Ecosystem framing and infomediary resonance: Amazon’s early years (1995–2003)

Abstract

Existing research into entrepreneurial framing has investigated how entrepreneurs use leadership, abstraction and familiarity emphasis in their framing to build legitimacy. However, how the media and financial analysts resonate with such framing is not known. Media and financial analysts are important information intermediaries that evaluate ecosystems and their orchestrators, as they are expert monitors offering consolidated assessments. Accordingly, we examine how the media and financial analysts resonate with the framing of a novel value proposition through an in-depth longitudinal case study of Amazon's early years. We found that Amazon differentially deployed leadership, abstraction, and familiarity framing between 1995 and 2003, decreasing leadership and increasing abstraction emphasis over time, while keeping familiarity constant. Information intermediaries resonated differently with framing: financial analysts focused more on the projective growth possibilities of the emerging ecosystem and its orchestrator, and the media focused more on real-world implications of the novel value proposition. We contribute insights about the process of entrepreneurial framing in emerging ecosystem contexts and highlight the various trade-offs that ecosystem orchestrators face when seeking resonance with the media and financial analysts. We also offer methodological suggestions for research on framing resonance that leverages linguistic analysis techniques.