Corporate Storytelling and Brand Communication: Applying Narrative Theory to Nigerian Telecommunications Companies

This study applies narrative theory to the analysis of corporate storytelling in the brand communication strategies of major Nigerian telecommunications companies, examining how MTN Nigeria, Airtel Nigeria, and Glo use narrative structures, character, and plot in their advertising, social media communication, and corporate social responsibility messaging to construct brand identities and emotional connections with Nigerian consumers. Corporate storytelling has emerged as a dominant paradigm in international brand communication, and its application to the Nigerian corporate communication context represents an underexplored area that draws productively on the skills and analytical frameworks of literary and communication studies. The study compiles a multimodal corpus of brand communication texts including television commercials, social media campaigns, and annual report narratives from the three companies over the 2021 to 2023 period. Narrative analysis examines character construction, narrative arc, the use of Nigerian cultural values as plot motivators, and the rhetorical position of the consumer within the brand story. Findings reveal that all three companies construct aspirational national community narratives that embed their brand as a facilitator of Nigerian progress and connection, but differ significantly in their cultural specificity, with MTN's pan-Nigerian narratives contrasting with Glo's more distinctively Nigerian popular culture tone. CSR narratives are shown to follow a consistent redemption plot structure. Recommendations include greater use of locally grounded narrative frameworks in Nigerian corporate communication training. Keywords: corporate storytelling, brand communication, narrative theory, Nigerian telecoms, advertising.