Is leadership language ‘rewarded’ in crowdfunding? Replicating social entrepreneurship research in a rewards-based context

Rewards based crowdfunding (where individuals provide funding for a campaign in exchange for a pre-specified reward) represents one of the largest forms of crowdfunding to date. While an emerging stream of research examines how the rhetoric used in crowdfunding campaigns impacts funding success, a number of studies examining language used in crowdfunding have only been explored in the context of social crowdfunding campaigns that rely on very different audiences, funding amounts, and project goals. To build knowledge surrounding the relationship between the rhetoric used in rewards-based crowdfunding and potential campaign success we replicate a number of rhetoric approaches previously examined in social contexts. Specifically, we examine the efficacy of charismatic rhetoric, political rhetoric, entrepreneurial orientation rhetoric, and virtue rhetoric in a sample of 1000 campaigns drawn from Kickstarter. Our replication results reveal relatively little consistency across contexts underscoring the value of replication to understand boundary conditions of important entrepreneurial phenomena.