Bricolage and Entrepreneurial Branding in Finnish Tourism Business SMEs

Kati Suomi () and Kaisa Aro
Additional contact information
Kati Suomi: University of Turku
Kaisa Aro: University of Turku

Corporate Reputation Review, 2025, vol. 28, issue 2, No 5, 155-174

Abstract: Abstract The literature on entrepreneurial marketing has grown over the past 25 years, but entrepreneurial branding remains under-studied. The purpose of the present study was to conceptualize entrepreneurial branding in the context of tourism small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Firstly, this study seeks to add to the literature on entrepreneurial branding by developing a new definition of entrepreneurial branding, by looking at literatures on both ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘branding’ addressing the limitations of existing definitions to offer a more complete conceptualization. Secondly, it explores whether and how tourism business SMEs employ bricolage in their entrepreneurial branding. The study adopts a qualitative approach with abductive reasoning. In total, 20 interviewees representing 16 Finnish tourism SMEs were interviewed. The findings demonstrate resource constraints faced by tourism SMEs in entrepreneurial branding. Unique features of the place, such as history and heritage of place, were significant sources for building a unique brand identity for the SMEs, often at little cost. The study exemplifies how companies use domains of bricolage (Baker and Nelson in Administrative Science Quarterly 50(3):329–366, 2005) to manage resource constraints. The study offers new insights into the contents of entrepreneurial bricolage domains (physical inputs, labor, skills, customers, and the institutional environment) within a specific context, while also suggesting a new bricolage domain in entrepreneurial branding—namely, media bricolage. This domain refers to companies’ innovative and proactive generation of unpaid or low-cost media coverage in different channels for the purposes of brand building.

Keywords: Definition; Entrepreneurial bricolage; Media bricolage; Resource constraints; Entrepreneurial branding; Entrepreneurial marketing; Tourism; SME (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41299-024-00215-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:pal:crepre:v:28:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1057_s41299-024-00215-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/journal/41299

DOI: 10.1057/s41299-024-00215-0

Access Statistics for this article

Corporate Reputation Review is currently edited by Guido Berens

More articles in Corporate Reputation Review from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().