Corporate branding of e-business ventures

Entrepreneurs in electronic markets move in industries where a strong corporate brand can deliver competitive advantage through differentiation. It facilitates increased attention. Despite ever-increasing followers and me-too products, it enables a company to build a positive image on behalf of the relevant target groups be they consumers/customers, shareholders, employees, or industry partners. This facilitates access to resources most scarce in early company life stages: capital, human resources, customers, industry partnerships, and management knowledge. Contemporary management literature on entrepreneurship neglects corporate communication to a great extent. This pioneering article takes a first step to outlining a framework for brand building by entrepreneurs in electronic markets. After an introduction of basic concepts relevant to this topic, we outline today´s key challenges for e-business ventures. We then introduce a generic framework for corporate branding, which in a next step is being applied to e-business ventures.