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This study aims to expand the existing body of knowledge on crowdfunding (CF) motivational patterns with special reference to intangible factors, which most scholars assume to be the most important ones, especially in non-investment-based CF. The purpose is to understand how the presence of an established brand in a CF campaign can affect backers’ funding choices and the reasons behind them. To this end, the authors combine principles from identification, brand relationship and self-determination theories.

The authors considered the (altruistic in nature) domain of CF for social causes as the most widespread type of branded CF and chose the relevant empirical setting of “research CF” run by universities which seem to be more and more interested in connecting branding and fundraising efforts through the active involvement of their “relational circles”. Accordingly, the authors surveyed an extensive sample of students as a primary stakeholder group of potentially engaged backers from one of the first Italian universities to launch a CF program and used structural equation modelling to test the research hypotheses.

The authors found that, despite the CF domain considered, the choices made by backers (counterintuitively, women, in particular) manifest themselves as mostly self-oriented. This is partly explained by brand identification, which fully mediates the effect of brand pride and partially mediates the effect of brand respect (BR) on funding intention. Moreover, BR also directly drives CF choices.

This study portrays a remarkably different CF playground compared with conventional campaigns for both project proponents and backers with several theoretical and managerial implications.

Even though the crowdfunding (CF) literature is rapidly reaching its maturity phase, the topic of serial CF (i.e. the participation in more than one CF campaign) is as much promising as still largely under explored. This study thus aims to offer a thorough view of the dynamic and complex processes characterizing the participation of the start-ups to more than one campaign adopting a business network perspective.

In line with an explorative research aim, a multiple case study analysis is performed by taking into consideration four start-ups engaged in more than one CF campaigns with different combinations of equity and non-equity CF, adopting the actor–resource–activity (ARA) model as theoretical framework.

Multiple CF campaigns are embedded in the overall changing startup’s network and are affected by the concurrent and overlapping startup’s development processes. From this standpoint, the adoption of the ARA model suggests to reconsider the “serial” dimension of multiple CF campaigns. These processes can be more or less “linear” as they could be affected by the combination of CF schemes and by the degree of alignment of actors, activities and resources, whose “assembly” can be facilitated by learning processes and impaired by unexpected circumstances.

This paper explores in depth the startup’s serial CF journey, building on recent studies calling for stronger analyses of the directions and outcomes of innovative funding trajectories pursued and implemented by new business ventures. From this standpoint, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to consider a complete spectrum of combinations between CF schemes within serial CF, thus allowing for a better understanding of the role of such a factor within a dynamic and contextual view, that is, that offered by the business network perspective. This paper also contributes to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing research on start-ups.

Over the past two decades, wedding tourism has been booming. Despite this, very little research has investigated this phenomenon. This chapter discusses the findings of 15 in-depth interviews with Italian wedding planners, which were carried out to analyse their views on what a destination wedding is, and how frequently they are able to influence the final choice of a site. Further, it discusses four case studies of the most important Italian wedding destinations in order to analyse their offer and related marketing strategy. Findings revealed that wedding destinations can be considered as a complex cluster of interrelated stakeholders; hence, a high degree of coordination and cooperation is needed for destination competitiveness. Further, results suggest that wedding destinations are currently opting for a product/service-oriented strategy with very little attention to a more appropriate experiential and emotional approach.