Making Ideas Break Through the Crowd: The Efficacy of Marketing Communication instruments and the Success of Crowdfunding

摘要

Which marketing communication tools, which are increas-ingly diverse and more than ever easily available online, are relatively better at helping ideas "break through the crowd," i.e. at making a large number of individuals willing to donate as much as, or more than, what new products, projects, and ideas in general need to flourish in the market? And which theoretical framework can best guide an empirical analysis targeted to answer that question, having in mind that in so-called donation-based crowdfunding individuals only get a symbolic token of gratitude, a thanking note, or simply a good feeling or warm glow (Andreoni 1989,1990) for having con-tributed monetarily to an idea or cause they believe? For this reason, we assume that financing projects on a crowdfunding platform is less an economic exchange, where goods are exchanged for money or other goods (Bagozzi 1975), than it is a gift or a donation, and therefore adapt the Gift-Giving paradigm and marketing-based theoretical framework of Ben-dapudi et al. (1996) to guide our empirical analysis.