Entrepreneurial marketing in indie game studios in Västra Götaland : A practice-based study of informal marketing in SMEs

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how marketing is enacted in small indie game studios in Västra Götaland, Sweden, where formal marketing education, dedicated marketing departments, and structured marketing processes are often limited or absent. While entrepreneurial marketing literature has traditionally focused on orientations, capabilities, and behavioural traits such as innovativeness, proactiveness, and opportunity recognition, less attention has been given to how marketing is performed in everyday organizational life (Hills & Hultman, 2011; Kraus et al., 2010). To address this gap, the study adopts a practice-theoretical perspective and integrates insights from strategy-as-practice, marketing-as-practice, and entrepreneurship-as-practice. A qualitative research design was employed, using two-week work diaries and follow-up semi-structured interviews with ten indie game studios employing between one and five members. The data were analysed abductively through thematic analysis, with attention to practices, praxis, and practitioners (Whittington, 2006; Reckwitz, 2002). The findings indicate that marketing in indie studios is embedded within everyday work rather than organised as a separate function. Recurring practices included community engagement, content creation, platform management, analytics monitoring, networking, internal coordination, and development activities later repurposed for promotional purposes. Participants frequently engaged in marketing-related work without explicitly identifying it as marketing, suggesting that marketing knowledge was often tacit, experiential, and developed through practice. Based on these findings, the thesis proposes the concept of Entrepreneurial Marketing as Practice (EMaP), which conceptualises marketing in SMEs as an emergent set of value-creating practices enacted under conditions of resource constraints and limited formal expertise. The study contributes theoretically by extending entrepreneurial marketing into a practice-based framework, empirically by identifying concrete marketing practices in indie studios, and methodologically by demonstrating the usefulness of diary methods for capturing everyday organizational activity.