Persuasive Reasons in Crowdfunding Campaigns: Comparing Argumentative Strategies in Successful and Unsuccessful Projects on Kickstarter

Abstract

In crowdfunding, individuals or small enterprises seek to attract funds for an innovative project by collecting small amounts of capital from a large number of people. In the last decade, it has become a popular form of fundraising that helped thousands of early stage entrepreneurs and ordinary people to realise their business idea (Mollick, 2014). The level of crowdfunding activity grew massively with the advent of the Internet, as project founders can nowadays easily reach a vast public by setting a campaign online. Between 2009 and 2021, over four billion dollars have been pledged on Kickstarter, one of the world’s most popular crowdfunding websites (Kickstarter, 2021a). In uploading a project on Kickstarter or similar venues, founders specify a funding target that must be met for the project to be successful and design a multimodal campaign (including video, images and written text) in which they pitch their project to an audience of potential backers. Crowdfunding campaigns, not very different from other fundraising or non-financial campaigns (e.g., political campaigns), constitute a genre of strategic communication, particularly when the latter is understood as communication related to the very existence and survival of a corporate entity (Hallahan et al., 2007; Zerfass et al., 2018). Indeed, the business project for which funding is sought can be set up only if it gains legitimacy (Frydrych et al., 2016) from funders, which in turn depends on the founders’ ability to communicate their project in a persuasive way. As this study will show more in detail, the discursive content of a crowdfunding campaign involves some of the typical “ingredients” of strategic communication, like, for example, the legitimation of societal needs, the construction of reputation and of a trustworthy image, the connection between the promoted products/services and the expectations of customers and other stakeholders, the exposition of plans for the achievement of business goals, etc. In other words, crowdfunding campaigns are persuasion endeavours that cannot be fulfilled by merely routinised and operational messaging, requiring instead the adoption a strategic approach to communication, which includes the deployment of micro-level communication strategies (Palmieri & Mazzali-Lurati, 2021; Van Werven et al., 2015). The need for a strategic approach when communicating a crowdfunding project is implicitly demonstrated by the fact that many campaigns fail to obtain their funding goal. For example, Kickstarter has currently a 38.76% acceptance rate (www.kickstarter.com/help/stats) and it includes overly successful campaigns as well as very unsuccessful ones. The chances of losing a crowdfunding