Abstract: The article identifies some typical breakthrough events serving as building blocks in stories about companies’ milestones and some other genres of marketing storytelling. These are events referring to the developmental stage of a product’s life cycle depicting how a product, company or brand achieves a breakthrough. Three main types of such breakthrough events are discussed: (1) company/product/brand’s breakthrough as a result of innovation, (2) company/product/ brand’s breakthrough due to cooperation, and (3) company/product/brand’s breakthrough as a result of celebrity endorsement or patronage. It is shown that marketing storytellers resort to various linguistic means to promote product/company milestones and convey the idea of transformation and excellence: verbs with the semantics of change, adjectives denoting excellence, adjectives in the superlative degree among others.
Keywords: marketingstorytelling, company/product/brand stories, stories about company/product milestones, breakthrough events, the language of breakthrough.
Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 16, January 2015, rhetoric.bg/, journal.rhetoric.bg, ISSN 1314-4464