The influence of the components of storytelling blogs on readers’ travel intentions

The purpose of this study was to determine how storytelling blogs affect readers’ intention to adopt travel products.

The present study proposes a storytelling framework based on heuristic theory for examining the characteristics and key components of a story that can affect the reader’s potential future behavior. An empirical study involving 368 subjects was conducted to test this model.

The results indicated that the elements of storytelling blogs, “perceived aesthetics”, “narrative structure”, and “self‐reference”, can indirectly influence readers’ intention through empathy and attitude. In particular, “perceived aesthetics” had the strongest direct effect on attitude and total effect on intention. Nevertheless, the control variables, age, gender, and frequency of searching for information about travel online, did not influence the intention.

The proposed framework can be used by enterprises to develop storytelling blogs for marketing their products. Blog design needs to consider aesthetics, narrative structure, and relevance to readers.

The paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the influence of storytelling blogs from a heuristic perspective.