Breaking down the crowd of backers: profiling cooperative strategies on a reward-based crowdfunding platform

ABSTRACT

On crowdfunding platforms, the success of campaigns relies on the ability of projects to attract backers. While backers’ motivations have been examined, the dynamics existing among the distinct profiles of backers remain underexplored. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this research offers a typology of backers’ profiles and shows how these profiles contribute to the success of a crowdfunding campaign. Informed by the sociological theory of cooperation, these results explain how backers with different profiles influence each other’s decisions to support crowdfunding campaigns. We provide guidelines to project leaders and platforms to attract backers with the best profiles at the best moment to optimise the campaign’s success strategy. We also help crowdfunding platform managers build their crowd of backers and optimise their number of funded projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Crowdfunding
• cooperation
• profile
• clustering
• netnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Leclercq

Thomas Leclercq is an Associate Professor of Marketing at IESEG School of Management (Lille, France). He received his PhD. in Economics and Management Sciences from the Louvain School of Management (Belgium) in 2017. His research interests are in the field of service, innovation and digital marketing. His work mainly concerns topics related to value co-creation, online communities, customer engagement and gamification. He presented his works in numerous prestigious conferences and won several awards for his research communications. His publications can be found in highly recognised journals such as Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research, Technological Forecasting and Social change, Journal of Service Management, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Journal of Marketing Management, and International Journal of Electronic Commerce.

Ingrid Poncin

Ingrid Poncin is a Full Professor of Marketing at Louvain School of Management (LSM), UClouvain and a member of LouRIM, Louvain Research Institute in Management and Organisation. She is in charge of the Partenamut -IPM Digital Marketing Chair. She completed her PhD in Marketing at Louvain School of Management (Belgium) for which she received the “Gouverneur Cornez Award”. She is qualified researcher (HDR) from Lille University, France. Her research interests focus on the importance and measurement of affective reactions, customer experience and consumer behaviour in relation to technologies. In this context, themes such as gamification, engagement, customer empowerment, presence, social sharing, AI-Robot interaction and personalisation are at the core of her work. She has published in international journals such as Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Journal of Service Management, Information & Management, Technological Forecasting and Social change and Journal of Business Research.