Can entrepreneurial marketing compensate for late market entry? A moderated mediation analysis

The study tested whether entrepreneurial marketing (EM) can create unique resource advantages for startups and small firms and compensate for late market entry. The authors collected the responses from 509 fast-food restaurants in Kuwait and analyzed the data through structural equation modeling. The evidence supports a direct effect of time-in-market on market share. However, customer-focused market penetration strategies (MPS) mediated the relationship between time-in-market and market share. Further, innovative, culturally influenced customer relationship management (CRM) moderated the impact of time-in-market and MPS on market share, compensating for late market entry. The authors utilize the Resource Advantage (R-A) Theory to inform market entry literature and provide novel solutions to resource-constrained late entrants who can offset the advantages of early market entrants and gain market share through an entrepreneurial marketing approach. It offers a practical approach for implementing entrepreneurial marketing in assisting small firms in seeking market advantages despite late entry and resource limitations. The study's findings have implications for small firms and marketing managers of late-entrant firms, who can leverage innovative MPS and CRM incorporating cultural artifacts to generate behavioral, emotional, and psychological engagement leading to higher market share.

Shared Identity Schemas Shape Incumbent Responses to New Entrants

An outstanding question in research on competitive strategy is what determines the strength and type of strategic response that incumbents deploy against new entrants. We argue that strategists’ assessment of threat from new entrants and their choice of strategic reactions depend on the shared identity schema in their field. Position of new entrants across identity categories indicate whether they pose a competitive threat within the same identity-based niche or outside it and whether they threaten to erode the incumbent’s category’s social value relative to other categories. Potential reactions to these threats can also be classified according to whether they protect or enhance the value that incumbents create and capture through their membership in their identity category. Matching identity-relevant strategic actions to the type of threat that new entries pose, we argue that incumbents (1) employ identity-deepening tactics in response to competition in their identity-based niche; (2) use identity-extending tactics in response to competition outside their niche; (3) respond to categorical identity threats by affirming their identities; and (4) are less likely to respond to either competitive or identity threats that originate from new entrants that do not clearly fit in the shared identity schema. We find support for our predictions in analyses using data on the population of Turkish universities over a 30-year period. We discuss theoretical implications for ecological and socio-cognitive studies of markets and practical implications for predicting patterns of strategic interaction and disruptive potential of new entrants.

Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2022.0179 .

Praised from birth: social approval assets in the creation of a new university

Purpose

The authors explore how social approval assets, namely status and reputation, are used to legitimate and categorise a new national university. They argue that in the course of the legitimation process, status and reputation work as stakeholder-oriented value-creating benefits. The authors specifically analyse the discursive constructions and labels used in the process and how the process enables nationwide university reform.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors’ longitudinal case study utilises critical discourse analysis and analyses media and policy discourses regarding the birth of Aalto University.

Findings

The findings suggest that the legitimation of the new university was accomplished through the use of two distinct discourses: one on higher education and another on the market economy. These discourses not only sought to legitimise the new university as categorically different from existing Finnish universities, but also rationalised the merger using the expected reputation and status benefits that were claimed would accrue for supporters.

Practical implications

This study elaborates on the role of various social approval assets and labels in legitimation processes and explores how policy enforcement can take place in arenas that are not necessarily perceived as policymaking. For managers, it is crucial to understand how a chosen label (name) can result in both stakeholder support and resistance, and how important it is to anticipate the changes a label can invoke.

Originality/value

The authors propose that the use of several labels regarding a new organisation is strategically beneficial to attracting multiple audiences who may hold conflicting interests in terms of what the organisation and its offerings should embody. They propose that even though status and reputation have traditionally been defined as possessions of an organisation, they should be further understood as concepts used to disseminate and justify the interests, norms, structures and values in a stakeholder network.

Investigating Category Dynamics: An Archival Study of the German Food Market

The contemporary German food market is marked by a large number of food items on retail shelves—the choice and abundance of products stand in sharp contrast to the market of the 1950s. We conduct a qualitative, interpretive analysis of the archives of a food magazine from West Germany between 1949 and 2014 to understand the changes the German food market has undergone. Drawing on category research, we discover three inter-related category dynamics that contribute to the change in the market: category member proliferation, category member valorization, and category member entanglement. We then discuss the implications of category dynamics and theorize how they drive category change.

Product Categories as Judgment Devices: The Moral Awakening of the Investment Industry

Product categories are more than classification devices that organize markets; when reflecting market actors' purposes, they are also judgment devices. Taking stock of the literature on product categories and drawing on the distinction between the faculties of knowing and judging, we elaborate a framework that accounts for how and why market actors include or exclude normative attributes in a product category definition. Based on a field study of the development of socially responsible investment (SRI) funds in France, we describe the phases and conditions of a judgment framework for category definition for both established and nascent categories. We discuss implications for research on product categories and the workings of markets more broadly.