Maastricht U., School of Business & Economics, Netherlands
We study how a French social venture helped scale social impact by selling fair-priced milk, reaching half of France’s households in less than four years. The social entrepreneur used diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames inspiring consumers to collectively take back control of pricing. These frames were emotionally charged through interactions with farmers, journalists, and social media followers, validated in the market by consumers and retailers, and finally normalized in society by politicians and lawmakers. We contribute to research on scaling social impact by offering a model of distributed scaling and showing how social entrepreneurs can mobilize the ecosystem through emotional appeals to collective intelligence and fairness. We also advance entrepreneurial framing research by revealing how emotional charging of framing can fuel scaling of social impact.
