Patching as a media consumption practice

Robert V. Kozinets, York University, Canada

Cele C. Otnes, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

ABSTRACT
Intensifying socio-cultural, technological, and economic changes affect how marketers produce and consumers experience media. Transmedia storytelling is the systematic dispersal of narrative elements across multiple media to create a cohesive consumer experience. This paper introduces transmedia to marketing and consumer behavior by exploring how consumers engage with complex marketing narratives. Transmedia consumption experiences are practices through which these intertextual and multiple media vehicle-dispersed narratives are consumed. This study draws upon data collected from in-depth interviews, netnography, and participant observation in three contexts: Obama For America, Coca-Cola Happiness Factory, and the ABC show Lost. We focus on emergent key practice “patching” that describes a customized consumer perspective, as consumers co-create their own versions of a particular transmedia world. The results inform our understanding of media consumption and branding in an interactive and social media socialized world.
EXTENDED ABSTRACT

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).

Within the highly fragmented contemporary marketscape, transmedia storytelling creates value for consumers by facilitating participation and proliferating potential touchpoints where brand engagement can occur. Also, it generates economic prospects for producers by fostering synergy, reducing costs, and expanding the audience base. Adapting and extending the idea of transmedia storytelling by grounding it in consumer culture theory, we initiate the study of transmedia consumption experiences (hereafter, “TCE”), exploring two related research questions: “What constitutes TCE? and How do consumers co-create a unified and meaningful consumption experience with transmedia franchises?”

Differing from many popular Hollywood marketing strategies (e.g., sequels, story adaptations from one platform to the other, product placements), transmedia is characterized by and relies upon three interconnected elements that in turn help produce the effects that drive its consumption: (1) media coordination, (2) world-building, and (3) negative capability. On the production side, transmedia is not simply about redistributing the same content across different media, but it represents a systematic and coordinated dispersal of narratives across platforms that support each other. Media coordination in transmedia franchises seeks to create a universe composed of interrelated characters and stories as in Star Wars (Brown et al. 2003) or American Girl (Diamond et al. 2009). Jenkins (2006) calls this “act of creating compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted in a single platform” as “world-building” (116). Consumers are encouraged to explore across these expanded story worlds via some strategically and intentionally placed gaps and mysteries in the narrative that are called negative capability (Long 2007). This exploration and exhaustion, we hold to be acts of consumption; as they transcend single “media” platforms, they become transmedia consumption.

Exploring this consumption side, these unique characteristics of transmedia demand not only consumers’ involvement, but also their motivation, affection, and engagement. TCE are practices through which intertextual, connected, and multiple media vehicle-dispersed commercial narratives are consumed. We explore how consumers engage with these interrelated marketing narratives across a set of media platforms, but because of space restrictions, focus on one emergent key practice – “patching.” This practice describes a unique and customized consumer perspective, as people co-create their own versions of a particular transmedia world.

To understand the lived, complex, and rich phenomena of TCE, we adopt a qualitative research approach. We collected data in three transmedia contexts, Obama For America, the Coca-Cola Happiness Factory, and the Lost franchise (an ABC show)—all understood as transmedia narratives by transmedia experts. This study draws upon data collected from in-depth interviews, netnography (Kozinets 2002), and participant observation in these three contexts. Our data set helps us identify issues and meanings that are shared and that resonate among consumers.

Our findings reveal how consumers weave together disparate media elements into a single narrative stream. Although consumers interact with interrelated transmedia narratives and the worlds they depict, they do not necessarily engage with every media platform that producers disperse the story. Patching describes this idiosyncratic and unique world-consuming process. Unlike Jenkins’ world-building concept, our findings reveal consumers engage in these narrative worlds by fixing them together. The process of “patching” describes a unique and customized consumer perspective that entails uniting, joining, and affixing story elements together to produce narratives whose elements are drawn from different media platforms.

Our analysis reveals that patching involves four permeating types of practices: mapping, dipping, digging, and stitching. Consumers identify the elements of the transmediated Lost, Obama, or CocaCola worlds, interpret them, and then re-construct their own individually-tailored versions of each world by stitching multiple stories together. Mapping details consumers’ explorations of the terrain to establish and learn the elements, features, and details of that particular transmedia universe. Dipping is a limited consumption of the secondary texts or media via reading recaps, synopsis from blogs, forums, or Wikipedia, or through other personal resources. Digging, on the other hand, refers to consumers’ first-hand experiences with the secondary texts and intertextual popular titles to find clues, interpret mysteries, and make sense of the transmediated world. Stitching describes how consumers put clues together and make their own versions of transmedia worlds from them. To create a cohesive and meaningful experience in a transmedia universe where stories are dispersed across multiple platforms, consumers rely on these narrative consumption practices.

Our paper offers four important implications to help spur consumer research in this area. First, by formulating the idea of TCE as an “experience,” we suggest transmedia consumption is broader than the consumption of entertainment-related narratives like reading, playing, or watching. Secondly, we place the consumer front and center within transmedia research, by focusing on naturalistically-embedded practices of “world-consuming” to complement the producer-focused “world-building” of prior research (Long 2007). Third, we discover and discuss individualized practices of “world-consuming” in which a complex narrative universe encourages consumers to develop idiosyncratic narrative experiences and customized brand practices (Schau, Muñiz, and Arnould 2009). Fourth, we detail four important interrelated practices that guide the individual construction of a new narrative universe and foster deeper engagement with media narratives: mapping, dipping, digging, and stitching. As the text is woven into a variety of different forms, these metaphors help guide our understanding and further research into this increasingly important area of media and brand consumption.

Brown, Stephen, Robert V. Kozinets, and John F. Sherry Jr. (2003), “Teaching Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning,” Journal of Marketing, 67 (July), 19-33.

Dena, Christy (2004), “Transmedia Narrative: Diverged Technology, Converged People, New Stories,” Podcast. http://lamp.edu.au/2004/11/08/podcast-new-stories

Diamond, Nina, John F. Sherry Jr., Mary Ann McGrath, Albert Muniz, Stefania Borghini, and Robert Kozinets (2009), “American Girl and the Brand Gestalt: Closing the Loop on Sociocultural Branding Research,” Journal of Marketing, 73 (May) 118-134.

Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press.

Kozinets, Robert V. (2001), “Utopian Enterprise: Articulating the Meaning of Star Trek’s Culture of Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research, 28 (June), 67-89.

Kozinets, Robert V. (2002), “The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities,” Journal of Marketing Research, 39 (February), 61-73.

Long, Geoffrey (2007), Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, MIT Comparative Studies Program, MIT

Hope Jensen Schau, Albert M. Muñiz, Jr., Eric J. Arnould (2009) “How Brand Community Practices Create Value,” Journal of Marketing, 73 (September), 30-51.

Scott, Linda M. (1994), "Images in Advertising: The Need for a Theory of Visual Rhetoric," Journal of Consumer Research, 21 (September), 252-273. 

The persistent and escalating media advancements starting with the high penetration of TV and cable in the 1970s, compounded by the emergence of the Internet and popularization of Web 2.0 and new media in general, and triumphed by the growth of social media in 2003, reshaped the media landscape and the consumer practices. Escalating socio-cultural, technological, and economic changes affect the production, distribution, and consumption of media texts. Within the co-mingling fields of marketing and consumer behavior, consuming media narratives has received increasing and interrelated interest from socio-cultural branding, consumer culture theory, and literary theory scholars (e.g., Brown 2005; Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry 2003; Gobe 2002; Scott 2004; Wipperfurth 2005). Recent studies have explored individual or communal entertainment consumption experiences and consumers’ media-related meaning-making practices. These studies focus on either the media (e.g., movies, cartoons, novels) or the content (e.g., Dallas, Out of Africa), with some also exploring fandom and subcultures of consumption (e.g., Brown, 2001; Kozinets 2001). This study contributes to the extant literature by exploring the consumption of complex and interrelated narratives that are systematically told across a multitude of media platforms.

Our launch point is the new movement afoot in the world of marketing that seeks to blend narrative branding with a Hollywood-style emphasis on multiple media platforms. For example, Starlight Runner’s founder and guru Jeff Gomez, based his company on the idea of “taking an existing blockbuster, whether a movie, toy, or soda, and extending it” by creating “a backstory, or mythology, designed to get legions of new customers, especially young ones” interested in creating complex and multilayered media worlds (e.g., Grover 2009).

Powering this enterprise is a phenomenon that has only recently been identified: transmedia consumption, which we define here as the consumption of diverse, dispersed narrative elements across multiple media for the purpose of creating a unified and meaningful story consumption experience. The idea is based upon the notion of “transmedia storytelling” offered by Henry Jenkins (2006, 20), but adapted to the realm of consumer behavior. Transmedia storytelling has revolutionized narrative consumption practices with its layered, non-linear, and complex stories that court consumers across media platforms. It provides alternative and multiple touchpoints for consumer engagement and allows consumers to create niche, customizable, interactive, and possibly richer media experiences.

Adapting and extending the idea of transmedia storytelling and grounding it in consumer culture theories, this study explores transmedia experiences by focusing on consumer practices pertaining to transmedia narratives. We explore two related research questions: “What constitutes transmedia consumption experiences (hereafter, TCE)? and How do consumers create unified and meaningful consumption experiences in transmedia franchises?”

To understand the lived, complex, and rich phenomena of TCE, we adopt a qualitative research approach. We collected data in three transmedia contexts, Obama For America (OFA), the Coca-Cola Happiness Factory, and ABC’s Lost franchise —all understood as transmedia narratives by experts. We draw upon data collected from depth interviews, netnography, and participant observation in these contexts. Via grounded and hermeneutic theory development procedures, our dataset helps us identify shared and resonant issues and meanings among consumers.

Space restrictions preclude discussing all findings of our in-depth study. As such, we will focus on one emergent key practice—patching. This strategy describes a unique and customized consumer practice that entails uniting, joining, affixing producer-defined elements from different media platforms to each other. Patching unveils consumers’ co-creations of their own versions of a particular transmedia world. We discover and discuss the individualized practices of “world-consuming” (Jenkins 2006), in which a complex narrative universe encourages consumers to develop idiosyncratic and interactive narrative experiences. We contribute to existing media consumption theories by exploring the myriad contemporary narrative practices consumers use when engaged with complex and interrelated media texts.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Transmedia Theory

Convergence “refers to the new textual practices, branding and marketing strategies, industrial arrangements, technological synergies, and audience behaviors enabled and propelled by the emergence of digital media” (Kackman et al. 2010, 1). Transmedia storytelling is an aesthetic of the consumer culture propelled by the ubiquitous profusion of interconnected media elements. In contemporary highly fragmented and dynamic media markets, transmedia production is a relevant and lucrative way to create value for consumers and to generate economic prospects for the producers. It proliferates the possible touchpoints consumers can use to interact with relevant and meaningful stories. For producers, it enables the elusive goal of engagement, a desire to prolong and deepen identification with brands, thus enriching consumer-brand connections and relationships.

Based on the Hollywood strategy of creating spin-offs, sequels, and merchandising, transmediating a story into movies, books, games, comic books, TV shows, toys, and so on generates revenue as it helps lower production costs, expand franchises, sustain consumer interest, create synergy across business units, and reduce the risk of the new releases (Gitlin 1986). Yet the newer and more valuable approach to understanding transmedia experiences is to conceptualize them in terms of three interconnected elements: (1) media coordination, (2) world-building, and (3) negative capability, as discussed below.

Media Coordination. On the production side, transmedia storytelling is a systematic industrial process that requires narrative coordination between media. Transmedia does not entail just redistributing the same content across different media, but implies that multiple narratives support a central one via other media platforms, “with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” Jenkins (2006, 95). In this paper, we use media to refer to things consumers do with the technology rather than synonymously with the technology per se as technology might facilitate multiple media consumption practices (Williams 1977). The American Girl doll, a consumption object, is a medium of representation and communication as the brand tells a layered narrative (Borghini et al 2009), facilitating multitudinous consumption practices.

Transmedia narratives are intertextually connected. This concept emphasizes that texts do not exist in isolation; rather, our understanding of any one text will be informed by the existence of our experience with other texts (Kristeva 1986). In its ideal state--and theorized by Jenkins but likely to be rare in the real world,--transmedia texts exist as interconnected components, without a single text offering a complete narrative. The transmedia model requires a complex media coordination made possible mainly by two developments-- one economic and the other technological. First, the conglomeration of many large media firms simplified and made more profitable the movement of media properties across different formats and locations. Second, technology enabled the rapid creation, transmission, and consumption of related images.

In short, transmediation has revolutionized narrative consumption practices with its layered and non-linear stories that court consumers across media platforms, provide alternative and multiple touchpoints, and allow them to create interactive and customizable media experiences. The three strategies described above therefore demand not only consumers’ involvement, but also their motivation, interactivity, affection, and engagement.

Over the years, consumer behavior scholars have drawn from various frameworks like psychology (Wang and Calder 2006), critical theory (Stern 1993), aesthetics (Phillips and Mcquarrie 2010), phenomenology (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982), or literary theories (Scott 1994) to develop media consumption theories.

Grounding literary theories in consumer behavior substantially contributed to the field’s understanding of consumption of media texts by identifying, categorizing, and analyzing unexplored textual elements likely to reflect and affect audiences (Holbrook and Bartra 1987). Literary theories “explicate the relationship between language, meaning, and consumption” (Stern 1989, 323) as they study the role of the structural elements of text or acknowledge media consumption as a meaning-based activity (e.g. Scott 1994, Stern 1990, Holbrook and Grayson 1986). However, they do not fully capture the consumption and co-creation practices pertaining to intertextually and systematically connected media narratives, but rather assume that the text is a coherent and bounded unity.

Transmedia consumption entails the consumption of unbounded, permeable and intertextually related texts. The act of reading as detailed by reader-response theory is based on a definable and bounded text within a particular medium or form, such as an ad (Scott 1994, Stern 1990) or a novel (Radaway 1983). Yet, the boundaries of transmedia texts are not clearly defined as they are intertextually connected and, as they court consumers across texts via negative capability, the transmedia texts are permeable. This study provides a new approach to understand the narrative (text) consumption practices in social, interactive, and transmediated mediascapes.

We sought to understand the lived phenomenon of transmedia consumption in all of its experiential complexity and richness; therefore, our research approach is qualitative. We explore two related research questions: “What constitutes transmedia consumption experiences (hereafter, TCE)? and How do consumers create unified and meaningful consumption experiences in transmedia franchises?” We follow transmedia consumption practices as they are realized in fan consumption of three distinct contexts: Obama For America, Coca-Cola, and the ABC show Lost. The Obama For America (OFA) is the political campaign organized to build up public support for the re-election of 44th U.S. President, Barack Obama. Between March 2011 and November 2012, the campaign used forward-looking social media operation and digital technologies (apps, emails, dashboard, forums) to reach its voter database, and powerful offline grassroots activities. Likewise, Coca-Cola Happiness Factory campaign created a compelling narrative world through featured TV ads, webisodes, an iPhone game and music videos and songs on iTunes. Similarly, Lost was a popular series airing on ABC from September 2004-May 2010, which follows the lives of plane crash survivors on a mysterious island in the Pacific. With multiple storylines, nonlinear progressions of events, and deliberate gaps in the story, Lost has been identified as a complex media narrative (Johnson and Mittell 2005).

Next to actually writing a story and then reading it, transmedia consumption is one of the most active and interactive forms of narrative consumption possible. In a world of intense social media activity, characterized by multitudinous stories flowing from Internet servers to television screens, captured in radio sound bites, tweeted and Facebook-fanned liked, developed in vivid magazine visuals, realized in products and retail environments, the notion of transmedia production and consumption becomes imperative. As mentioned previously, Although the complete exposition of our study’s central findings is more complex and detailed than the limitations of this paper can accommodate, in this paper we focus on one novel, overarching strategy—patching—as a way consumers weave together disparate media elements into a single narrative stream. Furthermore, we offer four “tropes” (Spiggle 1994) or abstracted practices that form consumers’ practices of “patching” narrative streams.

The process of “patching,” a unique, customized, and interactive consumer activity, entails uniting, joining, and affixing producer-defined and offered narrative elements in a unique way via the combination of elements from different media platforms. Similar to patching a quilt, each piece used for patching tells a story. However, when they are affixed together, they have a bigger story to tell. Consider how “Jim” explains his patching together of his own Lost universe:

I consumed every possible media that I thought was out there and that I would appreciate. Via Domus [the Lost videogame] didn’t look like a very good game from what I heard from the friends. So I decided not to buy it. . . I skipped it. And same way with the Bad Twin [official Lost] novel or whatever... I didn’t feel like I needed to read that book. Anything else I was very engaged with. I read the Bad Twin through references on Lostpedia and other blogs and fan sites. And, I played the two ARG’s [Alternative Reality Games]. Indeed, I read one on Lostpedia and played one. ARGs provide information on this expanded universe. If they give everything in TV show, it would be boring. . . . I appreciate the show more when I get the ‘answers’ wrapped up in ARGs. ” (Jim)
James’ patching activity is a result of his active and interactive engagement with the expanded Lost universe as dispersed across multitudinous media platforms. James picks and chooses from the available Lost stories to bring together a story and media experience for himself. As he states, his experience of the show is enhanced because of the other stories James affixed around the story told in the TV show. Patching practice displays this unique, personalized meaning-making, and experience-enhancing practice with regard to media texts.

Lost attracts millions of viewers across the globe, appealing to ordinary viewers who only engage with the TV show, as well as to devoted fans who stretch their engagement across several media platforms. Along similar lines, OFA 2012 campaign globally and nationally mobilized millions of people—from hardcore community organizers to nonvoters or non-US fans who only engage via social media to show their support for Obama’s re-election. Both contexts offer different levels of narrative complexities to their viewers/supporters. The Lost narrative, for example, provides a range of different stories upon which to focus—(e.g., love stories, a science-fiction theme, nerdy physics and science puzzles). Each viewer is tempted to increasingly engage with the show’s narrative at varying levels of participation, ranging from the purely passive to the active aficionado. “Gill” explains her pleasure with the “optional complexity” the Lost narrative offers. She expresses how she likes learning “the layers of” the Lost story via the “symbols and the hidden things like the little Easter Eggs that producers plant in” as well as “what’s happening on the surface.”

Although consumers interact with interrelated narratives and the expanded worlds that stretch across a set of media platforms, they do not necessarily engage with every platform the producers use to disperse the story. Furthermore, consumers themselves also create some stories around the brand. . This world-consuming perspective complements Jenkins’ definition of worldbuilding regarding the producer’s perspective on creating an expanded universe using interrelated stories.

Patching in turn involves four permeating types of practices: mapping, dipping, digging, and stitching. Consumers identify the elements of the Lost world, interpret them, and then re-construct their own individually-tailored versions of the world by stitching multiple stories together. Below, we briefly illuminate each practice.

Some our informants were unfamiliar with any media extensions. Cassandra’s view is that she does not “think it’s necessary. I think most, I would say 99.9% of what you need to know is in the show” (in-depth interview, Cassandra). On the other hand, a number of Lost consumers are familiar with the multi-platform and multi-threaded storytelling. They are also aware of the existence of a bigger world dispersed across several media platforms, and seem respectful of this fact. Lance’s mapping of the Lost universe assists him in creating his own atlas of the Lost world.

I think Lost is definitely… probably on purpose connected with all the other forms of media. It cannot be just a TV [show]. It would be too difficult to keep up. Or they would have made it much simpler. The books didn’t mean as much or the Easter eggs [hidden content intentionally inserted and concealed by the creators¹], and the representation wouldn’t have been there. There is no way they could do that. Maybe they could but probably… most people who knew what that [Easter Eggs] meant aren’t watching TV. [laughs] (personal interview)
The level of complexity that Lance finds in the narrative of the television show must be covered by multiple media from multiple viewpoints. When Lance observes that in its complexity, Lost “cannot be just as TV” program, he means that if its fantasy world is to seem as real as a real-life story, it cannot be restricted to just one medium.

In addition to enabling consumers to connect with secondary media platforms and brand communities, mapping involves exploring and including other cultural and popular stories intertextually connected to the Lost universe. Producers send signals of these texts through titles in podcasts or in interviews. Some are embedded in the story or script of the TV show, and some are deduced by consumers who recognize a possible link with the show. Online, “bongzilla” and “Steebin” suggest and discuss a number of books that fans find highly relevant to the consumption and understanding of the television series: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and The Stand novels, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, The Alan Moore graphic novel Watchmen, and Friedreich Nietzsche’s philosophical classic Moore, Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche (Book Club online community postings, dated 04-02-2009 and 02-17-2010). Likewise, Obama’s campaign video quoting Reagan on closing the tax loopholes is one intertextual story the campaign uses to initiate bi-partisan support. Reacting with “Obama no Ronald Reagan” comments, the campaign’s viewers – Democrat or Republican – highlight how Reagan’s story does not match with Obama’s. To be able to understand the parallelism implied in this video, consumers need to remember or learn Reagan’s actions regarding taxation. .

Mapping creates a bird’s-eye-view of the expanded and complex narrative universe that cannot be accessed through a single platform or media text. At times, consumers utilize several displays, drawings, or illustrations--created by producers or co-created by fans—of this expanded universe. These illustrations might be focused literally on the terrain of the universe like the maps of the Lost island, museum exhibits that detail the Coca-Cola world, or maps of the relationships between Lost character. (Exhibit 1& 2)

Dipping. A second strategy subsumed within the act of patching is dipping – the limited and second-hand consumption of secondary texts or media by reading recaps, synopses from blogs, forums, Wikipedia, or hyperlinks or through other personal resources. Dipping includes, for example, reading about an alternate reality game without playing it, or reading a summary of a related novel online. Dipping consumers most probably have already proceeded through mapping, so they are to some extent aware of the general terrain of the media extensions, and of the related intertextual popular-culture threads in the narrative universe. Yet they mostly prefer to or must consume them through secondary resources like recaps, summaries, forums, databases, wikis, and so on. For some consumers, dipping becomes a complementary strategy that provides possible and alternative ways of access to the narrative of interest. “Brady”, an avid Obama supporter, had to watch one of the town hall debates through Twitter feed, as she didn't have cable. Following the relevant hashtags and “mapping” the twitter accounts that live-tweet the event, she created a proxy watching experience for herself. Brady expressed that she “gets a general idea about how Obama performed” and “doesn’t miss the highlights of the debate” although her secondhand experience “would not compare to watching it live on TV”.

For consumers, dipping is also a form of coping strategy deployed in the face of daunting numbers of extensions that require significant time, investment, and effort. “Tracy” explains how the blog she follows does the necessary research for her, with respect to the Lost mysteries and Lost theories. She prefers to read what happens in these secondary media in the blog rather than doing the research herself. Similarly, James had to “read through” the first Alternate Reality Game (ARG) due to time limitations, which allowed him to be strategic about which elements of the game he chose to play later:

I didn’t complete but I played pieces of Where is 815. The second one. I was so busy at the time that I appreciated being able to read a recap. For Lost at that point everybody was very thirsty for answers. And there seems to be some information in ARG about the Vanzetti equation and those numbers” (James, personal interview).
In these examples, we can see how social media allows consumers to gain limited but strategic experience with each media platform. Dipping becomes a crucial practice that aids consumers to sustain their engagement with the specific brand. Brady’s engagement with the Obama re-election campaign might have been strained or even ceased, if she didn't have the necessary narrative “ ammo” she got from the dipping practice. Nevertheless, dipping is more about a directed inquiry, and is thus strategic, and is less about discovery or allowing the main narrative embedded within these secondary media to unfold on its own time, as it does in the central text.

Digging. Digging is the third patching practice to emerge in our text. Digging refers to consumers’ first-hand experiences with the secondary texts and intertextual popular titles to go into the deeper layers of the complex, multilayered transmedia stories: finding clues or interpreting mysteries posed by the Lost story, investigating some facts about the President’s performance, or uncovering the dynamics of the Coca-Cola video game. Digging is similar to a “forensic exploration,” or a hyper-attentive mode of spectatorship, embracing a detective mentality, seeking out clues, charting patterns, and assembling evidence into narrative hypotheses (Mittell 2009). Consider the level of interpretive depth and immersive experience contained in the excerpt below:

http://persephone.thehansofoundation.org is definitely from the first session of TLE [Lost Alternative Reality Game]. There was a backwards message in the audio if I remember correctly. http://www.thf.org/index.html is new to me, but it has a serious side that I doubt is TLE related. I am going to watch it and investigate further. (XMOZZAZX, The Lost Experience, 06-01-2008)

If this IS differential calculus, which I understand to be the math of momentum under the laws of motion (in relation to physics), then that might help draw a connection somewhere.... Keep an ear out for any names popping up like Liebniz, Lagrange, Newton, or Euler as they were major contributors to the study of calculus. There's also a "Jacobian Matrix" in calculus, which makes me wonder (though, it's a bit of a different TYPE of calculus) (Paperknives, ARG: Find 815, 01-26-2008)

As evident in these quotes, complex transmedia narratives allow consumers go into the deeper layers of the story and assign them roles beyond watching, playing, or reading. This detective like clue-gathering practice courts consumers across media and requires them to probe, investigate, triangulate, or test. Shortly, digging empowers consumers in their meaning-making processes.

Jonathan Adkins, a talented cartographer, created detailed maps of the Lost Island by bringing together the relevant info and clues revealed or implied about the island across several media. However, Jonathan’s map was not the only map of the island. Many Lost fans, expert or not, have co-created and distributed their versions of the Lost maps. Creating these maps is a stitching practice as it entails mapping the media that includes the relevant parts of the story, digging into these stories to find the relevant and specific information about the Lost island, and bringing them together to display the terrain of the Lost Island. (Exhibit 2)

Furthermore, our data reveal that some transmedia fans also teach others how to establish the intertextual connections between primary and secondary media platforms. Particularly for consumers who know about transmedia storytelling practices or have been a part of a different fan community, teaching others about the ways to approach stitching is common. For example, online we find “Garmonbozey” advising and offering “rules of thumb” about how to interpret secondary texts: “The characters themselves are not important or canon to the show, the information they uncover however is mostly, the information won't make it in episodes, but it is however canon to the mythology. They do these ARGs for the reason of getting out info or plot details that can't be fit into the show itself well.” (Garmonbozey, ARG The Lost Experience, 05-18-2009).

In summary, transmedia consumption experiences entail various world-consuming practices across a set of media platforms. We find evidence in our data for four distinct transmedia consumption processes that can all be subsumed under the umbrella category of patching: mapping, dipping, digging, and stitching. To create a cohesive and meaningful experience in a transmedia universe where stories are dispersed across a multitude of platforms, consumers rely on these narrative consumption practices to create a unified and meaningful consumption experience for themselves. They anchor themselves in customized and customizable ways to the transmedia universe through a certain touch point, and then they patch together a world around this entry point with their choice of media and stories.

Transmedia storytelling is the contemporary practice of media production across multiple media platforms. In this paper, we introduce and explain the topic, chart some of its contours, and explore key practices that consumers use to make sense of transmedia narratives. As the first paper to examine this topic within the context of consumption, we offer some important conclusions to help spur further consumer research in the area. First, TCE defines and describes a new multichannel and cross-media consumption practice, taking the discussion beyond the consumption of multiple media platforms. TCE describes a media consumption practice more broad than the number of media platforms consumers transverse across during their consumption of media texts. Second, by formulating the idea of TCE as an “experience,” we suggest that transmedia consumption is broader than the consumption of entertainment-related narratives like reading, watching, or playing. Despite reader-response theory’s focus on the act of reading as the most prominent meaning-making activity while consuming texts (Scott 1994), our study identifies consumption and co-creation practices that assign – or even demand – a different role to the consumer beyond reading. In that regard, similar to Cova et al (2007), this study identifies a range of productive roles of consumers for media consumption of complex and layered transmedia narratives.

Third, we introduce the consumer’s voice into the producer-focused landscape of transmedia research, by focusing on naturalistically-embedded practices of “world-consuming.” We discover and discuss individualized practices of “world-consuming” in which a complex narrative universe encourages consumers to develop idiosyncratic narrative experiences. TCE, a very necessary consumer perspective in the transmedia field, details a media consumption practice facilitated by the transmedia narrative and encouraged and at times enforced by the transmedia producers.

Four, we detail four interrelated and perpetual patching practices that guide the individual construction of a new narrative universe. These narrative consumption processes enable customizing of media experiences and also deepen engagement with the transmediated universes. Mapping allows dipping, dipping encourages digging, and digging enables stitching. Thus, patching is the product of four interrelated practices that escalate engagement with the complex, layered and intertextual transmedia universe.

Our study also has implications for practitioners. It contributes to the ways brand managers coordinate media, content, and consumers. Particularly for powerful brands, (i.e. the American Girl) that are products of multiple narratives at multiple venues (Diamond et al 2009), TCE provides an integrative approach pertaining to the orchestration and management of multimedia storytelling. As the text is woven into a variety of different forms, these metaphors can help guide our understanding and further research into this increasingly important area of media and brand consumption.

Our findings also have implications for multichannel retailing strategies. The multichannel retail environment for any retail brand is similar to the transmediated universes of Lost, OFA, or Coca-Cola Happiness Factory. Similar to the mediascapes, the contemporary retail environments also experience the proliferation of possible touchpoints to interact with consumers. Unlike the old two-node strategies between the brick and mortar store and the catalog, retail managers not only need to integrate the channel and communication (Keller 2010) but also should coordinate and orchestrate the communication (i.e., the story told via each touchpoint) across channel members.

Askwith, Ivan (2007), Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium, Doctoral Dissertation, MIT Comparative Studies Program, MIT

Brown,Stephen (2001) "Torment Your Customers (They'll Love It),"Harvard Business Review, Vol. 79, No. 9, October, 2001.

Brown, Stephen (2005), Wizard! Harry Potter’s Brand Magic. London: Cyan.

Brown, Stephen, Robert V. Kozinets, and John F. Sherry Jr. (2003), “Teaching Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning,” Journal of Marketing, 67 (July), 19-33.

Dena, Christy (2004), “Transmedia Narrative: Diverged Technology, Converged People, New Stories,” Podcast. http://lamp.edu.au/2004/11/08/podcast-new-stories

Diamond, Nina, John F. Sherry Jr., Mary Ann McGrath, Albert Muniz, Stefania Borghini, and Robert Kozinets (2009), “American Girl and the Brand Gestalt: Closing the Loop on Sociocultural Branding Research,” Journal of Marketing, 73 (May) 118-134.

Fournier, Susan (1998), “Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory,” Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (March): 343-373.

Gitlin, Todd, ed. (1986), Watching Television, New York: Pantheon Books.

Gobe, Marc ( 2002), Citizen Brand: 10 Commandments for Transforming Brand Culture in a Consumer Democracy, Allworth Press, New York.

Grover, Ronald (2009),“Giving Products a Good Backstory.” In Bloomberg Business Week, May,http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_21/b4132048821605.htm

Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press.

Kackman, Michael, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allsion Perlman, and Bryan Sebok (2010), Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, Routledge

Kevin Lane Keller (2010), “Brand Equity Management in a Multichannel, Multimedia Retail Environment,” Journal of Interactive Marketing, 24 (May), 58-70.

Kozinets, Robert V. (2001), “Utopian Enterprise: Articulating the Meaning of Star Trek’s Culture of Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research, 28 (June), 67-89.

Kozinets, Robert V. (2002), “The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities,” Journal of Marketing Research, 39 (February), 61-73.

Kristeva, Julia (1996) “Word, Dialogue, and the Novel.” The Kristeva Reader. T.Moi, ed.New York: Columbia University Press

Long, Geoffrey (2007), Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, MIT Comparative Studies Program, MIT

Mittell, Jason (2005), “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory,” in Thinking Outside the Box, edited by Gary R. Edgerton and Brian Rose, University of Kentucky Press, 37-64

Mittell, Jason. 2009.“Lost in a great story: Evaluation in narrative television (and Television studies)” In Reading "Lost": Perspectives On A Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson, 119–38. London: I. B. Tauris.

Roberts, Kevin (2001) Lovemarks: the Future Beyond Brands, Powerhouse Books

Stern, Barbara B. (1995), “Consumer Myths: Frye's Taxonomy and the Structural Analysis of Consumption Text,” Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (September) 1995, 165-185.

Thompson, Craig J. and Zeynep Arsel (2004), "The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers' (Anti-Corporate) Experiences of Glocalization," Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (December), 631-642.

Wipperfürth, Alex  (2010) Brand Hijack: Marketing without Marketing, University of Michigan

Figure 2: Jonah Adkin’s (Cartographer) Map of the Lost Island