The Poets of the Market Place: How Entrepreneurs Use Storytelling to Acquire Resources.

(1)

The Poets of the Market Place: How Entrepreneurs Use Storytelling to Acquire Resources.

Bastian Marenbach

MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Centre for Entrepreneurship

Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences University of Oslo

22.05.2018

(2)

i

The Poets of the Market Place: How Entrepreneurs Use Storytelling to Acquire Resources Bastian Marenbach

https://www.duo.uio.no/

Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo

(3)

ii

ABSTRACT

In recent years, storytelling has experienced increasing interest within entrepreneurship literature as scholars have started to explore its potential for new venture legitimation and resource acquisition. Based on a literature review, I identified ‘crowdfunding research’ as a very young research stream within storytelling and resource acquisition. But most of these studies are quantitative, which lead me to taking a qualitative approach, analysing the narratives of six chosen crowdfunding campaigns. More precisely, I took an Aristotelian approach to shed light on how entrepreneurs persuade the crowd on Kickstarter. The analysis included a personal rating of the narratives’ persuasiveness in text form, complemented by a live-questionnaire rating where I showed the corresponding videos to a group of participants.

Results suggest that entrepreneurs can increase the persuasiveness of their narratives by appealing to general persuasive themes that address either pathos, logos, or ethos, which in turn leads to higher resource acquisition performance. On Kickstarter, addressing especially logos themes in the text-narrative lead to increased funding success. Persuasion through logos is thereby conveyed by written text and spoken word, whereas pathos and ethos persuasion work best through visual forms of narratives like images and videos. This indicates, that entrepreneurs can use different types of media to appeal to different modes of persuasion.

The study closes with discussing the boundaries of the related research areas and providing possibilities for future research, in particular by proposing new types and sources of narrative data.

(4)

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing this master thesis has been challenging, and I would especially like to thank Daniel Leunbach for his constructive advice and valuable guidance throughout this study project, as well as for being available for chats on short notice.

I would also like to thank Truls Erikson for his help in finding a research topic that excited me personally. This helped me to motivate myself.

In addition, I want to thank the research participants, who’s contribution helped increasing the quality of my research a lot. Finally, I would like to thank the fellow students and lecturers that have been companions and mentors along the journey of the Innovation and

Entrepreneurship master program at the University of Oslo.

(5)

iv

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 1: Literature overview on new venture legitimacy and resource acquisition ... 8

Table 2: Literature overview of storytelling and legitimacy ... 11

Table 3: Literature overview on storytelling and resource acquisition ... 13

Table 4: Literature overview of crowdfunding research ... 16

Table 5: Description of the selected cases... 25

Table 6: Personal rating of persuasiveness ... 33

Table 7: Descriptive statistics of the movie night questionnaire responses ... 38

Table 8: Personal and movie night rating of persuasiveness... 39

Figure 1: The number of collected studies over the time of publishing ... 4

Figure 2: The relationship of the identified literature streams ... 4

Figure 3: Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion in Crowdfunding after Allison et al. (2017) ... 20

Figure 4: Data analysis plan ... 27

Figure 5: Aristotelian persuasion themes ... 31

(8)

1

1 INTRODUCTION

In April 2016 I was participating in a pitching competition organised by the federal

government of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. While preparing my pitch, I was struggling to fit everything I wanted to say into the allowed maximum time of three minutes. I scripted many different versions but none of them felt right.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I should just tell my story. I went on stage and presented my business idea to a jury and the audience. It was nothing more than an idea born out of an experience, and I told people about this experience. My pitch was ranked third place by the jury and even won the audience’ choice award. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had scripted my pitch like a typical hero journey. This structure of a story is often found in myths and consists of “a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return” (Pilotta, 2016: 39). I my case, it was a travel experience which took me far out of my comfort zone, changed my perspective, and sparked a business idea.

‘Story’ appears to be something that everybody understands, but most people ‘talk’ rather unconsciously – like I did. But I experienced how powerful it can be for entrepreneurs to tell a persuasive story. That’s why I decided to dedicate this study to entrepreneurial storytelling.

Unfortunately, research on the remarkable similarity of an entrepreneurs’ journey to that of a mythical hero can be described as quite saturated: “’Oh no, not more entrepreneurial hero success stories’ I hear the (rightly) sceptical entrepreneurship inquirer exclaim.” (Hjorth &

Steyaert, 2004: 569). But there are many different contexts and types of entrepreneurial stories (O'Connor, 2002), and the hero journey is certainly not always the best way to persuade an audience.

1.1 Research problem, objectives, and question

We have a well-researched understanding of a new venture’s challenges in acquiring external resources. Being perceived as legitimate is seen as the central and crucial problem (Garud, Schildt, & Lant, 2014; Rutherford, Buller, & Stebbins, 2009; Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002). In recent entrepreneurship literature, storytelling has gained attention in addressing this problem (Garud et al., 2014).

However, we know only little about how entrepreneurs acquire financial resources on internet-based crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter (Allison, Davis, Webb, & Short,

(9)

2 2017). There is a stream of research that deals with crowdfunding, but most of the studies are quantitative, often analysing large datasets with the help of algorithms.

Thus, this study sets out to gain more insights on how entrepreneurs use storytelling on Kickstarter by taking a qualitative approach. In particular, I take an Aristotelian persuasion perspective. The aim is to improve our understanding of how entrepreneurs persuade the crowd and provide suggestions for future research. Therefore, entrepreneurs of early stage ventures can possibly benefit from this study. The main objectives are

• to understand how entrepreneurial narratives can persuade,

• and to explore how that contributes to resource acquisition in crowdfunding.

Consequently, the research question is:

How do entrepreneurs use storytelling to persuade the crowd?

1.2 The stage: Kickstarter

Among many available crowdfunding websites, I chose www.kickstarter.com as the currently most popular one (Pietraszkiewicz, Soppe, & Formanowicz, 2017). Kickstarter is a so-called rewards-based crowdfunding platform. This means that entrepreneurs can obtain financial support from the general public in exchange for non-financial rewards (Allison et al., 2017).

Entrepreneurs can use the platform’s tools to create a webpage to present their project and collect funding. Such a project is then often called a campaign, because the time of how long it is ‘open’ to collect funding is limited. The duration can be anything from 1 to 60 days (Kickstarter). Kickstarter has an ‘all-or-nothing’ rule, which means that a project only receives money if the set-out funding goal has been reached. But there is no upper limit of funding, so that people can back already funded projects as long as the campaign is ongoing.

Although not obligatory, the project creators usually include a video. These videos are the main data source of my study.

1.3 This study’s structure

Starting with the presentation of the current state of research derived from a literature review, an in-depth explanation of how I went about conducting my research is given in the

methodology section. Since I developed my own framework, it is presented on its own, before then showing and discussing the findings. Finally, the study ends with concluding remarks and possibilities for future research.

(10)

3

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

To explore the current state of research on the role of storytelling in resource acquisition, I conducted a literature review in two stages. First, I searched across the following, reputed entrepreneurship and management journals that were recommended by my supervisor:

Management:

Academy of Management Annals (AMA), Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Academy of Management Proceedings (AMP), Academy of Management Review (AMR), Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), and Organization Science (OS)

Entrepreneurship:

Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice (ETP), Journal of Business Venturing, (JBV), and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (SEJ)

In doing so, I collected a core set of relevant journal articles. In the second stage, I extended my search with the use of Google Scholar. Among those second-stage-articles I found not only additional publications of the first stage journals, but also relevant articles in other research fields such as linguistics or psychology. In addition, I took into account studies that were frequently referenced in the core set but published in other journals.

The following keywords were used for the search in both stages: legitimacy, new ventures, storytelling, entrepreneurial narratives, and sensemaking. I selected the articles after screening the titles and abstracts for relevancy.

After my first literature search on storytelling and resource acquisition it became apparent that this research field only recently gained attention within entrepreneurship studies. In the

consequence, I did not exclude articles that were published before or after a certain year.

Together with selected articles I received from my supervisors, my set includes 42 articles, dating from 1995 to 2018. Interestingly, half of the sample of articles has been published between 2014 and 2018. This indicates that studying the role of storytelling in new venture legitimation and resource acquisition is a relatively young field of research that enjoys current interest. More specifically, most of the latest studies deal with crowdfunding. Figure 1

illustrates the number of articles published over the years.

(11)

4 Figure 1: The number of collected studies over the time of publishing

Based on the perspective taken on entrepreneurial resource acquisition, I identified three relatively distinct literature streams: one focusing on new venture legitimacy, another focusing on storytelling, and a third focusing on crowdfunding, where the latter is closely related to the second. I hope to help understanding the relationship between these literature streams with the following diagram.

Figure 2: The relationship of the identified literature streams

(12)

5 In the following, I elaborate on each of these streams and on their relative strengths and

weaknesses. The text is structured in accordance to the diagram, going from the bigger frames to the smaller ones. To draw a complete picture of each stream, I include several tables that show the respective studies, their methodological approach, and their key insights.

2.1 New venture legitimacy and resource acquisition

The first literature stream focuses on the role of new venture legitimacy in entrepreneurial resource acquisition. Singh, Tucker, and House (1986) are considered to provide the first empirical insights on legitimacy within the management research domain. Besides this, literature on new venture legitimacy and resource acquisition is mainly grounded in the domains of economic sociology and entrepreneurship (Überbacher, 2014).

To successfully launch a new venture, entrepreneurs need to acquire resources such as human or financial capital and achieve support from a range of external audiences. For these

stakeholders to provide the entrepreneurs with the needed resources, it seems widely accepted that stakeholders need to perceive the venture as legitimate (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Fisher, Kotha, & Lahiri, 2016; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002). Legitimacy is defined as “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions.” (Suchman, 1995: 574). It is therefore not seen as something a new venture can take. Instead, it is bestowed upon a new venture by the judgement of others (Pollack, Rutherford, & Nagy, 2012).

One influential paper of the field shows that legitimacy itself can be seen as a resource (Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002). The authors argue that it is important for attracting other

resources, and that it can be controlled by strategic actions. The authors further introduced the concept of the ‘legitimacy threshold’, the idea that there is a point in the course of a new venture before which it is more likely to perish, and after which it struggles significantly less to acquire resources. Extending this work, Fisher et al. (2016) showed that over the life cycle of an organisation, this organisation needs to overcome not one but multiple legitimacy thresholds.

(13)

6 The nature of the relationship between legitimacy and resource acquisition is multifaceted. On the one side, legitimacy is often seen as a prerequisite for resource acquisition (Zimmerman &

Zeitz, 2002). On the other side, there is no clear identifiable connection between legitimacy and economic returns. Consequently, entrepreneurs usually don’t prioritise legitimation activities (Wang, Thornhill, & De Castro, 2017).

After conducting an extensive and critical review, Überbacher (2014: 667) describes the research on new venture legitimacy as “fragmented” and resting on “taken-for-granted assumptions that require problematization”. He points out that different research perspectives share similar assumptions about the audiences (1), the purpose (2), and the consequences (3) of new venture legitimation:

1) Scholars don’t distinguish enough between different audiences that judge the legitimacy of a new venture.

2) According to Suchman (1995), the purpose of legitimation can be to acquire, maintain, or restore legitimacy. However, scholars focus exclusively on how legitimacy can be acquired.

3) Scholars assume that legitimacy has only beneficial consequences for new ventures.

He further shows that depending on a researcher’s theoretical perspective, the explanations of how new ventures can gain legitimacy even contradict each other. “For instance, while ecological studies assume that audiences control the legitimation process, strategic

perspectives propose the opposite. According to these perspectives, not audiences, but [new venture] representatives such as entrepreneurs shape legitimation processes according to their interests.” (Überbacher, 2014: 668).

In reference to point (1), some scholars recently began to investigate our understanding of legitimacy judgements by analysing how and why they may differ across multiple audiences (Fisher, Kuratko, Bloodgood, & Hornsby, 2017).

In response to point (2), the sole concentration of how legitimacy can be acquired, an explanation can be found in Pollack et al. (2012). The authors point out that the research on how legitimacy is acquired may be especially important in the new venture context because it is seen as crucial for acquiring initial key resources. In contrast to matured ventures, most new ventures usually possess only little legitimacy. Once a new venture has acquired legitimacy, maintaining or restoring it is far less difficult. In my own words: if you are not perceived as

(14)

7 legitimate, there is no legitimacy to be maintained or restored. I conclude that this can be referred to the concept of the ‘legitimacy threshold’. And I further derive that it is therefore not surprising that research on new ventures focuses on the acquisition aspect of legitimacy.

Nevertheless, an exploration on the possibilities of maintaining and restoring legitimacy through storytelling in a new venture context can be found in Garud et al. (2014).

Finally, also my sample of articles does not provide any examples on possible negative consequences of legitimation (point 3). But Überbacher (2014) provides some stimulating thoughts himself. For example, trying to achieve legitimacy through conformity may also decrease a new venture’s aspirations to stand out as distinct. Moreover, trying to be comprehensible for audiences might cause the danger of being exploited. For instance, revealing too much of one’s technological knowledge for the sake of transparency may provoke competitors to copy that technology. Another possible downside of legitimacy could arise if a new venture’s legitimacy is approved by ventures who themselves are considered illegitimate (Überbacher, 2014).

Additionally, I found one stimulating article that did not assume all legitimation strategies to be positive. Rutherford et al. (2009) draw attention to the fact that some legitimating

strategies might be ethically questionable. The authors state that, since it can be difficult for an external audience to determine the quality of a new venture, “ it is especially tempting and possible for entrepreneurs to mislead social actors by engaging in legitimacy lies, or

intentional misrepresentations of the facts.” (Rutherford et al., 2009: 949). Therefore, they applied two ethical frameworks that help judging whether different observed legitimating behaviours might be ethically acceptable or not.

The latest literature on new venture legitimacy deals with the challenge of distinctiveness.

How can entrepreneurs show conformity to typical characteristics of similar firms without being exploited while at the same time convince audiences that they are offering something new? This relates to point (3) mentioned earlier. An explorative, configurational approach to this challenge can be found in McKnight and Zietsma (2018).

The following table provides an overview of our current empirical knowledge about legitimacy and resource acquisition.

(15)

8 Table 1: Literature overview on new venture legitimacy and resource acquisition

Table 1: Literature overview on new venture legitimacy and resource acquisition

(16)

9

Table 1 (continued): Literature overview on new venture legitimacy and resource acquisition

(17)

10 2.2 The role of storytelling

The second literature stream focuses on the role of storytelling in new venture legitimation and resource acquisition and can therefore be regarded a subset of the first stream described before. The start of empirical research in this field is considered to be set by Aldrich and Fiol (1994). Later, approximately after the year 2000, more scholars began to call attention to the role of storytelling in entrepreneurial processes such as legitimation and resource acquisition (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Martens, Jennings, & Jennings, 2007; O'Connor, 2002).

Legitimacy and resource acquisition are strongly interconnected and interdependent (Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002). But I identified certain studies focusing more on legitimacy (Garud et al., 2014; Golant & Sillince, 2007; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; O'Connor, 2004;

Wry, Lounsbury, & Glynn, 2011), and others focusing more on resource acquisition (Lurtz &

Kreutzer, 2014; Martens et al., 2007; O'Connor, 2002). Both perspectives provide a quite limited number of articles. Consequently, the empirical findings in the literature on the role of storytelling in new venture legitimation and resource acquisition are few.

2.2.1 Legitimacy perspective

Most of the literature on storytelling in the context of legitimacy is theoretical and thus requires more empirical research. Only O'Connor (2004) and Golant and Sillince (2007) provide examples of empirical case-study research. The former showed how entrepreneurs deliberately adapted their company story several times during a 12-month research period in order to facilitate positive legitimacy judgements of different audiences. She further proposed that legitimation is an observable linguistic process that can be studied empirically (O'Connor, 2004). The latter applied the Greimasian model of narrativity (Greimas, 1987). This model identifies archetypal actors and reoccurring structures within (organisational) stories. Golant and Sillince (2007) argue that this degree of narrativity indicates persuasiveness, which lead them to conclude that high persuasiveness of organisational storytelling positively impacts legitimation. More specifically, organisations become more comprehensible when they represent the archetype of a protagonist in search of a quest. And in the consequence, they are more likely to be perceived as legitimate (Golant & Sillince, 2007).

The following table provides an overview of the storytelling literature within the legitimacy perspective, complementing the main contributions described here.

(18)

11

Table 2: Literature overview of storytelling and legitimacy

(19)

12 2.2.2 Resource acquisition perspective

In terms of the second perspective, the view on resource acquisition, O’Connor’s paper published in 2004 is regarded the pioneering work in this field as well (Martens et al., 2007).

I conclude that this confirms the close relationship of legitimacy and resource acquisition. But scholars can therefore possibly make use from a certain degree of freedom when interpreting existing research.

In O'Connor (2004), the author also refers to one of her earlier studies. There, she accompanied a high technology start-up for ten months and elaborated a typology of

entrepreneurial narratives (O'Connor, 2002). She further found out that stories are a key asset for founders to justify their venture, acquire resources, and make short and intermediate term decisions.

In contrast to O’Connor’s single-case design, Martens et al. (2007) widened our

understanding of storytelling and resource acquisition by including more cases, analysing all initial public offerings in three high-tech industries from 1996-2000. Their results suggest that entrepreneurial narratives indeed impact the likelihood of acquiring resources. They further

“support the underlying premise that storytelling is a key mechanism through which

entrepreneurs can leverage their existing capital to acquire additional resources.” (Martens et al., 2007: 1125). The authors found out that effective stories for resource acquisition are those that construct clear venture identities, explain in a simple manner how the entrepreneur plans to mitigate risks, and base unfamiliar elements in the context of those that are familiar.

The latest paper on storytelling and resource acquisition is given by Lurtz and Kreutzer (2014). By transcribing and analysing live-pitches, they showed that constructing a story with strong Greimasian actants increased resource acquisition success. Especially, portraying a venture as a protagonist on a quest with clearly identified obstacles and opponents indicated successful storytelling. They took a very similar approach to Golant and Sillince (2007), but focused on the resource acquisition and not the legitimacy aspect.

An overview of the current insights on storytelling and resource acquisition is given in the following table.

(20)

13

Table 3: Literature overview on storytelling and resource acquisition

Table 3: Literature overview of storytelling and resource acquisition

(21)

14 2.3 Crowdfunding research

Vaara, Sonenshein, and Boje (2016) raise attention to the fact that the internet and social media provide a large source of entrepreneurial narratives and huge potential for scholars to make more sophisticated analyses, where the narrative data can be text, picture, video, audio and so on. Scholars have just begun to test how to use these types of data in the best way.

Current examples can be found in studies investigating the workings of online crowdfunding.

The third literature stream I found to be relevant for my own study can be described as

‘crowdfunding research’ (McKenny, Allison, Ketchen, Short, & Ireland, 2017). Most of these papers analyse the language used in crowdfunding campaigns. They are therefore closely related to storytelling and resource acquisition. The first article of this kind included in my sample dates back to 2014 (Frydrych, Bock, Kinder, & Koeck, 2014). Only in 2017 and during the time of writing this thesis, contributions to crowdfunding research were published in one of the top entrepreneurship journals (Allison et al., 2017; Anglin, Short, Drover, Stevenson, McKenny, & Allison, 2018; Parhankangas & Renko, 2017). Crowdfunding research generally draws upon existing theories such as signalling, social capital, and legitimacy, but applying those traditional theories to crowdfunding has mostly produced mixed results (Allison et al., 2017).

Since it is a very young field of research, our knowledge of how entrepreneurs acquire financial resources via internet-based platforms is quite limited (Allison et al., 2017).

Frydrych et al. (2014) suggested that entrepreneurial narratives are an effective tool for entrepreneurs to influence and shape the believes of potential funders, but the exact

mechanisms are still unclear. Additionally, we know only little about what drives the crowd to support a project (Mitra & Gilbert, 2014). And the differences between the crowd and

traditional investors are yet to be explored (Allison et al., 2017). Thus, both acting sides of crowdfunding, the entrepreneur and the crowd, require more investigation to improve our understanding of how and why certain projects get funded and others don’t.

The literature on crowdfunding research is generally grounded in several different research disciplines like entrepreneurship, linguistics, or psychology. In addition, it emerged only recently. Therefore, it is difficult to identify the main contributors. In the consequence, I want to present one outstanding paper and the applied analytical model in short before closing this section with another table overview.

(22)

15 One particularly interesting paper is that of Allison et al. (2017). They analysed how

entrepreneurs persuade on Kickstarter. Their paper is therefore highly relevant for my own study, which can also be ascribed to crowdfunding research. The authors applied the so-called elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). The model helps analysing how entrepreneurs change potential funders’ attitudes through narratives. This will be further explained at the end of this chapter.

Allison et al. (2017) found out that entrepreneur-specific information such as education and experience as conveyed by the narrative increase crowdfunding performance, and that this effect is enhanced when the crowd’s motivation and ability (elaboration likelihood) are high.

Also portraying a new venture as a personal dream, adopting a group identity, and using a positive narrative tone increased crowdfunding performance, although only with a low significance for the latter. But in contrast to their first finding, here, persuasion through the peripheral route was enhanced when elaboration likelihood was low.

As this study investigates the same phenomenon but with a different approach to persuasion, I will relate my own findings to Allison et al. (2017) in the discussion chapter after presenting my findings.

Again, I want to include a quick overview of the literature on crowdfunding in Table 4. The table illustrates that the majority of crowdfunding research is quantitative and uses language processing software for the analysis.

(23)

16

Table 4: Literature overview of crowdfunding research

(24)

17

Table 4 (continued): Literature overview of crowdfunding research

(25)

18 2.4 Summary: What we know and don’t know

It has been suggested and observed that storytelling is an effective tool which entrepreneurs can use to enhance the chances of acquiring resources (Frydrych et al., 2014; Martens et al., 2007; O'Connor, 2004). In this context, ‘good’ storytelling is constructing a clear venture identity, explaining in a simple manner how one plans to mitigate risks, and grounding unfamiliar elements in the context of those that are familiar (Martens et al., 2007).

Additionally, the narratives told by entrepreneurs are regarded an effective conveyer of persuasive messages that lead to crowdfunding success. When the motivation and ability of a potential funder is high, they are more likely to be persuaded by direct issue-relevant

information. If motivation and ability are low, the crowd is more likely to be persuaded by peripheral indicators that are easier to process (Allison et al., 2017).

In terms of what we don’t know about storytelling in resource acquisition, we lack knowledge about what makes a story persuasive other than including issue-relevant information. How, for instance, can entrepreneurs construct effective stories and narratives to influence the process of persuasion. Furthermore, it remains unclear what distinguishes funders of crowdfunding projects from traditional investors like for example venture capital firms or angel investors. Consequently, we also lack an understanding of how effective stories differentiate themselves for these different investor groups. This has been analysed from the legitimacy perspective (Becker-Blease & Sohl, 2015; Fisher et al., 2017) but not from the perspective of acquiring financial resources.

2.5 Additional findings

In the following I want to present other interesting and relevant findings of my literature review that are not related to the theory itself.

2.5.1 Terminology: stories and narratives

As I found out during my literature review, almost no entrepreneurship or management article differentiates between what is a story and what is a narrative. McQuillan showed that the two terms are generally used interchangeably (as cited in Kim, 2015: 6). Thus, the literature can be confusing here.

(26)

19 One might argue that story and narrative essentially mean the same, but as Kim (2015: 6) demonstrates, “we say ‘storytelling’ not ‘narrative telling’, ‘narrative inquiry’ not ‘story inquiry’”. There is a subtle difference between story and narrative.

In my understanding of the definition by Kim (2015), a narrative is at first a form of knowledge. It is an essential mean to human expression, and the most common and oldest form is myth. A narrative is a recounting of an event. It is then the (not necessarily

chronological) order of several narratives that make up a story. Stories construct "apparently independent and disconnected elements of existence" into "related parts of a whole" (Barry &

Elmes, as cited in Martens et al., 2007). “This is what we mean when we say stories (not narratives) have a beginning, middle, and end […].” (Kim, 2015: 8). In that sense, one can say that stories are built by narratives, or that stories contain narratives.

Defining storytelling is simpler. It is the process of telling a story. In broad terms it can be described as “the primary way we express what we know and who we are” (Kim, 2015: 9).

My literature review indicates that researchers generally use the term storytelling for both telling a story and telling a narrative. One has to look at the context and the data they have used to differentiate the two. This becomes important when interpreting empirical findings.

For example, some scholars might say ‘engaging in storytelling leads to improved …’,

without explaining their understanding of storytelling. The literature generally fails to provide a clear distinction, although research has shown that there are many different types of stories (O'Connor, 2002) and entrepreneurial narratives (Vaara et al., 2016). Nonetheless, storytelling as a broader concept is a fundamental human attribute, and as Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld put it: “A business is talked into existence” (as cited in Pollack et al., 2012: 918).

2.5.2 Analytical frameworks

It would be interesting to see other separate analytical models of narrativity and

persuasiveness of organisational storytelling. Only the Greimasian model (Golant & Sillince, 2007; Lurtz & Kreutzer, 2014) and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion (Allison et al., 2017) can be found in my sample of articles.

The narrative structure model after Greimas (1987) identifies certain archetypal actants and actions. Golant and Sillince (2007) used this to develop their coding scheme to recognise

(27)

20 stories in their narrative data. Following the model, the authors identified a story by the

inclusion of a breach in the social context, a protagonist allocated responsibility to address the situation, a helper supporting the protagonist, and an opponent or set of obstacles that must be overcome to resolute the story successfully.

The ELM of persuasion says that persuasion works through a central route and a peripheral route, and that which route one is more likely to take to process a persuasive message depends on the elaboration likelihood. In the case of Allison et al. (2017), taking the central route means processing issue-relevant information of the entrepreneur and the product. Taking the peripheral route means processing peripheral cues such as portraying the venture as a dream, adopting a group identity, and a positive narrative tone. The authors define elaboration likelihood as the audience’s motivation (How high is the funding commitment?) and ability (How much experience does one have as a crowdfunder?). I hope to make this more

understandable with the following diagram.

Figure 3: Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion in Crowdfunding after Allison et al. (2017)

In this thesis, I took an Aristotelian approach to persuasiveness. The analytical framework was developed by myself and can therefore not be compared directly. But since I intended to measure how entrepreneurs persuade with storytelling, I can relate my own results to those of

(28)

21 Golant and Sillince (2007) for the legitimacy perspective, and Allison et al. (2017) for the context of crowdfunding. Although they don’t make any conclusions on persuasiveness, I will also refer to Lurtz and Kreutzer (2014) for the resource acquisition perspective, because their paper represents the latest study on storytelling and resource acquisition. This will be

addressed in chapter 6 Discussion.

3 METHODOLOGY

To describe the character of this study’s research, I use the ‘Honeycomb’ model of research methodology suggested by Wilson (2014). This model contains six ‘combs’: research philosophy, research approach, research strategy, research design, data collection, and data analysis techniques.

3.1 Research philosophy, approach, and strategy

This study was conducted following the pragmatist research philosophy. This means the research problem and question are the focal point of this thesis. The main goal was to generate the most significant insights to answer the research question, and the research methods have been chosen accordingly.

Although I did not aim to contribute to a new theory with this thesis, my research approach has an inductive character because I first collected data, and then tried to make generalisations about the phenomenon in question. Nonetheless, since I derived my analytical framework from the existing persuasion theory and used it to collect data as well, part of my research approach can be described as deductive.

My main research strategy was qualitative, complimented by a smaller quantitative part. The most studies that make use of narratives taken from Kickstarter follow a quantitative strategy, applying algorithms and special linguistic software. I think that these studies are valuable, but I expected there to be contextual nuances and implications that cannot be captured by

algorithms, and therefore chose a qualitative approach. I hoped to get a more in-depth insight compared to a quantitative study. The quantitative part of this study complements the

qualitative part and was mainly to increase the reliability. Following such a multi-strategy can often be seen in pragmatic studies (Wilson, 2014).

(29)

22 3.2 Research design

Since the question how entrepreneurs use storytelling in resource acquisition, specifically crowdfunding, has only little been studied, I chose to conduct exploratory research. This also fits well to the inductive approach, where one observes a real-life phenomenon we know only little about and tries to explore its workings (Wilson, 2014).

Because this thesis “investigates a contemporary phenomenon […] in depth and within its real-world context [while] the boundaries between phenomenon and context may not be clearly evident” (Yin, 2014: 16), a case study design was chosen.

Looking at just one Kickstarter campaign would not have allowed me to provide a better understanding of the research question, therefore I chose a multiple case study design.

Given the time constraints of a master thesis, the number of cases that could be included was limited. But usually, six to ten cases show replicating results (Rowley, as cited in Wilson, 2014). In the consequence, I selected six different Kickstarter campaigns under the premise that I found them most suitable to draw conclusions on my research question. Consequently, the unit of analysis is the entrepreneur or entrepreneurial team that has created and published the videos on Kickstarter.

The research design can not only be described as a multiple case study but also partially as action research. Coming back to the multi-strategy, the qualitative part consists of the multiple case study, and the quantitative part of the action research. In detail, I organised a ‘movie night’ where I showed the corresponding Kickstarter videos of my choice of campaigns to a group of participants. There, I was taking an active role in the research. How I went about the event and analysis is explained in section 3.3.2 The movie night.

3.2.1 Quality of research: reliability

Following the description of Wilson (2014), reliability refers to how far your analysis produces stable, consistent and repeatable results. Depending on the overall research approach, different reliability concerns must be addressed.

This study has a subjective nature because I assessed the entrepreneurial narratives and judged their theoretical persuasiveness by myself. Therefore, I needed to cope for inter-judgemental reliability concerns. To do so, I included the movie night where I handed out a questionnaire to draw conclusions on the persuasiveness as perceived by others. This allowed me to

compare my own judgement against that of the participants. However, by pursuing reliability

(30)

23 I might have sacrificed realism, because I randomly assigned participants to my sample of cases. In reality, people are rather drawn to specific projects (Allison et al., 2017).

Another possible threat could be observer influence. Because I was present while the

participants watched the Kickstarter videos, their behaviour might have been influenced. But since I was not interviewing or observing them in any interaction with others, I argue that there was a low risk.

To increase the general reliability, I provide all transcribed narratives together with the analysed versions in the appendix as a chain of evidence. Other investigators are therefore able to assess the evidence immediately and don’t see themselves confined to my report.

3.2.2 Quality of research: validity

Validity concerns deal with the question whether one uses the right indicators in one’s metric, so that one measures what one intends to measure. In general, one has to differentiate between internal and external validity (Wilson, 2014).

In terms of internal validity, my research can possibly lack face validity. In my case, this refers to the questionnaire I handed out at the movie night, because I cannot be absolutely sure about the extent to which the questionnaire measures what it is supposed to measure. A

possible way to mitigate this risk would be to doublecheck the questionnaire with a

persuasion expert before handing it out. I tried to do so at the university but did not receive an answer.

For mitigating the risk by myself, I used at least two questions that essentially mean the same and point to the same conclusion for each variable. By doing so, I decreased the risk of misunderstandings. In addition, I was present at the movie night and could clarify possible misunderstandings immediately. Furthermore, I showed a random ‘trial’ Kickstarter video before my actual cases, so that the participants could answer each question once and test their understanding.

In general, one can increase the validity of research by applying multiple indicators to measure a phenomenon in its entirety. Therefore, I use three different measures:

1) My personal theoretical knowledge about persuasion

2) External opinions of students without in-depth persuasion knowledge 3) Crowdfunding success measures provided by Kickstarter

(31)

24 The first measure is interesting to see but highly biased and subjective. With using the second measure, I aimed to cope for biases and subjectivity. Finally, the third measure allowed me to validate the first two with ‘hard facts’ based on the much larger Kickstarter community.

Finally, external validity signifies the extent to which empirical findings can be generalised to other contexts. But since I don’t intend to generalise it is not a big concern. As typical for a case study approach, my intention is merely to provide a better understanding of a

phenomenon. This could then be used in subsequent research, testing its generalisability.

But one has to be careful and remember that my analysis looks at entrepreneurial resource acquisition in a very special context, namely crowdfunding.

3.3 Data collection

In general, the data collection of this is study is quite complex, but not complicated.

Moreover, using a variety of collection methods enhances the quality of my research through triangulation.

3.3.1 Kickstarter narratives

First, I collected secondary data. This type of data has been published before and is publicly available (Wilson, 2014). In my case this means narratives I extracted from Kickstarter. Here, I transcribed videos from six different campaigns. This left me with six narratives in text form as my core data.

When choosing the cases I followed a purposive or judgemental sampling technique. Well- fitting to the pragmatist philosophy and exploratory research design, this means that I chose the campaigns based on my own judgement. By the time of sampling I was already familiar with persuasion theory. Derived from that I chose two cases I expected to be good examples, two medium, and two bad in terms of persuasiveness. I also collected available information about the funding status for each case from Kickstarter, such as funding goal, funding

received, and the resulting percentage of what amount of the funding goal had been collected.

I did this partially at two different points in time because some of my cases were active campaigns that were still ongoing. I deliberately chose those cases where the campaign period would run out during the time of writing, because it was particularly interesting to see

whether I could predict their funding success. Although this prediction was very limited and not in the focus of my research.

(32)

25 Comparable studies using transcribed videos from Kickstarter as a source of data can for example be found in Frydrych et al. (2014) or Manning and Bejarano (2017).

An overview describing the cases is given in the following table. In general, I chose only cases with consumer technology products because I expected them to be the most

understandable for the participants of the movie night.

Table 5: Description of the selected cases

3.3.2 The movie night

In the second step I collected primary data through a questionnaire. Primary data is defined as data I gather myself, which then becomes unique to this study (Wilson, 2014).

Usually, questionnaires suffer from being impersonal without the research being present.

Participants of a questionnaire are therefor usually not able to ask questions about something that needs clarification (Wilson, 2014). In my case, I was present the whole time the

participants answered the questionnaire. I invited 7 participants to a ‘movie night’ at the university, where I showed them the Kickstarter videos of my chosen cases and asked them to answer a few questions after each. There was also popcorn and soda. The questions were

(33)

26 derived from the same persuasion theory I used to do my own analysis. I developed the

questions in order to make claims about the use of pathos, logos, and ethos, as well as whether the participants would have supported the campaign financially. For them not to be biased, I made sure that I never spoke about any of my cases with them beforehand.

One has to bear in mind that the data I used for my own analysis of the Kickstarter videos is plain text. The participants of the movie night watched and listened to the whole videos before making their judgements. Since pathos is mostly transferred through visual

communication (van Gelderen, 2013), I expected the participants to rate the videos higher on pathos than me.

Additionally, I didn’t show any of the funding status information at the movie night, so that the participants were not biased from the results on Kickstarter. They were only provided with the campaign name and video.

There were seven participants, of which two were female and five male. The minimum age was 24, the maximum 33, and the average 27,29. The two female participants owned master’s degrees in IT respectively education. The five male participants consisted of four fellow students of the master program Innovation and Entrepreneurship and my supervisor.

3.4 Data analysis

The following illustration shows the underlying data analysis plan (Figure 3). The main work has been done on the qualitative side, analysing the narratives from an Aristotelian persuasion perspective. The quantitative part of the analysis served two supporting purposes. Thus, I could validate my insights in how pathos, logos and ethos are addressed with a control group.

‘Attacking’ the research question in this way also allowed me to draw conclusions on possible practical implications. What I mean with an Aristotelian approach is explained in the

following chapter.

(34)

27 Figure 4: Data analysis plan

Since the main interest of this study is to shed light on how entrepreneurs use storytelling to acquire resources, I analysed entrepreneurial narratives aimed at convincing an audience to provide financial capital. In my case, these are transcribed videos from Kickstarter campaigns.

Consequently, this study is a so-called narrative inquiry. As this might be an unconventional research approach among master theses within business studies, I briefly want to unpack what this approach implies and how it relates to other modes of research.

(35)

28 3.5 Taking a narrative approach

Narrative inquiry has long been used in other disciplines than entrepreneurship. These disciplines include for example psychology, law, medicine, education, anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, and organisations (Kim, 2015). As we have learned, the linguistic turn took longer to reach entrepreneurship literature (Martens et al., 2007) and the study of narratives with it.

Regarding narrative data analysis techniques, Kim (2015) bases most of her explanation on the work of one of the main contributors to narrative research methodology, Polkinghorne (1995).

In general, there are two modes of how to analyse narratives: the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode. For the latter, one would collect narrative data that contains actions,

happenings, or events. In the second step, one would then try to make sense of these actions, happenings, and events by integrating the individual pieces in to a plot. The outcome is a story. “The purpose of the narrative mode of analysis is […] to help the reader understand why and how things happened in the way they did, and why and how our participants acted in the way they did.” (Kim, 2015: 197).

The mode of this study is called paradigmatic because it relies on so-called paradigmatic cognition, a thinking skill we humans use to identify patterns among unorganised information.

This is a common and usual method of qualitative research (Wilson, 2014), but in the

narrative context, the data to be analysed consists of narratives or stories. One tries to identify common themes or patterns among collected narratives. For this study, I scanned through the narratives and searched for themes that are mentioned in van Gelderen (2013) and Green Jr (2004). For example, when analysing how much a narrative relies on pathos to persuade, addressing the ‘audience’s self-interest’ or specific feelings like ‘fear’ or ‘comfort’ were possible themes. Consequently, I use persuasion theory as the pattern or filter to scan through the collected narratives from Kickstarter.

Thus, for gaining a better understanding of how entrepreneurs use storytelling for acquiring resources, I specifically look at their ability to persuade resource providers in crowdfunding.

A thorough explanation of the framework I applied is given in the following chapter.

(36)

29

4 ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

After conducting my literature review, different theories were suggested by my supervisor to apply for investigating how entrepreneurs use storytelling in resource acquisition. After transcribing the Kickstarter videos, I checked these theories against the narratives. Following the pragmatic research philosophy, I found the rhetoric perspective and the theory of

persuasion after Aristotle to be most useful in helping me to answer my research question.

Furthermore, this presented a possibility to extent our understanding of persuasion in

crowdfunding with a model different from the Greimasian (Golant & Sillince, 2007; Lurtz &

Kreutzer, 2014) or the ELM of persuasion (Allison et al., 2017).

4.1 Aristotle and persuasion

In order to receive financial resources, entrepreneurs need to be able to persuade the resource holders. This connects to both legitimacy and storytelling. As we have learned, the resource holders only provide financial capital to a new venture when they perceive it as legitimate.

And as Delmar and Shane (2004: 390) put it, “To persuade others to support their new venture with little observable evidence to demonstrate their value, firm founders must rely heavily on the story that they tell others about the future.”, hence storytelling.

For learning more about the art of persuasion, one paper was provided by my supervisor (van Gelderen, 2013), and one was added by myself published in one of the top management journals (Green Jr, 2004). Although only the former focuses on new venture entrepreneurs whereas the latter deals with matured businesses, both papers provide an explanation of what one needs to address in a narrative to make it persuasive.

The first person that we know of to recognize the importance of narrative in human life was the Greek philosopher Aristotle (Boyd, as cited in Kim, 2015). One of his major contributions was the idea of pathos, logos, and ethos. (Green Jr, 2004; van Gelderen, 2013), which can be described as three different, interconnected modes of convincing people.

Following the description of van Gelderen (2013), pathos is directed at the audience’s emotions, logos refers to using arguments and claims supported by evidence, whereas ethos indicates trustworthiness and credibility of the persuader. In other words, pathos is persuasion through emotions and addressing a person’s self-interest. Logos is persuasion through logic

(37)

30 and argumentation, addressing a person’s desire for efficiency and effectiveness. And ethos is persuasion through credibility and authenticity while drawing on moral or ethical norms that put the persuader’s self-interest in the background (Green Jr, 2004).

Following the description of Green Jr (2004), if one moves from pathos to logos to ethos, the difficulty and time needed to grab an audience’s attention increases. But the time it takes to lose attention also increases. That means, for example, that pathos appeals (emotions) are very useful to quickly grab attention, but it cannot be sustained by pathos. And it takes the longest time to persuade through ethos, but it also has the most long-lasting persuasive effect.

Therefore, the proposed order in which to address all three aspects should be first pathos (grab attention quickly), then logos (sustain attention by proof and evidence), and then ethos (make the audience remember in the long term) (Green Jr, 2004).

Additionally, while logos is based on the spoken word, “pathos is often invoked by means of images” (Rogers, as cited in van Gelderen, 2013: 18). Images and a visually passionate

presence of the persuader help to induce pathos and invoke emotions. These emotions are then taken as the bases on which is decided whether an argument (logos) is sound or not (van Gelderen, 2013).

Interestingly, Green Jr (2004) identified direct connections between the categorisation of legitimacy after Suchman (1995) and Aristotle’s modes of persuasion. The author argues that pathos and logos appeals are aimed at an audience’s self-interest. Therefore, they build and construct pragmatic legitimacy, whereas ethos appeals construct moral legitimacy. And “over time, if these appeals are persuasively effective, they will produce cognitive legitimacy – taken-for-grantedness.” (Green Jr, 2004: 695).

My analytical framework is derived from both van Gelderen (2013) and Green Jr (2004). Both authors provide detailed descriptions of what a persuader needs to address in order to

persuade through the use of pathos, logos, and ethos. I put the descriptions from both authors together and identified a set of themes. These themes I used to analyse the Kickstarter

narratives, where I highlighted those phrases that addressed pathos, logos, or ethos. My sheet of Aristotelian persuasion themes is shown in Figure 5.

(38)

31 Figure 5: Aristotelian persuasion themes

4.2 Variables

From the knowledge I gained about persuasion, I concluded the following variables to rate my cases:

1. Pathos (How strong is the narrative in pathos?) 2. Logos (How strong is the narrative in logos?) 3. Ethos (How strong is the narrative in ethos?)

These variables are each rated on a scale from 1-5 with 1 meaning “very weak” and 5 “very strong”. The rating was done after scanning the narratives for the persuasion themes as previously described.

By operationalising my own analysis this way, I could compare my rating to that of the movie night participants, as they also provided 1-5 rated answers for the same variables. Since each variable was tested there by at least two questions, I took the mean of the provided answers for comparison.

(39)

32 4.3 The movie night questionnaire

I used the following questionnaire to draw conclusions on each variable from the participants of the movie night. These questions were also derived from the theoretical knowledge I gained during the thesis work.

I asked the participants: On a scale from 1-5, how true are the following statements for you?

(1: the least, 5: the most).

1. The video evoked emotions.

2. The video put me in a different mood.

3. The video addressed my personal interest(s).

4. The entrepreneurial team came across as knowledgeable.

5. The company provided proof for its arguments.

6. The company came across as trustworthy.

7. The entrepreneurial team came across as authentic.

8. I would support this campaign financially on Kickstarter.

I expected the questions 1-3 to indicate pathos, 4-5 logos, and 6-7 ethos. Question 8 was a to control for factors other than persuasiveness that decide whether a participant would have supported a campaign or not. Question 8 thereby accounts for another variable on its own which appears as “invest” (likelihood of investing) in the findings. For example, it was possible that a participant rated a video as very high in all three rhetoric dimensions but still would not have backed the Kickstarter campaign, maybe because he or she wasn’t affected by the problem the product was trying to solve.

Further, in order to avoid making the participants biased, I didn’t explain anything of what I knew about persuasion to them before having collected all answers. Instead, we had a joined discussion about my first findings and persuasion on Kickstarter at the end of the event.

4.4 Relation to other persuasion models

Whereas the Greimasian model identifies archetypal actants in a story and derives a measurement of narrativity from that (Greimas, 1987) , the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion shows when persuasive messages rely on issue-relevant information and when on peripheral cues (Allison et al., 2017). My own model differs in a way that it

identifies persuasive themes within a narrative that either address persuasion through pathos, logos, or ethos.

(40)

33

5 FINDINGS

The data collection and analysis process was divided into a personal and an external rating. In the following I present my findings accordingly.

5.1 Personal rating

An overview of the personal rating and the variables collected from Kickstarter is given in Table 6. The cases are sorted with descending persuasiveness from the top. In the following, I want to present the most striking findings.

Table 6: Personal rating of persuasiveness

As expected, not all narratives were persuasive to the same degree. But if there were persuasive elements, the narratives seem to generally focus on persuasion through logos.

I rated 50% of the cases as strong/very strong in logos (Pebble, Sense, and Pine).

Interestingly, it is those cases that reached and topped their funding goal. The ones weak in logos as well as pathos and ethos didn’t reach their funding goal. Among those three successful cases, Pebble and Sense had already been completed in the past. But the third campaign, Pine, was only 75% funded on March 9^th, 2018 when I selected the cases and had 13 days of campaign duration left. Even though Pine’s text-narrative relies almost solely on persuasion through logos, it eventually topped its funding goal with 135% of the requested funding received.

As mentioned in the data collection section, I aimed at predicting the funding success of those campaigns running out during the time of writing. Besides Pine those cases were Wi-Voy and Quit. But the two latter had less than 7 days of campaign duration left and 15% respectively 2% of funding received. They did not reach their funding goal.

(41)

34 Pine is therefore the most interesting case in this aspect. From a theoretical perspective on persuasion I did not expect Pine to reach their funding goal, because their text-narrative contains almost only logos appeals instead of a balanced mix with pathos and ethos. Usually, persuasive messages contain all three rhetorical modes (van Gelderen, 2013).

Having a closer look at Pine’s narrative, I identified logos appeals in almost the whole text. It is only at the very end where there are short references to themes that can help persuading through pathos and ethos. In that way, this narrative stands out from the rest. Most of Pine’s narrative states the different functions and how they can help the customer in becoming more efficient and effective. I expected this to be too much and too long for the audience that would lose attention quickly. But nevertheless, Pine managed to pass its funding goal.

The indication that logos persuasion seems to be effective on Kickstarter is further backed by Pebble’s campaign. Like Pine, its textual persuasiveness is heavily based on logos appeals and still managed to collect 10,267% of their initial funding goal, being the most successful

Kickstarter campaign in the platform’s history. Only in Sense’s case there can be found themes in the narrative that strongly address all three modes of persuasion. The rest seems to rely solely on persuasion through logos and received the minimum scores on pathos and ethos in my personal rating.

For example, the focus on logos in the narratives can be seen in (1) the extensive use of arguments and claims (van Gelderen, 2013) in favour of the presented product,

“It's the only watch that works perfectly with iPhone and Android smartphones.

Pebble is much smaller and lighter than anything else out there. It has a high- resolution e-paper display that looks sharp and readable even outside under direct sunlight.” (Pebble)

“Pine is the universal tool for all your photo and video production needs. With Pine, you can create motion control time lapse videos, panoramic gigapixel, and 360-degree images, 3D photogrammetry scans, automated camera movements, and much more.

Controlled all from your smartphone or tablet. The Pine motion app will give you the perfect control for every mode. With Pine, you are not limited to any hardware. You can use any slider or Pan & Tilt unit with step remotes, and the controller can trigger

(42)

35 multiple camera modes. This makes it the perfect solution for professional users who already have their own system, beginners who want to start with motion-controlled applications, and DIY creators who want to bring motion to their projects.” (Pine)

(2) using logic (van Gelderen, 2013) to justify the creation of the product

“With the rise of wearables, we have seen that people clearly care about their sleep.

But to us it felt so unnatural to be worrying about putting something on, charging it, remembering to press buttons. We believe that technology needs to disappear. It didn’t make sense to us that we have been told to put something on just as we get into bed.

Everything with Sense is designed to fade away. You should simply be up to just…

sleep.” (Sense)

“Studies have shown that gradual quitting an addiction is the most effective way of keeping clear of it. Therefore, we have created Quit.” (Quit)

and (3) addressing a person’s need to become more efficient and effective (Green Jr, 2004).

“Around the house, Pebble makes it easy to see who is calling while your hands are full. You can also control most smartphone music apps like iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Google Music, and more right from your wrist.” (Pebble)

“We all have a natural sleep cycle. But a normal alarm will wake you up regardless of when it is best for you. With Sense’s smart alarm it knows how to wake you up at the right time, so you don’t start the day feeling terrible. If you want to be up by 9.30, but you are already half awake at 9.15, then your alarm should know to go off then, not wait for you to fall deeper into sleep.” (Sense)

In contrast to the general focus on logos, the campaign of Sense addresses all three modes of persuasion almost equally. Therefore, I rated Sense as the overall best case in persuasion. In addition to the examples for logos provided above, they exemplify how to address pathos and ethos appeals. For example, persuasion through pathos is achieved by inducing feelings or putting the audience in a specific mood (van Gelderen, 2013):

(43)

36

“We spent a third of our lives doing it, each day is dependent on it, but we still neglect it. Knowing how you slept is good, but it’s not enough. You need to begin to

understand why you slept a certain way. While you sleep at night you have no idea what is happening. Nobody is even thinking about the most important room of our lives and how it impacts us: the bedroom.” (Sense)

By first stressing the importance of sleep, something that everybody can generally agree upon, the fact that we generally don’t put much effort into finding out how we sleep and how to improve it may create a feeling of worry. This feeling then justifies that something needs to be done. In that way, pathos can provide the emotional proof for logos. Whether or not an

argument or claim is accepted depends on which feeling it is connected to (van Gelderen, 2013).

Sense is an outstanding case where there are elements in the narrative that create a certain mood or emotion. In addition to the example above, Sense also manages to create a feeling of comfort or naturality that helps creating acceptance for a new device in a rather intimate part of one’s life:

“When designing Sense, we didn’t want to create something that looked like just another piece of technology. That’s easy to do. It is much harder to design a device that feels at home sitting beside your bed every day. It should look like an object that you’d be happy to have there almost regardless of its purpose. For something so natural as sleep, we wanted to design something that felt organic. This spherical form and nest-like structure helped to keep things both simple and strong.” (Sense)

The Quit campaign also addresses emotions effectively, in this case fear.

“Every six seconds someone loses their life because of smoking. That’s seven million people dying in vain. But we have a solution. We have been working hard to create a different kind of cigarette package.” (Quit)

But there is no indication that this strategy translates into effective persuasion as Quit did not reach their funding goal.

The Poets of the Market Place: How Entrepreneurs Use Storytelling to Acquire Resources.