Entrepreneurial narratives in the video game industry to seek differentiation and coherence
Research Paper Title:
“More than words! How narrative anchoring and enrichment help to balance differentiation and conformity of entrepreneurial products”
Authors:
Alexander Vossen (University of Siegen)
Christoph Ihl (Hamburg University of Technology)
Background:
To gain a competitive advantage entrepreneurs push toward differentiation. However, they are pulled toward conformity to meet consumer preferences and meet cultural norms. Entrepreneurs face this challenge in managing the tradeoff between differentiation and adherence to established cultural norms. This study examines how entrepreneurs can succeed at this task by evaluating the narratives and its relations with cultural codes and established product categories. This research has practical implication for entrepreneurs in terms of focusing on the design process of a suitable narrative that entails researching target markets as well as other markets with interesting audiences to raise awareness and improve evaluations.
Methodology:
Sample: The first data source is video game development projects that were available from August 2012 to June 2014 from Steam Greenlight, a community platform introduced from an online video game vendor, Steam, to handle requests from independent game developers to be included in the vendor’s online store. Published games available in established markets from August 2007 to July 2012 are used as a second data source collected from MobyGames, a public website that lists information on video game releases.
Sample Size: 2901 and 11651
Analytical Approach: machine learning and natural language processing using doc2vec in Python’s genism package
Hypotheses:
Strategic differentiation has an inverted U-shaped relationship with audience evaluation.
Narrative anchoring has a positive relationship with audience evaluation that is strengthened by category spanning.
The inverted U-shaped relationship between strategic differentiation and audience evaluation is moderated by narrative anchoring, such that it is accentuated when narrative anchoring is high and attenuated when narrative anchoring is low.
Narrative enrichment has a positive relationship with audience evaluation that is attenuated by category spanning.
Results:
Anchoring the narrative in on cultural codes and meanings of claimed categories allows entrepreneurs to improve audience evaluation of products that span multiple categories or are distinct within their claimed categories.
Enriching the narrative with these cultural codes and meanings of unclaimed categories allows entrepreneurs to improve audience evaluation of products that focus narrowly on few or single categories.
In absence of particularistic reputations, cultural entrepreneurship can also work through familiarity by using category-specific meanings and logics.
When narratives are enriched to resonate with additional audiences and evoke familiarity by addressing cultural codes of unclaimed categories, audiences can be expanded, their support harnessed, and the overall evaluation improved.
Narrative anchoring can disentangle the typically inseparable effects of distinctiveness on audience evaluation.
Conclusion:
Entrepreneurial narratives are a key cultural element that can be used to signal alignment and coherence with a product category that entrepreneurs seek membership in and as a means of getting noticed by the audiences they want to reach. The insights from this research are valuable for entrepreneurial ventures in crowdfunding settings that address users as evaluators. Entrepreneurs can reach out to additional audiences, raise awareness, and improve evaluations by embracing cultural codes of unclaimed categories.