Transmedia Consumption Experiences (TCE): Patching as a Narrative Consumption Practice

Consuming media narratives has been an interest of socio-cultural branding, consumer culture theory, and literary theory scholars (e.g., Brown 2005; Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry 2003, Scott 1994). Over the years, both within marketing and consumer behavior, studies have explored individual or communal entertainment-consumption experiences and consumers’ media-related meaning-making practices. This study contributes to the extant literature by exploring the consumption of transmedia narratives. Developing Jenkins’ (2006) notion of “transmedia storytelling” (20) and translating it to the realm of consumer behavior, transmedia consumption is herein defined as the consumption of diverse, dispersed narrative elements across multiple media for the purpose of co-creating unified and meaningful story consumption experiences. We consider transmedia storytelling and its consumption to be direct consequences of the combined and intensifying socio-cultural, technological, and economic changes that affect the ways marketers produce and consumers experience media and entertainment (Dena 2004).