Creating brand awareness and brand image in new ventures: the role of entrepreneurial marketing

New ventures face numerous challenges in the initial years of establishment. Due to these challenges, the failure rates of new ventures are high at the inception. One potential path to address the failure rates may be through the marketing and branding activities of new ventures. However, few researchers have focused on the insights of using entrepreneurial marketing strategies as a mitigating factor in this context. Further, new ventures and their journey of creating a favorable brand in a timely fashion is a topic that has received scant attention in the literature. This study investigates the extent to which entrepreneurial marketing impacts the development of branding capabilities to create brand awareness and brand image in new ventures. The study utilizes effectuation theory as the theoretical framework and analyzes the role of bricolage capability and brand management capabilities in facilitating the relationship between entrepreneurial marketing and branding outcomes in new ventures. The study adopts a quantitative research approach and used a multiple-informant design to collect data from the owners/entrepreneurs and the marketing managers of the same firm. Data was gathered from new ventures in Sri Lanka and analyzed using PROCESS analysis and regression analysis to test the hypothesis. The findings indicate that entrepreneurial marketing plays an important role to facilitate creating brand awareness and brand image in new ventures while brand management capabilities mediate, and effectuation and bricolage capabilities moderates this relationship. The results of this study provide insights on new venture branding and highlight the importance of entrepreneurial marketing to successfully overcome the challenges associated with new venture growth and survival.