345. IJRM. Creatrepreneurs.
January 9, 2025
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The creator economy, which allows individuals to monetize their content and audience, has given rise to a new type of entrepreneur: the creatrepreneurs. In this interview, Simone Wies and Alexander Edeling, experts in marketing and the creator economy, discussed their research and their paper, recently published in the IJRM, on these creatrepreneurs.
Key points from the discussion include:
Defining the Creator Economy: The creator economy enables individuals to produce and share content, engaging an audience and building a community. Creators use digital platforms and tools to share their content and monetize their audience.
Creatrepreneurs: These individuals are entrepreneurs who capitalize on opportunities within the creator economy, aiming to generate sustainable revenue through their content. The goal is to expand their audience to a point where they can generate revenue that they can live on.
Drivers of Success:
Environmental drivers (the ecosystem around the creators, like startups and financial backers)
Individual drivers (personality traits like openness to experience, extroversion, and resilience to social media stress)
Financial drivers (the ability to generate sustainable revenue)
Models:
Hobbyist Model (part-time passion project)
Subsistence Model (income for basic needs)
Professional Model (full-time content creation)
Niche Model (focused on a specific community)
Ephemeral Model (leveraging temporary popularity)
Launchpad Model (clear vision for long-term growth)
Leapfrog Celebrity Model (transferring fame from other channels to social media)
Collaborations: Marketers should treat creatrepreneurs as business partners, respecting their personal brand and understanding the value of their audience relationships.
Click here for the Research Article
The Up Next podcast’s access to this content is courtesy of the International Journal of Research in Marketing, an international, double-blind peer-reviewed journal for marketing academics and practitioners. IJRM aims to contribute to the marketing discipline by providing high-quality, original research which advances marketing knowledge and techniques. As marketers increasingly draw on diverse and sophisticated methods, IJRM‘s target audience is comprised of marketing scholars, practitioners (e.g., marketing research and consulting professionals) and policymakers.
IJRM aims to be at the forefront of the marketing field with a particular emphasis on bringing timely ideas to market. The journal embraces innovative research with the potential to spur future research and influence practice. Hence, it welcomes contributions in various aspects of marketing. The editors, while accepting a wide array of scholarly contributions from different disciplinary approaches, especially encourage research that is novel, visionary or path breaking.
Alexander Edeling is Associate Professor of Marketing at KU Leuven, one of the oldest universities in Europe (founded in 1425). Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University (as a visiting researcher) and at the University of Cologne, Germany, where he also received his PhD. He works on quantitative strategic marketing topics related to the interface between marketing and finance, digitalization (with a special focus on the creator economy), and unethical corporate behavior. His work has been published in leading marketing journals such as the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Research. He has received Best Paper Awards from the Journal of Marketing and the International Journal of Research in Marketing, the two journals for which he serves on the editorial review board. He has worked with companies in the automotive, telecommunications, social media, pharmaceutical, railroad, and rail infrastructure industries. He enjoys tennis, running, skiing, history, reading, and traveling.
Simone Wies is Professor of Marketing Strategy & Performance at Goethe University Frankfurt. Prior to her appointment, she held the SAFE Junior Professorship for Marketing and Finance at the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE and a Post-Doctoral research position in Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. She received her M.Sc. in Marketing and Finance and Ph.D. in Finance from Maastricht University. Simone Wies’ research centers on the interactions among a firm’s marketing strategies, financing choices, and performance implications. A substantial part of her work focuses on firm innovation as a particularly important type of marketing strategy, resulting from digitalization opportunities such as in the creator economy, and the creation of new ventures, business models, product introductions, or marketing innovations. Her work has been published in major marketing outlets such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Marketing Science. She teaches in the Marketing Analytics M.Sc. program and Goethe Business School MBA program, is Director of the B.Sc. Marketing Track, and Director of the Ph.D. Marketing Track of the Graduate School of Economics, Finance, and Management.
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International Journal of Research in Marketing
Alexander Edeling
Simone Weis