While organizations often communicate strategic positions in categories, audiences may not always perceive these positions as intended. How do these misalignments influence organizational performance? Drawing on organizational theory and strategy, we conceptualize two types of misalignments based on the typicality of an organization’s intended categorical position. Opportunistic misalignment arises when an organization intends to be typical but is perceived as deviating from category expectations, whereas innovative misalignment involves a low-typicality positioning that, though initially confusing, invites audiences to appreciate novel elements. We propose that organizations with innovative misalignment perform better than those with opportunistic misalignment, as novelty-seeking audiences embrace unpredictability in offerings that defy established expectations. We test our theory using data on 7,790 video games from the Steam platform, leveraging Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to capture intended positions and relying on user-assigned tags to quantify perceived positions. Our findings lend support to the hypotheses and contribute to research on strategic positioning, category theory, and social evaluation in creative markets.
