Framing and reframing digital business models: the global messenger industry

We identified some key forces that influence the framing of business model choices of 14 important firms in the global messenger industry from 1998 to 2018. As suggested by the established literature, diversified large US firms (AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.) that entered this industry typically followed and firmly established advertising-supported business model choices in their other divisions. By contrast, Korean entrants adopted a complementor business model approach that successfully challenged US firms in their domestic markets. One such firm is Kakao Talk, which achieved significant financial success. We found that the successful strategies of Kakao Talk and other Asian firms (Line and Tencent’s WeChat) have not been emulated by US firms. In this study, we examined the apparent cognitive motivations of US and Korean actors and determined their significance in our understanding of the role of entrepreneurial spirit compared with corporate inertia in framing business model choices.