Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, United States
Growth is an important goal of entrepreneurial ventures, and an important tool for entrepreneurs is storytelling. This research asks how a social venture’s communication of its values-laden origin story to non-marginalized customers affects their reactions to the venture and its products. We run a two-wave field experiment with an Indian feminine hygiene company that is attempting to scale beyond its initial rural customers and find that 1) telling its origin story did not lead to enhanced outcomes compared to not telling the story at all, 2) this outcome was driven by the mechanism of stigma transfer, as opposed to dissimilarity or cynicism, and 3) when told with a social responsibility frame, there was lower customer identification but increased support by non-purchase means (e.g., joining the mailing list). These results urge growing entrepreneurial ventures to consider the trade-offs of telling their origin stories to new audiences. On the one hand, origin stories may generate unintended consequences in eliciting negative emotions among new, mainstream customers, which may be mitigated by putting a different frame on the origin story (i.e., a product frame). On the other hand, origin stories may lead to other forms of support for scale by different means.