Entrepreneurial Branding - The Strategic Role of Positioning and Storytelling

Abstract

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are crucial to any economy as they drive innovation and economic progress, create job opportunities, diversify markets, and foster regional development. For small businesses, branding is of great importance because a strong brand attracts customers, partners and talent, ensures a long-term competitive advantage, and enables business growth.

At the heart of branding is the strategic question of what the brand stands for and how this positioning can be communicated to a brand’s target audience. Using stories and narratives are a promising way to build a strong brand, however, the strategic role of positioning and storytelling is largely unexplored in the context of entrepreneurial branding.

The present dissertation contributes to closing this research gap with three studies investigating: (1) how small businesses build their brands in a digital world, (2) which positioning strategies SME entrepreneurs apply, and (3) the role of storytelling in the branding of SMEs. The findings provide a deeper understanding of the entrepreneurial branding process, a systematic review of research advancements in the past decade, an empirically validated typology of four positioning strategies and a survey-based analysis of the relationships between storytelling, brand orientation, brand identity, brand communication and brand performance.

The first study was a systematic literature review of 63 empirical studies on SME branding published between 2012 and 2022 (including January 2023). This study highlighted key terms of SME branding and synthesized key findings based on a conceptual framework of the entrepreneurial branding process (i.e. becoming brand-oriented, developing brand identity, implementing brand marketing and measuring brand performance). The second study analyzed three focus group discussions with SME entrepeneurs and identified positioning strategies they typically applied: Specilization, Differentiation, Conviction and Opposition. Finally, the third study explored storytelling in SME branding with a unique data set of 217 German SMEs, including 107 responses from German Start-ups. The results showed significant relationships between brand storytelling and brand positioning as well as between strategic and tactical storytelling and other key elements of brand building in SMEs.

Chapter 1 of this dissertation outlines the theoretical and empirical foundations of entrepreneurial branding and explores the concepts of positioning and storytelling from three different research perspectives. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 contain the three studies conducted and Chapter 5 concludes with a general discussion of the overall research and provides implications for entrepreneurial practice and future research.