The influence of narrative description on the success of crowdfunding campaigns: The moderating role of quality signals

• Informal language (unpreparedness signal) reduces crowdfunding performance. • Punctuation (preparedness signal) increases crowdfunding performance. • Risk rhetoric creates a negative external perception reducing performance. • Reward rhetoric creates a positive external perception increasing performance. • Quality signals attenuate the effect of risk rhetoric. • Quality signals accentuate the effect of reward rhetoric. Launching crowdfunding campaigns for new products and ideas is popular, and quality signals, such as endorsement and past success, can indicate the likelihood of the success of future projects. However, as these signals are not always available, creators, especially new ones, must rely on other signals, such as narrative quality. Building on the emerging literature on rhetorical signaling, we investigate the moderating effect of narrative quality on the relationship between risk/reward rhetoric and crowdfunding success. We show that risk (reward) rhetoric negatively (positively) affects campaign success. Thereafter, we introduce two new signals (narrative structural quality and narrative wording quality). Using a sample of 331,060 Kickstarter campaigns from 2009 to 2018, we empirically show that the use of punctuation positively moderates the relationship between risk/reward rhetoric and success, whereas the use of informal language negatively moderates this relationship. Interestingly, this moderating effect is similar to that of traditional signals such as endorsement and past success.