Managerial responses and customer engagement in crowdfunding

Abstract

Despite the widespread recognition of the importance of customer behavior in crowdfunding performance, empirical research concerning the importance of managerial responses in user-generated content is scarce. How do managerial responses affect backers' comments? Does user-generated content affect following backers' behavior? Using a dataset of backers' comments and creators' managerial responses from Kickstarter. com, we attempt to clarify the relationships among creator responses to comments, comment volume, linguistic features of comment text and crowdfunding performance. Our results show creator responses have a significant positive effect on customer engagement and crowdfunding performance. Moreover, creator response is an effective advertising strategy to improve crowdfunding performance.