UNDERSTANDING HOW AND WHY STARTUPS EMBED HISTORICAL ELEMENTS INTO VISUAL COMMUNICATION ARTIFACTS

Abstract

This research explores how and why entrepreneurial firms embed historical elements into their visual communication artifacts. New firms seek to attract stakeholders by reducing perceived risk and uncertainty. One way to achieve this is through connecting historical elements into their narratives to create a sense of legitimacy or authenticity. This work explores how historical elements are embedded by firms into their visual communication artifacts by conducting a semiotic analysis on the websites of new ventures found in the Start Alberta database. After analysing by sector, theme findings revealed that that rhetorical strategies of legitimacy of land, authenticity of human connection, reputation and status adoption, and skeuomorphism occur. An exploratory step to understand why entrepreneurs do this was achieved through semi-structured interviews with founders and entrepreneurs. The interviews confirm that in many situations, entrepreneurs are deliberate when embedding historical elements into their work. Analysis also led to a typology of entrepreneur intentionality including Aesthetic Delegation, Personal Symbolism, and Strategic Stakeholder Framing.