Are StartUps and Small Businesses Ready to Adopt Digital Branding Strategies? A Critical Assessment

Abstract

It is expected that every working professional must have the idea of Digital Branding to sustain in the growing digital era, approximately 170 million people are on digital media platforms. Digital branding involves the promotion of products as well as services on the internet or other forms of electronic media. The advancement in the digital world has been gradually reaching the clouds. Irrespective of size, every business is trying to cope with branding challenges to sustain itself in the market. Startups and small businesses have limited resources hence they need to think twice before investing in any branding strategy. The furious growth in the access of digital media platforms gave opportunities to businesses for spreading their brand to their target audience. Startups and small businesses face problems in choosing the strategy due to a lack of awareness and knowledge. Businesses are still not fully aware of the benefits and use of digital branding hence when it comes to their intention to adopt digital branding, many questions raise in their minds regarding cost, time requirement, benefits/drawbacks, return on investment, safety and privacy, etc. The current study has the aim to analyse factors affecting the intention of startups and small businesses for digital branding adoption. The study adopted a quantitative approach. To better formulate the problem, 15 small business owners from different industries were interviewed to understand their perspectives regarding independent digital branding. After that quantitative approach followed in translating the interview finding into a structured questionnaire for determining the readiness of small businesses and startups by addressing their concerns such as return on investment (ROI) from digital marketing, cost of digital branding, the time required for digital branding, benefits from digital branding, promotional strategies and privacy policies of digital branding. 61 responses have been received from the entrepreneurs having businesses in major cities of Maharashtra such as Mumbai, Pune, Thane, and Nagpur. Collected data cleaned, sorted, coded, and further analysed by applying the PLS-SEM technique with SmartPLS software. The research brings the need for independent digital branding for small businesses and startups. The study will also help the digital marketing professionals in understanding the factors that can affect the behaviour of adoption of startups and small businesses to come on digital platforms. Many studies are done on Digital Marketing but not particularly on Digital Branding as Digital branding mainly focuses on promotion and brand recognition strategies. The research area lacks the study on pre-sales factors that affect the decision of startups and small businesses to step into digital branding platforms, and this research fills that gap.