Gaining insight into membership strategy: Competitive advantage by shaping institutions

Thiemo Brandt and Rudi K. F. Bresser

No 2012/7, Discussion Papers from Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics

Abstract: Institutions matter greatly in the development of competitive advantage. Different institutional strategies to manipulate and shape institutions are discussed in the literature. This paper aims at extending the existing conceptual model of membership strategy. Despite being referenced frequently, the concept of membership strategy is not well developed. This is surprising because what is referred to as membership strategy has become very popular in various industries. We propose and develop a theoretical model that explains a firm's opportunity to protect itself against dominant institutional pressures and, additionally, to create competitive advantage by implementing a consumer centric membership strategy. Practical examples are discussed to clarify theoretical interrelationships. The main illustrative case focuses on Blizzard Entertainment, an American developer and publisher of video games.

Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/56054/1/688817386.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:fubsbe:20127

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().