Paper Session at Sase 2022

We examine how new ventures in online B2C marketplaces use visuals, such as product videos and images, in their strife for optimal distinctiveness, that is, being as different as conformingly possible. Building on research on cultural entrepreneurship as well as sensory marketing and perception, our work shows that visuals help new ventures orchestrate their distinct organizational identity, that is, appearing either more conforming or different to evaluating audiences than they truly are. We use machine learning approaches from image label recognition and natural language processing on videos and images of 1,157 entrepreneurial products offered on Amazon Launchpad to analyze the effect of the visual semantics—the meaning contained in visuals—on product performance. We find that visual semantics matter most for a new venture’s product performance when firm distinctiveness is low, albeit with a juxtaposing effect: While visuals should adhere to consumer expectations in terms of semantic fit, that is, the type of meaning they convey, they should deviate in terms of semantic richness, that is, the extent of meaning conveyed. By offering a multifaceted perceptual perspective on the way a distinct organizational identity is visually conveyed to audiences, our work has important implications for research on optimal distinctiveness. For managers, our work demonstrates clear guidelines for designing and using semantics in product videos and images to appear more or less unique to consumer audiences in online B2C marketplaces.