal app being promoted via storytelling, but also sheds light on how the preceding effects could be mitigated by within-developer influence.