Persuading the crowd to back your innovation
Persuading the crowd to back your innovation
Published 1 August, 2019
In recent years, modern entrepreneurship has been transformed by the scale and efficiency of internet platforms. One popular platform is online crowdfunding, where one posts on these crowdfunding platforms, and potential consumers go on this platform and decide if they want to back this project or not.
Hannah Chang
Associate Professor of Marketing
In brief
- Online crowdfunding very often comes with a video describing what the product is all about. Having different communicators can lead to more funding.
- While having different communicators can lead to more funding, the effect depends on the information complexity and the ability of the audience to comprehend the information. The more complicated the product, the better it is to have only one communicator.
- While this is true in the US market, more market research in other countries is needed.
Crowdfunding is changing how entrepreneurs finance their innovation. As the number of crowdfunding platforms continues to rise, competition for investor attention also intensifies. What can entrepreneurs and communicators do to heighten attention and strengthen persuasion, in order to secure greater success for their crowdfunding campaign?
Associate Professor of Marketing Hannah Chang from SMU's Lee Kong Chian School of Business specialises in consumer behaviour. In this podcast, she shares a recent research where she and her collaborators investigated all product-pitch videos on online crowdfunding portal, Kickstarter using a dataset with more than 30,000 project videos and millions of support from the crowd. They observed a phenomenon that has yet been documented in prior literature, that is: having multiple voices in the videos enhances persuasion and leads to increased funding.