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Dilemmas of Branding for Start-ups ; The Opportunities and Challenges in the Digital Era

Authors:
Amirhossein Roshanzamir

Keywords: Start-up; Branding; Digitalization; Digital disruption; Emotion; Innovation; Co-creation

Abstract:
Most of the start-ups have challenges in building up their corporate brand as they have no resources, such as money and internal structure, nor do they have customers or even a consistent idea how the end-product should look like. Having a strong brand enables start-ups to increase their visibility and ensure a certain level of quality which ultimately increases their chance of success. Nonetheless branding, as a growing field, focuses mainly on well-established firms who are already successful as opposed to start-ups whose business model involves lots of risks and their success is still uncertain. Digitalization provides immersive opportunities for the start-ups to engage and communicate with their potential customers and stakeholders. The tremendous success of the new wave of start-ups, such as Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and Coursera, which are now revolutionary brands, testifies the critical impact of digitalization on start-up brand building. This paper reviews the opportunities and challenges which start-ups face in building up their brands in the digital era and suggests a conceptual model with three notions including emotion, innovation, and co-creation to address these dilemmas. Later, Coursera is reviewed as one of the most successful education-focused technology start-ups in order to illustrate the application of the model. This paper highlights the vital role of branding for start-ups in the digital era and the findings contribute to the literature by articulating a three stages modular and incremental approach to build a start-up’s brand from scratch.

Pages: 63 to 72

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018

Publication date: March 25, 2018

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3956

ISBN: 978-1-61208-615-6

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from March 25, 2018 to March 29, 2018