Identifying effective market-shaping strategies: A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis approach

Abstract

Firms regularly seek to exert influence over their operating environments through market-shaping strategies. Such market-shaping strategies view markets as endogenously enacted environments and thus broaden firms' strategic repertoire from merely adapting to the changes in the operating environment to also proactively seeking to induce changes in relevant markets. Past research has delineated the market-shaping concept and identified various shaping activities that may induce market change. However, there is limited understanding of how these individual shaping activities are combined to form effective market-shaping strategies. Against this backdrop, focusing on the contents of market-shaping strategies, the authors put forward six elements of what is being shaped: Changes in offering, pricing, customer-side features, supply-side features, representations, and norms. The findings from a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 21 case firms reveal how these elements combine into six distinct configurations. These findings contribute to the nascent research on categorizations of market-shaping strategies and research on market formation. For managers, the authors provide normative and nuanced advice on which elements to include in market-shaping strategies, depending on the overall strategic intent.