The platform economy is a growing market that consists of four branches. One of these branches is the business-to-businesses platform market. This market delivers and hosts services to business customers or clients via their own platform, often to increase efficiency in handling different tasks or helps analyzing data. The network and the digital profile of 65 companies that are active in the B2B platform market were studied to find out how the framing or similarity of the digital profiles of organizations is connected to the embeddedness of these organizations in their network. Isomorphic pressures predict that organizations within a population are more similar as organizations strive to gain legitimacy and trust. The digital profiles, consisting of two pages of an organizations’ website, were coded with quantitative content analysis. To test the embeddedness of the companies, how integrated organizations are within a population, the network was constructed by scraping the organizations’ websites manually to find their customers, integrations and investors. It was found that within this market the digital profiles are significantly similar, what suggests that the B2B platform market is isomorphic. It also appeared that the homogeneousness’ of the digital profile is related to the embeddedness of an organizations in the network. If the similarity is related to the position of the network, this should also be reflected for the outliers of the market; the organizations that belong to a niche. Although the profiles were found to be significantly different of niche organizations than from non-niche organizations, the embeddedness of these niches did not appear to be. Lastly, the network of the B2B platform market turns out to be a small world network, so that indicates that this market is embedded in more ways than one. As a result, the embeddedness of an organization can be found in the framing of the digital profiles. Organizations that use similar statements on their websites are likely to have a closer relationship and appear to be more embedded in the market. As the embeddedness of an organization can predict better economic performance, this outcome calls for more research into the relationship between embeddedness and the digital profile and or in this market.

, , , , , ,
J. Lee
hdl.handle.net/2105/50150
Media & Business
Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication

A. Toonders. (2019, June 24). The embeddedness of the business-to-business platform market through online framing A quantitative research examining the relationship between the network position and the homogeneousness of webpage content of companies in the business-to-business platform market.. Media & Business. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2105/50150