Signaling Organizational Purpose - A textual analysis of corporate statements and product descriptions in the financial industry

Sammanfattning: Corporate Purpose is a topic that is being discussed increasingly often in academic literature and among management practitioners. More and more firms express their renunciation of the traditional shareholder perspective by expressing a broad and transcendental organizational purpose from a holistic stakeholder perspective. Nonetheless, there are vast differences in how organizations signal their corporate purpose. Especially between startups and mature firms, the usage of means to signal purpose and the extent to which purpose is signaled varies immensely. This thesis, therefore, aims to identify the key dimensions among which corporate purposes vary and to evaluate if the maturity of the firm is responsible for the differences in signaling. In order to evaluate these research questions, the corporate statements and product descriptions of 42 startups and 45 mature firms in the European financial industry were analyzed textually. The results of this study indicate that there is a significant difference in how startups and mature firms utilize corporate statements and product descriptions in order to signal meaning and corporate purpose. The analysis suggests that mature banks employ purpose language in their corporate statements and feature language in their app descriptions significantly more often than FinTechs and that FinTechs use feature language in their corporate statements significantly more often than mature banks.