Published Online:https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2008.35732614

We analyze how firms use media-associative rhetoric in their decisions to enter emergent and uncertain product-markets. In the context of our study, this type of rhetoric associates the logics of firms' existing markets with the not-yet-legitimated logics of a newly emerging market. Our panel study shows that firms enter such markets faster when the associative rhetoric has higher (versus lower) volume, positive (versus negative) tenor, firms (versus journalists/analysts) as the source of information, and generalizations (versus specific cases) as the focus. We discuss the implications of our findings for institutional theory and market entry.

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