The relationship between brand constructs and motivational patterns in crowdfunding decisions

Crowdfunding (CF) platforms are emerging as new source of resources to support either business or not-for-profit entrepreneurial projects. This phenomenon has received increasing attention by academic scholars. One of the most important existing streams of literature is the one of backers’ motivations. To the best of our knowledge, no study has so far considered the possible role of brand constructs in backers’ funding decisions. This is due to the typical CF setting, where project proponents usually don’t have a strong brand to rely on and backers have no significant reason to feel emotionally connected to a given CF platform. However, the scenario is changing: companies and other organizations seem to be increasingly intrigued by the idea of using CF as a marketing tool. We aim to deepen our understanding of this very recent phenomenon by analyzing a special empirical setting, which is the one of CF platforms created by Universities to fund (above all) their scientific research projects. These projects have mostly to do with the progress and well-being of society, so we should expect more of other-oriented reasons for funding. Nevertheless, since all the stakeholders of a given University (starting from students) could have strong reasons to conceive themselves as “in-groups” we expect this can affect the CF intention (as a brand supportive behavior) as well as the reasons behind it.