The power of consumer solidarity framing in scaling up social impact

Abstract

We study how a French social venture helped scale up social impact by selling fair-priced milk. Besides market success, the venture became a symbol of fair pricing for farmers, influencing public discourse and inspiring new laws. We develop a process model where energized consumer solidarity framing serves as a catalyst for mobilizing ecosystem actors, leading to the widespread adoption of the venture's solution to an economic and social crisis. This distributed process of scaling up social impact unfolds outside the venture's direct control, relying on community enactment as well as engagement and energizing from the media, incumbent retailers and competitors, as well as politicians. We contribute to research on scaling up social impact by explaining how and why entrepreneurial framing can mobilize diverse ecosystem actors. We also advance entrepreneurial framing research by offering a social-emotional explanation of how framing can enable change.