Making an Impression with Open Strategy: Transparency and Engagement on Corporate Blogs

By increasing transparency in corporate strategy-making, open strategy approaches potentially limit possibilities to tailor respective information to specific audiences. Taking an impression management perspective in this paper, we explore why and how new firms use open-strategy making to establish their position in the marketplace. Empirically, we compare two firms that engage in open strategy practices on their corporate blogs, an increasingly common instrument for new firms to disclose information to wider audiences. We find open strategy-making provides firms with a new repertoire of impression management strategies and tactics. The firms under study engage in various open strategy practices (e.g. engagement- or transparency-led approaches) in separate strategy areas (e.g. general strategic orientation or product strategy). In addition, we observe a transition from a more engagement-led to a more transparency-led approach in both cases over time. One explanation for this finding is that in a firm’s early stages, dialoguing is an impression management instrument to acquire legitimacy, while over time, broadcasting practices serve to maintain legitimacy.