Crafting Digital Personas and Reputations: Applying SCM to Assess Family Business Reputations via Websites

By: Teagan Dubé

It was a privilege and a pleasure to participate in the 2024 Sprott Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Internship. Given this unique opportunity to conduct in-depth research under the mentorship of Professor José I. Rojas-Mendez, I found the experience invaluable and instrumental to my academic journey—an experience that has confirmed and solidified my interest and passion for academic research and has inspired me to continue to work hard to pursue a career in the field of marketing and branding research. 

My research project aimed to identify the attributes that Canadian, family-run businesses most commonly exhibit to create and disseminate their reputation on their websites. The project involved applying the Stereotype Content Model (SCM). This model allowed us to work under the assumption that stereotypes form along two dimensions: warmth and competence. We further examined the data through a Market Signaling perspective; a concept that suggests that commercial entities signal aspects of their brand to consumers through various attributes such as quality and reliability.

The study involved the analysis of diction (words, phrases, sentences) and images across the businesses’ websites to determine prevalence and importance of common characteristics and attributes exhibited throughout family-run businesses’ websites in Canada. The results of the attribute coding revealed that family-run business websites prominently feature competence attributes (e.g., they highlight product/service quality, reliability, expertise, and client testimonials) to compete with established industry rivals. Ultimately, it was competence that proved to be the most prevalent attribute for building and communicating reputations for family-run enterprises.

Based on these analyses it is suggested that family-run businesses consider adapting their market communication and branding strategies to emphasize more elements of warmth, authenticity, and status while promoting the inherent aspects of personability and reputation. By promoting these attributes, businesses may achieve a more powerful differentiation, allowing them to position themselves strategically and better compete with their larger, more established rivals. Moreover, through this research we are excited at future opportunities to explore the relationship between the SCM, signaling theories, and business performance. This exploration will provide insights into which reputation-building attributes are most effective for enhancing commercial performance. 

Previously, as an undergraduate student in marketing, I gained knowledge by studying existing theories, papers, and works that were already discovered and written about by established academics. The Sprott internship experience gave me the opportunity to conduct research from start to end. I was instrumental in every step of the research process, from the formulation of the research question, to conducting literature reviews, creating methodologies, collecting and analyzing data, creating connections and identifying correlations with the data, and in generating important insights with our results. Moreover, I wrote the final research paper summarizing the outcomes, and as well, developed new questions and research approaches to support future work.

With this experience, I can now say that I can conduct further research in academia with greater confidence and proficiency. I particularly appreciate how much I learned about the various methodologies, data collection strategies and processes, as well as qualitative and quantitative analysis. I am immensely proud of the work that I have produced over the summer. 

I know this experience will serve me well in the future. My enduring curiosity and eagerness to learn drive me to delve even deeper into this research topic and further my understanding of brands’ reputation development and the implications for modern consumer-brand relationships. 

I truly appreciate how research outcomes and insights further our understanding and prompt us to continue to ask important questions in the field—paving the way for new opportunities and chances for future contributions, making the journey of research never truly complete. There is always more to learn, more to discover, and more knowledge to share! I have come to understand the iterative nature of research and gained an appreciation for how, seemingly small research questions, have the potential to blossom into much larger projects with far-reaching implications and many opportunities for further exploration. 

As I complete my undergraduate degree and move on to pursue graduate studies and a future career in research, I am excited about the skills and competencies I have gained through this internship. I am appreciative of the helpful and supportive faculty who have encouraged and supported me wholeheartedly throughout the duration of the internship. I am grateful, in particular, to my professors and Dr. Rojas-Mendez, all who played integral roles in my success and helped me to identify my passion and adeptness for academic work.