Adding Strategic Internet Marketing to an Equity Crowd Funding Project: Building Information Exchange Based Relationships on the Internet

Abstract

Technological innovation causes new markets to be created that did not exist before. In the case of private capital markets on the internet, two important new markets are the affinity market of users who share an interest with each other, and the affiliate market of users, who have some potential affiliation with each other.

These two new markets require new terms and new explanations in order to use them in a crowd funding marketing strategy. Both affiliate markets and affinity markets are relationship based, and the older marketing concepts that are based upon prices do not work well anymore for finding affiliates and affinity users.

In many cases, the new terms generally evolve from the older theories or explanations, but are not very accurate. For example, in marketing theory, professionals use the term “supply chain” as a way of describing the production relationships between producers who “add value” to the product at each step of the chain, as the product makes its way to the final consumer.

In the case of using the internet for crowd funding, the internet constitutes the technological platform for facilitating the information exchange relationship, where the behavior of the company and potential investor continues to affect each other’s behavior after a private capital investment has been made.

The important point for marketing strategy is that the CEO is looking for potential relationships, and that means anticipating two important types of places, or markets that did not exist before, on the internet to find potential investors.

Keywords: equity crowd funding, affinity, affiliates, Feser, supply chain

JEL Classification: M13, O16