An Investigation into the Role of Brand Affiliation and Content Emotions on Crowdfunding Success: An Extended Abstract

Crowdfunding, a process of generating monetary resources for a certain need through the power of the crowds’ collaboration, is becoming a popular practice among entrepreneurs (Mollick 2012). The popularity of crowdfunding has exponentially grown in the last few years, generating around $5.1B worldwide each year (Massolution 2012) to support entrepreneurial and social ventures in the areas such as, arts, fashion, technology, and so on. In parallel with the growing popularity in the marketplace, crowdfunding is also considered an important research topic among researchers. Past studies have examined the role of important factors such as project characteristics (Mollick 2014), social information (Kuppuswamy and Bayus 2014), and consumer motivation (Gerber et al. 2012) on the funding success. While these studies advance our understanding of what leads to the ultimate funding success, we have limited understanding on how marketing factors such as branding and emotions of the rhetoric used to promote the projects affect the final outcome.