Abstract
Personal branding has become an important career skill, yet graduate business curricula rarely teach students how to develop a professional identity that feels both authentic and communicable. We introduce and evaluate a storytelling-based pedagogy designed to help MBA students construct and articulate their personal brands. Drawing on narrative identity theory, we conceptualize personal brand development as involving two related challenges: reflective integration, through which students make sense of their experiences, values, and aspirations; and discursive construction, through which they shape those experiences into audience-facing professional narratives. We implemented this pedagogy in a graduate marketing course and used mixed methods to examine both students’ personal brand stories and changes in key learning outcomes. Qualitative findings suggest that storytelling helped students connect past experiences to future goals, reinterpret formative events, and craft coherent narratives that conveyed values, credibility, and professional direction. Quantitative findings indicate gains in personal brand appeal, differentiation, and professional identity clarity. Together, the results suggest that storytelling pedagogy can move students beyond formulaic self-presentation toward more coherent, credible, and adaptable professional identities. The study contributes a theory-informed and practically actionable approach for marketing educators seeking to strengthen career preparation in the classroom.
Introduction
Graduate business students are increasingly expected to enter the labor market with a clear and compelling professional identity that they can communicate to others. Employers seek candidates who can articulate coherent professional identities that communicate value, authenticity, and potential (Ewing & Ewing, 2017; Gorbatov et al., 2019; Honea et al., 2017). Yet, while the importance of personal branding has grown, marketing education has not kept pace. Personal branding receives little explicit instructional weight in business school curricula, and when it does appear, it is usually folded into strategic communication courses that emphasize organizational communication, teamwork, and employment-related outputs such as résumés, cover letters, and elevator pitches (Moshiri & Cardon, 2014; Russ, 2009). These activities provide students with useful techniques for self-presentation but little support for the deeper interpretive and communicative work required to generate authentic professional brands. As a result, students often leave with polished artifacts such as LinkedIn profiles, positioning statements, or personal taglines without developing a coherent account of who they are, what they value, and how their experiences support that professional identity.
We approach this problem through the lens of storytelling pedagogy. Storytelling offers a promising angle because it directly addresses two central challenges of personal brand development. Narratives require individuals to link past, present, and future into a coherent account, experiment with alternative versions of self, and tailor these to diverse audiences (Boje, 2001; McAdams, 2015; Riessman, 2008). In this sense, personal brand development is not only a reflective task; it is also a discursive one. By discursive, we mean the communicative process of selecting, organizing, and framing identity-relevant experiences for an audience (Boje, 2001; Riessman, 2008). Students must make sense of their experiences for themselves, but they must also shape those experiences into a professional narrative that others can understand and find credible. These are exactly the capacities that current personal branding pedagogy neglects. Moreover, storytelling has an established role in marketing education, where it is valued for fostering creativity, critical reflection, and engagement (Bledow et al., 2017; Spanjaard et al., 2023). Scholars have shown that storytelling helps individuals rehearse emerging professional identities (Ibarra & Lineback, 2005) and reflect on their values and motives (Cunliffe, 2004; Gabriel, 2000). At the same time, prior uses of storytelling in education have more often emphasized reflection or engagement than the explicit construction of audience-facing personal brand narratives. By framing personal brand development as a storytelling effort, we reposition branding pedagogy as a process of narrative identity articulation rather than mere template completion.
In this study, we ask: How does storytelling pedagogy shape MBA students’ development and articulation of personal brands? To address this question, we designed and implemented a storytelling-based intervention in a graduate marketing course, where students authored personal brand stories as part of their professional development. We then conducted a deconstructive narrative analysis of these stories, a method uniquely suited to examining how narrators actively re-author their experiences into coherent professional identities (Boje, 2001). This approach enabled us to examine how students engaged in the processes of reflective integration and discursive construction that are central to brand development.
This paper makes three contributions. First, it extends the personal branding literature by conceptualizing personal brand development as both a reflective and a discursive problem, thereby shifting attention from branding outputs to the processes by which individuals construct professional identities that are both internally meaningful and externally communicable. Second, it advances storytelling pedagogy by demonstrating how a narrative-based intervention guides these reflective and discursive processes, equipping students to generate authentic and coherent professional identities. In doing so, the paper complements reflection-based views of learning by showing that personal brand development also requires students to translate self-understanding into audience-facing professional communication. Third, it enriches marketing education scholarship by providing evidence of how storytelling pedagogy can address a neglected area of career preparation, offering a theoretically grounded and pedagogically actionable approach for teaching personal branding in contexts where students are still forming their professional identities.
Conceptual Development
Personal Branding and the Educational Gap
Personal branding is widely recognized as critical to career development (Gorbatov et al., 2019; Parmentier et al., 2013). Defined as “the strategic process of creating, positioning, and maintaining a positive impression of oneself” (Gorbatov et al., 2018, p. 2238), it is strongly associated with outcomes such as employability, differentiation, prestige, career satisfaction, and organizational performance (Brems et al., 2016; Jaring & Bäck, 2017; Lee & Cavanaugh, 2016; Zinko & Rubin, 2015). Employers expect graduates to present coherent and compelling personal brands, and students themselves increasingly recognize the importance of doing so (Honea et al., 2017). Despite this, business school education rarely offers explicit instruction in personal brand development. A review of our peer MBA programs’ curricula revealed that among eight comparable early-career programs in the western United States, only four reported teaching some form of personal branding, typically through non-credit-bearing seminars, electives, or career management programming rather than in the core curriculum. The remaining programs either addressed the topic indirectly or not at all. Even among programs that taught personal branding, it was often siloed; for example, one institution limited the topic to a specialized sport and entertainment MBA, reasoning that NCAA athletes would find it especially relevant. These findings suggest that while personal branding is broadly acknowledged as valuable for professional development, structured curricular support remains uneven and often peripheral. The consequences of this omission are reflected in a recent survey of incoming MBA students in which participants reported both uncertainty about how to construct a personal brand 1 and strong agreement that they would value structured pedagogical support in doing so. 2 These findings underscore a persistent gap between the expectations placed upon graduates in the labor market and the preparation they receive in business schools.
This instructional gap is compounded by the fact that, when personal branding is included in curricula, it is often framed in ways poorly aligned with the demands of identity work. Business and professional communication courses emphasize organizational writing, presentation skills, and workplace communication rather than reflective self-narrative (Moshiri & Cardon, 2014; Russ, 2009). Where personal branding is addressed, it is typically taught through prescriptive templates such as positioning statements, elevator pitches, or standardized online profiles (Montoya, 2002). Scholars have critiqued these approaches for encouraging individuals to market themselves as packaged products, reinforcing self-commodification rather than authentic identity development (Lair et al., 2005). Such methods may yield polished artifacts, but they fail to cultivate the reflective and discursive capacities needed to generate authentic identity narratives (Cunliffe, 2004; Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010). Related pedagogical practices such as self-reflection, professional development exercises, and career coaching may already support students’ self-understanding, but they do not necessarily help students transform that self-understanding into a credible professional narrative for others. This tendency reflects a broader pattern in marketing education: privileging cognitive and strategic tasks at the expense of reflexive integration (Mintzberg, 2004).
Addressing this misalignment requires rethinking what personal brand development actually involves. Traditional frameworks describe brand development as a sequence of steps (e.g., awareness, positioning, architecture) focused on strategy rather than self-authorship (Parmentier et al., 2013). Khedher (2019) emphasizes that authenticity and coherence are integral to effective personal branding, while Labrecque et al. (2011) highlight how individuals must balance pressure between self-branding and information control when branding online. We further argue that personal brand generation is best understood as a reflective and discursive problem: Reflectively, students must integrate past experiences, current self-understanding, and future aspirations into a coherent narrative (McAdams, 2015; McLean et al., 2020). This is particularly challenging because students’ identities are still developing. As established in Chickering and Reisser’s (1993) student-identity development framework, identity formation during college involves navigating tensions like “establishing identity” and “developing purpose.” Discursively, students must craft coherent stories by selecting which experiences and voices to include, tailoring the narrative to varied audiences, and performing an emergent identity publicly (Boje, 2001; Riessman, 2008). The academic environment intensifies this challenge: students are expected to present polished, market-ready selves while still exploring their evolving professional identities. Traditional branding models offer little guidance for such reflective and discursive work.
This perspective shares common ground with transformative learning theory (Mezirow, 1997), which holds that adult learning involves critically examining taken-for-granted assumptions and revising one’s frames of reference through experience, critical reflection, and rational discourse. Our approach overlaps with this tradition in its emphasis on reflective sense-making and the re-authoring of experience. However, our focus differs in a fundamental respect. In transformative learning, discourse functions as a vehicle for epistemological validation; a form of collaborative, rational dialogue through which learners test beliefs and arrive at more truthful self-understanding (Mezirow, 1997; Taylor, 2000). The goal is a revised frame of reference, or a more accurate and inclusive way of seeing oneself and the world. Personal brand development demands more than self-understanding: it also requires making that self-understanding legible and compelling to others in settings such as interviews, networking conversations, and career transitions. This is what we mean by discursive construction: a process oriented toward audience-facing narrative performance (Boje, 2001; Riessman, 2008). Transformative learning theory offers limited guidance for this performative dimension (Taylor, 2000). Pedagogies that support self-insight alone leave this part of the task unfinished.
Storytelling Pedagogy as a Promising Approach to Personal Branding
Because personal brand development requires both reflective integration and discursive construction, storytelling is especially well-suited to this pedagogical challenge. Stories help individuals organize experience, connect past and future, and communicate identity to others (Boje, 2001; McAdams, 2015; Riessman, 2008). These features make storytelling especially relevant to personal branding, where students must understand themselves and communicate that understanding in professionally meaningful ways.
In marketing education, storytelling has been widely used to enhance learning (McDougal et al., 2021), deepen critical reflection (Bledow et al., 2017; Gonzalez-Fuentes et al., 2021), and foster creativity (Ng, 2006; Spanjaard et al., 2023). Storytelling also plays an important role in professional identity development: Gabriel (2000) shows how stories allow individuals to explore values and emotions in organizational contexts, while Ibarra and Lineback (2005) demonstrate that stories provide a vehicle for experimenting with and rehearsing provisional professional selves. But despite its established role in marketing education, storytelling has rarely been applied to the teaching of personal branding. Branding pedagogy often emphasizes prescriptive frameworks, message consistency, or polished outputs such as résumés, online profiles, and elevator pitches (Labrecque et al., 2011; Parmentier et al., 2013). Storytelling pedagogy offers a distinctive alternative by giving students structured opportunities to integrate experiences, articulate values, and test multiple versions of self before peers and instructors. In doing so, it aligns educational practice with the reflective and discursive demands of personal brand generation. Accordingly, we see storytelling pedagogy as a mechanism for helping students build the underlying narrative coherence that effective personal brand communication requires.
Building on this rationale, we turn to an empirical exploration of how storytelling pedagogy operates in practice. While conceptual arguments for storytelling’s pedagogical value may be persuasive, less is known about how students actually engage in storytelling as a method for generating personal brands, or what consequences such engagement has for their sense of authenticity, coherence, and professional readiness. To address this gap, we designed and implemented a storytelling-based intervention within a graduate business program.
Study: Exploring the Processes and Consequences of a Storytelling-Based Personal Brand Development Intervention
Guided by prior research on storytelling as a reflective and discursive pedagogy (Boje, 2001; McAdams, 2015; Riessman, 2008), we designed a classroom intervention to support personal brand development. The intervention created structured opportunities for students to reflect on their values and aspirations, connect those ideas to meaningful experiences, and turn those experiences into stories for professional audiences. In this section, we describe the research setting, curriculum implementation, and measures used to assess the intervention. We obtained Institutional Review Board approval for all activities (#076-SB21-204).
Research Setting and Student Participants
We implemented these activities in a Fundamentals of Marketing course within an MBA program at a large state school in the United States. The program is a 2-year, cohort-based in-person program designed for students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (e.g., biology, philosophy) to bridge into the business discipline. This population typically lacks a well-developed sense of personal brand due to limited business experience. This setting is especially relevant for studying personal brand development because many students are still in the early stages of forming a professional identity in business-related contexts. Forty-eight students (Mage = 25.3, 62% male) across two consecutive cohorts participated in the storytelling intervention. In addition, we collected comparison survey data from a separate graduating cohort of 33 students who did not receive the intervention and served only as a non-equivalent baseline for the quantitative analyses.
Curriculum Development and Implementation
The intervention took place during the third week of a 7-week Fundamentals of Marketing course. The full implementation unfolded across two 3-hr class sessions and a set of linked assignments, though the components can be adapted or condensed for other course formats. The first 3-hr session introduced core concepts around branding and narrative communication, as connected more broadly to core marketing communication concepts, and thus does not necessarily displace core curricular material. The second 3-hr session constituted the focal “intervention” workshop (see the online repository containing files outlining our personal brand identification and storytelling workshop activities, slides, and facilitator notes 3 ). The design unfolded across several stages that guided reflective integration and discursive construction.
First, students completed a personal values assessment, articulated both personal points of parity and points of differentiation, and generated a preliminary “brand bullseye” exercise commonly used by firms to map brand elements (Kotler & Keller, 2016). These activities provided students with an initial vocabulary for describing their brands, while also serving as a structured reflective exercise on values and aspirations. Instructors could easily assign these activities as pre-work, if in-class time limits are a constraint.
Second, students participated in a storytelling workshop that translated these brand elements into narrative form. The workshop was developed in conjunction with The Story Collider, a national nonprofit specializing in teaching and producing personal storytelling. In the first year of the intervention, Story Collider facilitators led the session; in subsequent years, they trained course instructors to deliver the same curriculum.
Students first identified events that illustrated something important about themselves and the characteristics they wished to emphasize in professional settings. They then shared initial snippets of potential stories with peers, who responded by posing questions framed as curiosities and confusions (e.g., “but why?” or “what else?”). This activity encouraged narrators to see their stories from an audience's perspective, clarify what was at stake, and polish their accounts into something both meaningful and engaging. Students were also prompted to consider how the same story could be adapted for different professional contexts, such as a job interview or an elevator pitch, reinforcing discursive flexibility.
From there, the workshop guided students through the process of narrative construction. They were taught to organize their material into a clear beginning–middle–end structure, to articulate the story’s central takeaway (“what does this story illustrate about you?”), and to “show rather than tell” through sensory detail and vivid description. The iterative structure of the workshop involved rounds of feedback: initial brainstorming of events, peer discussions to refine story ideas, draft submissions for instructor review, and final written and recorded versions of their stories (see the online repository for the full assignment 4 ). This structure was designed to support both identity exploration and communicative refinement. See the online repository for an example of how this pedagogical approach could fit into the overall Fundamentals of Marketing course structure, and Appendix A for core intervention activities, learning objectives, deliverables, and competencies developed.
Qualitative Data Examining Students’ Personal Brand Stories and Analytic Approach
Our primary data source consisted of the personal brand stories that students wrote and submitted as part of the course assignment. Each student produced both a written and recorded version of their story, reflecting on a personally meaningful event and articulating how it illustrated their intended professional brand. These narratives served as the primary source of evidence for understanding how students engaged in the reflective and communicative work of personal brand development.
Our qualitative analysis is grounded in deconstructive narrative analysis (Boje, 2001), a method well-suited to examining how storytellers construct professional identities. This approach attends to the process of restorying, or the ways individuals re-author lived experiences into coherent accounts for professional contexts. This perspective allowed us to examine how the intervention prompted students to transform experiences into polished personal brand narratives.
Our analysis focused on two interrelated processes. Reflective integration refers to how narrators connect past experiences to present identity and future aspirations (McAdams, 2015). Discursive construction refers to how narrators shape those experiences into coherent accounts for audiences through selection, framing, and emphasis (Riessman, 2008). We used these categories to examine how students made sense of their experiences and how they communicated that sense-making in professionally legible ways.
We treated each student’s written story as the unit of analysis and segmented narratives into meaning units (sentences or short paragraphs expressing a distinct idea). For each unit, coders identified “restorying moments” or points where the narrator reframed their self-concept (e.g., from obstacle to growth opportunity). These were then initially coded under one or both of the two parent categories: Reflective Integration and Discursive Construction. Two of the authors independently coded an initial 20% of stories, compared results, refined the codebook to clarify inclusion/exclusion rules, and developed subcategories, see Table 1. Intercoder reliability (Cohen’s κ) for the presence/absence of each parent code at the meaning-unit level exceeded 0.72. Disagreements were discussed and resolved. To complement the focal examples discussed here, Appendix B (Table B1) summarizes broader thematic trends that recurred across the full set of student narratives.
Code Descriptions and Prevalence.
Qualitative Results
Reflective Integration: Making Sense of Self Across Time
Students used storytelling to interpret their experiences as parts of a developing professional identity. This process aligns with narrative identity research (Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010; McAdams, 2015) and with pedagogical calls for cultivating reflexive awareness in business school education (Cunliffe, 2004; Hibbert, 2013). Across the narratives, reflective integration most often appeared in three forms: (1) temporal integration, or linking past, present, and future selves; (2) turning points, or moments of realization that reoriented students’ self-understanding; and (3) re-authoring of self, in which students reframed adversity as a source of growth. Together, these patterns suggest that storytelling helped students move beyond listing traits or achievements and instead construct personal brands as evolving identity narratives.
Temporal Integration: Linking Past, Present, and Future Selves
One of the most common reflective patterns involved connecting earlier life experiences to present capabilities and future aspirations. This temporal coherence, or the sense of a continuous self across time, is central to narrative identity (McAdams, 2015) and professional identity development (Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010). Students engaged in this temporal sense-making, articulating how earlier experiences, present identities, and future goals converged in the present. For instance, Jason
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described how childhood financial constraints shaped his entire trajectory toward higher education:
Everything that I did, was to prepare myself for these next steps and to set me up financially to be able to gain a college education . . . It was my chance to be the first person in my family to gain a college education. And it was my chance to compete for a prestigious division one track and field program.
The narrative then bridges this aspiration with its realization: “And I became the first person in my family to graduate from college. I competed for [redacted] University at a high level.” Here, the student constructs an explicit bridge spanning years: family circumstances (past) become the engine for disciplined striving (present) and imagined achievement (future aspiration), which ultimately transforms into accomplished reality (realized future). Such narratives exemplify McAdams’s (2019) notion of the continuity motive in life stories.
A similar integrative orientation appears in Alice’s reflection on personal growth:
When before I thought I could barrel my way through anything I put my mind to, I realize now that having a strong network of shared values and interpersonal connection are far more important in bridging a prelude and finale. I am continuously working on refining and playing my own song, but without the structure and support of the people around me, I could never have gotten to where I am today.
The passage illustrates identity development as a movement between independence and connection, linking earlier self-conceptions (solitary achievement) to present and future ways of being (collaborative interdependence).
Turning Points: Aha Moments
Students also described distinct moments of realization that marked shifts in perspective or identity. These moments served as the hinge between who students had been and who they now understood themselves to be or who they are becoming. Clara captured this process when recounting a specific moment of clarity after a year of isolation following her move to California:
And for a year, I felt this way. And then one day, I just said, I need to make friends. I can’t keep being this person that doesn’t hang out with really anybody, that doesn’t have a group, that doesn’t have someone to talk to.
This passage highlights the crystallizing quality of turning points. The temporal marker “one day” signals a specific moment when prolonged discomfort converts into resolution. The internal dialogue (“I just said”) captures what Boje (2001) characterizes as the movement from the uncertainty of ongoing experience to the emergence of a coherent, agentic narrative. The student’s realization then translates into action: “now, I had to go out and talk to people, I had to make friends, I had to be uncomfortable.” The turning point enabled a fundamental identity shift from isolated newcomer to engaged community member, demonstrating how a single moment of recognition can reorient an entire trajectory.
Kayla offered a similar reflection on decisive clarity. After becoming separated from her sister on a European subway, a moment that crystallized her feelings of being constrained by her homeschooled, small-town upbringing, she described physically forcing open the closing train doors to let her sister board. Describing this action, she stated: “And at that moment, I decided that that’s what I needed to do with my life, need to make sure that I was opening the doors that were otherwise closed to me.” In a single phrase (“I decided”), this student similarly converts uncertainty into forward motion.
Re-Authoring of Self: Transforming Adversity Into Strength
A third form of reflective integration involved revisiting difficult experiences and recasting them as evidence of growth, resilience, or purpose. In these stories, students reinterpreted hardship as a meaningful source of identity and direction. This process corresponds to what McAdams (2019) describes as a redemptive sequence in life-story development and parallels Hibbert’s (2013) account of critical reflection as the conversion of discomfort into insight and action. Christa describes this transformation in a moment of public criticism early in her professional journey:
They handed me an eight-page letter of everything I had done wrong in my first six months with the crown. I sat in silence as they read it to me. Then I remembered the . . .women who had been through it all but found the strength to move forward. That strength guided me to go above and beyond; I went on to become Miss Rodeo Idaho and placed fourth at the Miss Rodeo America Pageant.
Here, an experience of humiliation becomes the catalyst for agency. The narrator reframes failure into the defining feature of her personal brand of enduring perseverance.
Sam’s account similarly illustrates how failure can be re-narrated as fulfillment:
“In a way, I’m thankful I failed the exam because I am much happier now than I think I would have been if I had stayed in my previous career.” This reflection demonstrates how the student reframed a professional setback as an experience that led to perspective and resilience, as an instance of moving on through learning and redefinition.
Reflective Integration Summary
Reflection functioned as a developmental process through which students constructed authentic, evolving identity stories. Through temporal linking, moments of realization, and the re-authoring of hardship, they moved beyond listing desirable traits to interpreting how those traits had been formed, tested, and carried forward across time. This highlights storytelling’s value as a pedagogy of self-awareness and meaning-making in business education (Cunliffe, 2004; Hibbert, 2013).
Discursive Construction: Crafting Coherence for an Audience
While reflective integration concerned internal sense-making, discursive construction concerned audience-facing communication. Students shaped their personal brand stories into a credible professional identity for others. This process involved selecting events, managing voices, and framing experiences in ways that would resonate with professional audiences (Riessman, 2008). Across the data, four forms of discursive work emerged: coherence-making through selection and omission, foregrounding and marginalizing voices, moral or value claims, and narrative closure.
Coherence-Making Through Selection and Omission
Students created coherence in their narratives by selectively emphasizing particular experiences, while minimizing or omitting details that might complicate their professional self-presentation. Their stories often appeared as polished, linear accounts that privileged growth and capability while managing tension or difficulty. As Riessman (2008) notes, coherence emerges through inclusion and omission, an active process of shaping events for meaning and audience reception. Luke demonstrated this selective framing in his account of an unsuccessful hunting expedition: “While we were at the vehicles my friends were complaining about the hike, and I was thinking about being tired, but glad we had done it. Just excited to be out there.” The narrative omits extended discussion of fatigue or disappointment about not harvesting a deer, instead focusing on emotional responses that align with his intended brand of passion and perseverance. This selective emphasis reflects a developing professional awareness: an understanding that credible self-presentation requires projecting dedication and positive outlook while managing acknowledgment of difficulty.
A comparable coherence appears in Karl’s reflection on work ethic: “From pulling all-nighters to finishing work before time . . . I started to enjoy the work I’m doing whether it is small or big, doesn’t matter, but giving my 100 percent in whatever I do.” Here, the student condenses frustration and adaptation into a single storyline of diligence and control, converting effort into identity coherence.
Foregrounding and Marginalizing Voices
A second discursive pattern involved managing whose perspectives were amplified and whose were pushed into the background. This selective voicing exemplifies the polyphonic dimension of storytelling (Boje, 2001; Riessman, 2008), where narrators balance others’ influence with their own agency. Ethan’s reflection foregrounded familial and peer voices while downplaying the sense of isolation that had characterized his earlier experience:
As I matured in high school, I realized that even though I was going through something unique, I was not the only one. Many of my peers were alone in their struggles and did not have the support system that I did through my family and friends.
By focusing on the supportive voices of family and peers, the student reconstructs his story around connection rather than adversity. In foregrounding these relational voices, he positions himself as both beneficiary and contributor within a community, reinforcing an identity related to empathy and gratitude (which he subsequently underscores as key to his personal brand).
A similar pattern of voice management appears in Taylor’s professional narrative, where he reports a tense encounter with his manager:
I was able to listen to what he had to say and eventually, he calmed down. I was able to articulate my concerns and address his. I learned he lost a different big deal that morning and he was under a lot of pressure. His disappointment was projected onto my situation.
Here, the student actively manages competing voices, his manager’s anger and his own composure, by foregrounding his rational response while marginalizing the manager’s inappropriate behavior. By providing justification for the manager’s outburst, the narrator converts what could have been a story about workplace mistreatment into evidence of his own emotional intelligence and professional maturity. This discursive maneuver demonstrates how coherence is achieved through selective amplification: the narrator asserts composure and professionalism by acknowledging but subordinating the emotional volatility of others.
Moral or Value Claims
A third form of discursive construction emerged when students articulated explicit moral or value statements that conveyed ethical character and professional integrity. These statements were performative: students used them to position themselves as credible, values-driven individuals within an audience’s moral frame. By declaring what they believed or stood for, they converted experience into evidence of professional character. For instance, Brad broadens his story from a personal account to a universal moral principle:
I believe that this is what it means to be human: to reach out of what was our bubbles and connect with other people and help them to see that they are not limited by the circles of the bubbles that have defined them in the past.
By presenting his individual insight as a statement about “what it means to be human,” he invites his audience to share in his values and to see connection itself as a measure of moral and professional worth. The statement functions as moral performance: it illustrates his capacity for perspective-taking while also signaling to listeners or employers that collaboration and inclusivity are central to his professional identity.
Another student, Grace, articulated diligence as defining moral commitments. “But this experience helped me realize that I can overcome obstacles with a good work ethic and patience. I learned from a young age . . . I had to work harder than some of the kids in my class.” This statement underscores discipline as a moral imperative and the basis of their professional identity. By emphasizing patience and effort, the student translates her individual struggle into a broader ethic of responsibility.
Narrative Closure
A final discursive pattern concerned how students concluded their stories, crafting endings that stabilized identity and conveyed finality. Within storytelling pedagogy, closure reflected students’ developing ability to transform ongoing experience into a communicative performance of resolution and confidence. For instance, Oscar closed his story by reaffirming determination as a defining thread of his personal brand: “I have always been one to adapt and overcome, shown through my hard work and perseverance through any issues I face. And I know I will continue to improve and overcome with the support of those around me.” The use of “always” and “will continue” converts momentary challenge into a lasting disposition, reinforcing stability and reliability, which are traits valued in professional contexts.
Brittany’s conclusion offered a different kind of closure; one grounded in moral definition: “It was in that challenging moment that I finally knew what I stood for. I stood for integrity, honesty, and authenticity, something that my job could no longer offer.” Here, the student resolves professional tension by asserting moral clarity. The repetition of “I stood for” functions as a declarative act of identity performance, inviting the audience to recognize her values as both personal conviction and brand statement.
Discursive Construction Summary
Across these four patterns, students showed how personal coherence is constructed for others. Through selective narration, voice management, moral declaration, and crafted endings, they translated lived experience into a coherent and credible professional identity. If reflective integration involved making sense of self, discursive construction involved making that self-legible to an audience. This outward-facing dimension is central to personal branding. See Table 2 for additional examples.
Additional Examples of Codes and Interpretations.
Quantitative Data Examining Intervention Efficacy
To complement the qualitative analysis of the process, we also examined whether the intervention was associated with changes in outcomes relevant to personal brand development. From a learning outcomes perspective, we expected our storytelling-based intervention to enhance individuals’ personal brand equity (PBE). Defined as “an individual’s perception of the value of one’s personal brand derived from its appeal, differentiation, and recognition in a given professional field” (Gorbatov et al., 2019, p. 507), PBE reflects the extent to which one’s personal brand is perceived as clear, compelling, and professionally relevant. We measured brand appeal (4 items; e.g., “I have a positive professional reputation”; α = .91) and brand differentiation (4 items; e.g., “I am considered a better professional compared to others”; α = .87) subscales of Gorbatov et al.’s (2021) PBE scale. We omitted the “brand recognition” subscale, as it was irrelevant to most of the students in the program since they did not have professional work experience. We also examined the intervention’s influence on participants’ professional identity clarity, defined as “the relatively stable and enduring constellation of attributes, beliefs, values, motives, and experiences in terms of which people define themselves in a professional role” (Dobrow & Higgins, 2005, 5; 4 items; e.g., “I know who I am, professionally and in my career”; α = .83), general self-efficacy (8 items; Chen et al., 2001; e.g., “Even when things are tough, I can perform quite well”; α = .93), and employment self-efficacy (2 items; Brown et al., 2006; e.g., “Organizations generally view people like me as good candidates for employment”; α = .81). See Appendix C for all items.
We measured these constructs twice: 2 weeks before receiving any of the curricular materials and 2 weeks after. To provide a rough comparison against maturational change, we also collected these measures from a separate graduating cohort of 33 students (Mage = 26.06, 52.9% male) who did not receive the intervention. This comparison group was used only as a non-equivalent baseline for the quantitative analyses.
Quantitative Results
Comparison Between Pre and Post-Test: Experimental Groups
To complement the qualitative evidence, we examined whether the intervention was associated with changes in outcomes relevant to personal brand development. We conducted paired sample T-tests comparing changes in our measured constructs before and after the storytelling intervention (see Table 3 for means). Significant differences emerged for the appeal, t(41) = 4.17, p < .001, and differentiation, t(41) = 3.09, p = .004, dimensions of PBE; differences in professional identity clarity, t(41) = 3.11, p = .003; and employment self-efficacy, t(41) = 3.19, p = .003, also emerged, with the increase in general self-efficacy as marginally significant, t(41) = 1.93, p = .061.
Pre- and Post-Test Quantitative Results.
Comparison Between Experimental and Control Groups
We next conducted independent samples t-tests (equal variances not assumed) comparing the final mean for the experimental group with the mean for the control group. Welch’s independent samples t-tests indicated that students in the intervention group scored significantly higher than the comparison group on the appeal dimension of PBE, t(65.37) = 3.56, p < .001; the differentiation dimension of PBE, t(76.81) = 3.75, p < .001; and professional identity clarity, t(61.80) = 16.30, p < .001. No significant differences emerged for employment self-efficacy, t(91.54) = 0.29, p = .772, or general self-efficacy, t(89.42) = 1.01, p = .317.
Overall, the quantitative findings suggest that the intervention was associated with gains in personal brand appeal, differentiation, and professional identity clarity, with other outcomes moving in the expected direction. The comparison-group results provide some additional context suggesting that the observed differences may not be due solely to maturational change, although the non-equivalent design precludes strong causal conclusions.
Together, the qualitative and quantitative findings converge in meaningful ways. The qualitative analysis identified two processes through which storytelling supported personal brand development: reflective integration, through which students constructed more coherent accounts of their experiences, values, and professional trajectories, and discursive construction, through which they shaped those accounts into narratives legible and credible to professional audiences. The quantitative results complement this picture. Gains in professional identity clarity align with the reflective integration patterns observed in students’ stories, while gains in personal brand appeal and differentiation align with the discursive construction findings. Taken together, the findings provide converging evidence that storytelling pedagogy supports both the processes and outcomes of personal brand development.
General Discussion
This study examined how storytelling pedagogy can support MBA students’ personal brand development. The findings suggest that storytelling may help students move beyond formulaic self-presentation by supporting both self-understanding and audience-facing identity articulation.
Classroom Applications
Our findings offer concrete pedagogical implications for business educators seeking to address the persistent gap between labor market expectations and education practice. Although personal branding is increasingly critical to career success (Gorbatov et al., 2019), students are often taught to produce branding artifacts without receiving much support in the underlying work of identity articulation. By integrating storytelling into branding instruction, this intervention helps students not only reflect on who they are becoming but also communicate that identity in narrative form.
The storytelling-based approach offers several practical advantages. First, it is flexible and scalable. The intervention fit within a core marketing course through two workshops and linked assignments, and it required no structural program changes. The curriculum can be delivered by course instructors following training from storytelling facilitators, making it sustainable across cohorts and adaptable to various course contexts. At the same time, we do not suggest that all marketing courses should devote six in-class hours to the full intervention. Rather, the pedagogy is modular and can be adapted to fit different learning goals, course formats, and time constraints. Instructors can implement a condensed version by combining the branding and storytelling workshops, reducing the amount of pre-work, replacing the final video with a written narrative or interview response, or embedding peer feedback into existing discussion or presentation activities.
Second, the intervention is developmentally appropriate for students whose professional identities are still emerging. Rather than asking students to declare fixed brand propositions prematurely, storytelling allows them to explore, experiment with, and articulate evolving self-concepts through narrative (Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010). The iterative structure—values assessment, peer feedback, draft revision, and final performance—creates opportunities for both reflection and communication practice. This makes the approach especially well-suited to early-career MBA students and to other contexts in which professional identity formation is itself part of the learning challenge.
Third, students found the exercise engaging and meaningful. Students found storytelling more authentic than traditional branding, helping them move beyond buzzwords to articulate experiences reflecting growth and purpose. This emotional resonance matters pedagogically: when students perceive assignments as genuine identity work rather than performative compliance, they invest more deeply and retain learning more durably (Cunliffe, 2004; Hibbert, 2013). Consistent with this interpretation, our quantitative results support this pattern, showing significant improvements in PBE (brand appeal and differentiation) and professional identity clarity relative to pretest and comparison-group benchmarks.
Finally, this approach aligns with broader calls to reimagine marketing education as developmental rather than purely instrumental (Mintzberg, 2004). As business schools face growing pressure to cultivate self-awareness, adaptability, and ethical reasoning in addition to technical competence, storytelling pedagogy provides a concrete model for integrating identity formation into the curriculum. By treating narrative competence as foundational to professional effectiveness, educators can better prepare students for contemporary careers that demand continuous self-authorship across boundaries, transitions, and uncertainties (Honea et al., 2017; Sullivan & Baruch, 2009). Our curriculum materials, including the partnership model with The Story Collider and detailed implementation guidelines, offer a replicable framework that other institutions can adapt to their own contexts.
Theoretical Implications
This study makes two primary theoretical contributions to research on personal branding, storytelling pedagogy, and marketing education. First, it reconceptualizes personal brand development as involving both reflective integration and discursive construction. Prior research has predominantly treated personal brand development as a strategic communication problem centered on positioning, message consistency, and market differentiation (Gorbatov et al., 2018; Labrecque et al., 2011; Parmentier et al., 2013). Our findings suggest that effective personal brand development depends not only on creating polished branding artifacts but also on interpreting experience, linking past and future selves, and shaping that material into a narrative others can recognize and value. In this way, the study shifts attention from branding outputs alone to the identity work through which professional selves are formed and articulated.
Second, the study clarifies why storytelling pedagogy is especially well-suited to personal brand development. Our findings suggest that storytelling’s pedagogical value lies in linking self-insight with audience-facing identity articulation. This clarifies a point that reflection-centered views of learning, including transformative learning theory, do not fully address. Transformative learning explains how learners revise internal frames of reference through reflection and dialogue (Mezirow, 1997). Personal brand development, however, also requires discursive construction: the narrative work of making an emerging professional identity legible and persuasive to external audiences (Boje, 2001; Riessman, 2008). Pedagogies that foster self-insight alone may therefore leave students underprepared for evaluative settings such as interviews, networking conversations, and other professional interactions.
More broadly, these findings also speak to contemporary views of careers as fluid, self-directed, and narratively constructed (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996; Hall, 2004; Sullivan & Baruch, 2009). As careers increasingly require individuals to explain who they are across transitions, settings, and audiences, the ability to construct and revise a coherent professional narrative becomes an important developmental resource. By helping students begin this work early, storytelling pedagogy may prepare them for the ongoing task of adapting and rearticulating professional identity over time.
Limitations and Future Directions
Several limitations of this study point to useful directions for future research. First, the study was conducted within a single MBA program composed largely of early-career students from varied disciplinary backgrounds. This context was well-suited to examining personal brand development among students still forming professional identities, but it may differ from more experienced MBA populations or other educational settings. Future research should examine how storytelling pedagogy operates across contexts, including executive MBA programs, undergraduate courses, and settings where students enter with more established professional identities.
Second, we captured students’ development immediately following the intervention. Longitudinal research would help clarify whether the reflective and discursive capacities fostered through storytelling persist over time and whether they translate into longer-term outcomes such as career adaptability, narrative competence, or professional advancement.
Third, our design does not allow us to isolate which elements of the intervention were most influential. The values assessment, peer feedback, iterative revision, and storytelling workshop may each have contributed in different ways. Future research could disentangle these components to identify which features are most essential and under what conditions.
Fourth, our quantitative measures relied on self-reported perceptions. Future studies could strengthen this line of inquiry by incorporating additional forms of evidence, such as peer evaluations, instructor ratings, employer impressions, or behavioral measures of how effectively students communicate their professional identities across contexts.
Finally, because personal brand stories are both reflective accounts and crafted performances, they may capture not only genuine self-understanding but also strategic self-presentation. Future research could examine this tension more directly, exploring how authenticity and impression management interact in students’ professional narratives.
Conclusion
This study suggests that storytelling pedagogy can help MBA students develop personal brands that are authentic, coherent, and communicable. By supporting both reflective integration and discursive construction, the approach offers marketing educators a theory-informed and practical way to strengthen career preparation in graduate business curricula.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Core Intervention Activities, Learning Objectives, Deliverables, and Competencies Developed.
| Stage/Component | Core activities | Learning objectives | Student deliverables | Skills/Competencies developed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Personal Brand Introduction | Students reflect on their current personal brand, desired future professional identity, and steps needed to move from one to the other. | Help students begin identifying their existing professional image and recognize personal branding as a strategic and developmental process. | Initial video reflection on current brand, desired future brand, and action steps. | Self-reflection, professional self-assessment, career goal articulation. |
| 2. Branding Foundations | Introduction to brand identity, brand equity, points of parity, points of difference, and brand bullseye concepts. | Help students understand core branding concepts and apply them to themselves as emerging professional brands. | Brand foundation exercises completed in class or as pre-work. | Application of branding theory, differentiation, positioning, value articulation. |
| 3. Values and Brand Identification | Students complete a values assessment and identify 3–5 core values that define how they work and engage with others. | Help students connect personal values to brand identity and build a more authentic foundation for professional self-presentation. | Values assessment and preliminary articulation of personal points of parity and differentiation. | Values clarification, identity awareness. |
| 4. Story Discovery | Students brainstorm meaningful life events and experiences that illustrate something important about who they are professionally. Peer questioning (“but why?” / “what else?”) helps surface stakes and significance. | Help students move from abstract brand traits to concrete experiences that can serve as evidence of their personal brand. | Initial story idea or event selection. | Reflective sense-making, audience awareness. |
| 5. Narrative Construction | Students learn story structure (beginning, middle, end), stakes, scene-building, “show don’t tell,” and the articulation of a central takeaway. | Help students transform raw experience into a coherent, audience-facing narrative that illustrates their professional identity. | Draft written personal brand story. | Storytelling, persuasive communication, message framing. |
| 6. Peer Sharing and Feedback | Students share stories in small groups, receive structured feedback focused on curiosities and confusions, and revise accordingly. | Help students refine their stories through audience feedback and improve clarity, resonance, and relevance. | Revised story draft; peer discussion participation. | Oral communication, revision, feedback integration. |
| 7. Final Story Performance and Submission | Students polish and submit both written and recorded versions of their personal brand story. | Help students practice communicating a coherent and compelling professional narrative across formats. | Final written story and final video performance. | Professional communication, confidence in self-presentation, multimodal communication. |
| 8. Transfer to Professional Contexts | Students consider how the same story can be adapted for interviews, networking, leadership, or other professional settings. | Help students understand how personal brand stories function across different audiences and contexts. | Implicitly reflected in final story framing and class discussion; may also be included as reflection or debrief. | Professional readiness, audience-centered communication. |
Appendix B
Appendix C
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.