How to Convince the Crowd: An Impression Management Approach

Abstract

Crowdfunding allows entrepreneurs to fund their business projects by attracting crowd investors to provide relatively small financial amounts via a standardized internet-based platform. Research on this topic is still limited, especially considering determinants that actually "convince the crowd" to fund someone else's business idea. This study examines impression management strategies as drivers for crowdfunding success. Based on a sample of 264 crowdfunding campaigns from Kickstarter, we develop and test hypotheses concerning linguistic behaviors affecting the likelihood of raising funds and the number of project backers. We find that crowd investors prefer high levels of positive language patterns and moderate levels of promoting innovativeness.

10,000 Steps a Day for Health? User-based Evaluation of Wearable Activity Trackers

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The Role of External Supports on Performance of Reward Crowdfunding Projects in BRICS Countries

“…A good impression of a project for supporters can be built through promoting the innovations that entrepreneurs have made for supporters (Lins et al, 2016). An indicator that can be used to promote entrepreneur's innovations is through the use of project updates feature.…”

Association Between Exposure to E-Cigarette Content Across 10 Social Media Sites and Youth E-Cigarette Use

“…Therefore, creators may treat campaigns as promotion opportunities and carefully design "pitches" (aka project descriptions) to persuade potential backers by emphasizing how innovative their works are. Although a few studies also studied the impact of creator-claimed innovativeness in their campaigns, they defined innovation claims as innovation-related keywords, such as "innovative", "creative", or "unique" (Lins et al, 2016;Mukherjee et al, 2017;Seigner et al, 2022). In this work, innovation claims instead refer to sentences written by creators to describe the newness, improvement, or advantages of work with respect to certain features or functions.…”