Globalization and digitalization have removed barriers, reduced costs of multinational interchange and enabled a remarkable speed of information transfer world-wide. Thus, a growing portion of international market players are international start-ups or so called born globals. To overcome the liability of newness, outsiderness and foreigness in international markets, start-up brand building offers strategic focus and tools for accelerating this process.
The purpose of this study is to understand start-up brand building in internal and external level in international context and how internationalization and branding as operations support and affect each other. The literature review views internationalization process and start-up branding as separate phenomena since existing literature combining these two is nearly non-existent. Therefore, the study opens discussion and offers new perspectives on the topic.
The empirical part of this study was conducted as a single case analysis of global education industry start-up Edunation. Empirical data was gathered through three themed interviews including two of the entrepreneurs and one employee.
This study identifies the operations behind successful start-up brand building on internal and external level and finds the linkages between these and accelerated internationalization’s key functions: networks, international opportunity recognition and innovations.
The main theoretical contribution of this study is opening discussion of two separate research paths of start-up branding and accelerated internationalization. Study emphasizes the previous studies’ findings on entrepreneurs’ big influence on both processes and how both branding and internationalization happen in networks.
This study focuses on identifying and understanding the underlying functions on international start-up branding. It leaves space for future research since the phenomenon lacks universal guidelines and identification of most effective brand building functions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:oulo.fi/oai:oulu.fi:nbnfioulu-201809052724 |
| Date | 06 September 2018 |
| Creators | Koutaniemi, N. (Nelli) |
| Publisher | University of Oulu |
| Source Sets | University of Oulu |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, © Nelli Koutaniemi, 2018 |
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