Categories and narratives as sources of distinctiveness: Cultural entrepreneurship within and across categories

Abstract

Cultural entrepreneurship theory suggests that entrepreneurial narratives need to be optimally distinctive-neither portraying an offering as too similar to nor too distinctive from the conventions of its product category-for attracting superior demand.Building on and extending this literature, we propose that the benefits and downsides of a distinctive narrative fundamentally depend on a category's distinctiveness vis-à-vis alternative categories because distinctive categories (a) provide an important source of differentiation for their members and (b) disproportionally attract those audience members that highly value novelty. Our longitudinal study of 159,343 Airbnb listings in 45 categories strongly supports our hypotheses: the relationship between Airbnb listings' narrative distinctiveness and demand-side performance flips from an inverted U-shaped curve in indistinctive categories to a U-shaped curve in distinctive categories. Managerial Summary: Entrepreneurs need to craft a compelling narrative around their offering to legitimate and differentiate it from competing offerings. In this article, we explore when and why entrepreneurs should craft narratives that portray their offerings as similar, moderately distinctive, or highly distinctive from other

Positioning for optimal distinctiveness: How firms manage competitive and institutional pressures under dynamic and complex environment

“…Some scholars take a contextual perspective and predict that market or institutional factors might produce different outcomes of the same OD strategy on firm performance. Some of the proposed market‐related influences include category heterogeneity, category density, or competition intensity (Boone et al, 2013; Haans, 2019; Zhao et al, 2018); notable institutional‐related variables include audience diversity and the source of legitimacy (Fisher et al, 2016; Majzoubi & Zhao, 2023) or how different audience expectations might build a legitimacy buffer (Taeuscher et al, 2022). But in reality, organizations often confront both competitive and institutional pressures simultaneously (Gong et al, 2021; Topaler et al, 2021), so their combinations, across their varying intensities, may determine relevant boundary conditions regarding which OD strategies exist in which circumstances.…”

“…Furthermore, considering the three viable viewpoints on the relationship between differentiation and legitimacy (Taeuscher et al, 2022), we need insights into their actual interaction. Does the link between legitimacy and distinctiveness evolve dynamically as OD strategies change?…”

Going beyond optimal distinctiveness: Strategic positioning for gaining an audience composition premium

“…More recently, scholars have started to theorize about important heterogeneities both within and across audiences (e.g., Beunza & Garud, 2007; Falchetti et al, 2022; Kim & Jensen, 2011; Kovács & Sharkey, 2014; Pontikes, 2012) due to differences in their theories of value (Lamont, 2012; Zuckerman & Rao, 2004), degrees of domain‐relevant expertise (Falchetti et al, 2022), preferences and perspectives (Pontikes, 2012; Taeuscher, Zhao, & Lounsbury, 2022), calculative frames (Beunza & Garud, 2007), path‐dependent evaluation routines (Theeke et al, 2018), and goals and motivations (Bowers, 2020; Bowers & Prato, 2019; Glaser et al, 2020). Therefore, when audiences evaluate a firm, they may embrace different categorization schemas, judge the firm through different lenses (Beunza & Garud, 2007; Pontikes, 2012), and compare the firm with different reference groups (Bowers, 2015; Goodman & Haisley, 2007; Smith & Chae, 2017), giving rise to different predispositions toward the firm.…”

The Aesthetic Evolution of Product Categories

“…We show that in addition to signaling category membership, producers’ aesthetic differentiation is further constrained because many possible aesthetics are not viable due to misalignment with current cultural trends. We thus call for future research to synthesize insights on the role of culture in category meaning change (Weber, Heinze, and DeSoucey, 2008; Delmestri and Greenwood, 2016) with insights from research on optimal distinctiveness (Zhao et al, 2017; Taeuscher, Zhao, and Lounsbury, 2022).…”