Built-in: How Entrepreneurs Use Their Personal Brands to Build Cognitive Social Capital to Foster the Venture Growth

Luca Sabia (), Robin Bell () and David Bozward ()
Additional contact information
Luca Sabia: Coventry University
Robin Bell: University of Worcester
David Bozward: Global Banking School

Chapter 7 in Contemporary Marketing Solutions, 2025, pp 155-181 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract At the beginning of their journeys, new ventures are confronted with owner-centricity. In this phase the entrepreneur’s personal brand overlaps with the still-developing brand of the new business entity. As such, building a strong personal brand represents a strategic asset to overcome both the liability of newness and the liability of smallness to attain the legitimacy needed to attract people and money. Indeed, being well suited to communicate identities, personal brands are a strategic means for the founder to stand out from the crowd and accumulate social capital to acquire resources. Yet, despite the relevance of the topic, there is a paucity of research. With the aim of addressing how the personal brand of an entrepreneur could be leveraged to facilitate the formation of cognitive and social capital, that is, a shared view of the world needed to ease the exchange of resources, the study adopted a multiple-case study approach investigated through a semiotic method. Findings suggest entrepreneurs foster a shared understanding of the world with their audience through their personal brands leveraged as a cognitive device by developing a narrative that resonates with them. Implications for the community of practice are provided with a range of future research opportunities.

Keywords: Case studies; Entrepreneurship; Personal brand; Personal branding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-74657-4_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031746574

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-74657-4_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().