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ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A DYNAMIC CO-CREATION OF ROLE IDENTITY AND SOCIAL IDENTITY
Entrepreneurship and marketing are two disciplines whose paths have intersected frequently, because the underlying orientation of each relates to markets and customer needs (Hills and LaForge, 1992). The most common argument surrounding this relationship has been that entrepreneurs do not follow the mainstream approach taken by large corporations when performing marketing functions. Consequently, many researchers have attempted to better understand how marketing is performed differently by entrepreneurs. Interestingly, however, extant research has tended to overlook the sui generis relationship between the entrepreneur and his firm, and the impact that such relationship potentially has on both the entrepreneur and his firm/brand.The missing link in entrepreneurial branding, we believe, lies in further understanding the dynamic that exists between the entrepreneur’s roles and his firm’s growth. Our thesis is that the entrepreneur assumes different roles in order to develop and grow his firm/brand and a newly created social structure, and eventually matures into a sense of belonging and commitment to his firm/brand that potentially attracts and retains all the other stakeholders associated with the firm/brand. This may be regarded as an identity construction process which is triggered by the entrepreneur and permeates into his firm/brand. In their cross-disciplinary exploration of entrepreneurship research, Ireland and Webb (2007) identified identity construction as one of the three broad concepts around which multilevel entrepreneurship theory can develop.Qualitative data were collected through a total of 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs from the U.K., Guatemala and Colombia. Informed Grounded Theory by Thornberg (2012) was used as a data analysis approach, permitting an empirical understanding of entrepreneurial branding illuminated by extant literature on branding, entrepreneurship and identity. Data analysis revealed that entrepreneurs whose businesses are growing are involved in a variety of actions that compel them to embrace three different roles. The first role, identified as the Entrepreneur Strategist, encompasses the triggering elements through which the entrepreneur creates the foundations and key purposes of his firm. The second role, identified as the Entrepreneur Sense-giver, captures the actions that the entrepreneur undertakes to embed his central beliefs, values and personal assumptions through his daily experiences with his employees in the firm. The third role, identified as the Entrepreneur Developer, captures the various actions that the entrepreneur embraces to permeate his firm’s and brand’s essence to the outside world, including the customers. Our study also supports the notion that the identity of an entrepreneur is a co-creation of an individual identity and a social identity. Our argument implicitly bridges the two traditionally disconnected perspectives of Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory through the entrepreneurship process. More specifically, the three roles that entrepreneurs potentially need to embrace in order to grow their firm/brand in the market are embedded within a dynamic process in which the entrepreneur’s personal identity is co-created alongside his firm’s and brand’s social identity. A successful entrepreneur of each entrepreneurial firm should eventually permeate the entrepreneurial brand essence, a distinct blend of his personal identity and his firm’s and brand’s social identity, into the world.
