More than words! How narrative anchoring and enrichment help to balance differentiation and conformity of entrepreneurial products

Alexander Vossen and Christoph Ihl

Journal of Business Venturing, 2020, vol. 35, issue 6

Abstract: Entrepreneurs face the challenge of having to conform to gain legitimacy, while at the same time differentiating themselves to gain competitive advantage. We show how entrepreneurs can craft an entrepreneurial narrative to succeed in this task among the user audiences empowered to evaluate their products. Building on theories of categorization, optimal distinctiveness, and cultural entrepreneurship, we propose that entrepreneurs should utilize the narrative's semantic relations with cultural meanings of established products and categories. We measure these semantic relations using machine learning methods for natural language, applied to data on 2901 independent video game proposals compared to 11,651 established games. Our findings reveal that semantically anchoring a product's narrative in the cultural meaning of claimed categories can help to leverage the benefits of differentiation, especially when spanning multiple, atypical categories. When a product focuses on few categories, semantically enriching a narrative with unclaimed categories' cultural meaning makes them more favorable to additional, possibly fragmented audiences that would not have considered them otherwise. Our results point to a key theoretical role of cultural entrepreneurship in shaping audience evaluation of categorization and differentiation by entrepreneurial ventures. It provides guidelines for entrepreneurs for managing the trade-off between differentiation and adherence to established cultural norms.

Keywords: Cultural entrepreneurship; Distinctiveness; Narrative; Categories (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L22 L26 M13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902620306583
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jbvent:v:35:y:2020:i:6:s0883902620306583

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2020.106050

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Venturing is currently edited by S. Venkataraman

More articles in Journal of Business Venturing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().