Value Proposition Alignment: Estimating Sustainable Self-Service Technology Initiatives (An Extended Abstract)

Abstract

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an umbrella concept for initiatives that aim at doing good. The concept of “triple-bottom-line thinking” indicates that sustainable business includes not only an economic dimension but also an environmental and a sustainable dimension (Elkinton 1997). Managers have come to consider CSR initiatives as appealing given the potential positive effects on relationship quality, brand, and firm performance (Homburg et al. 2013). However, research shows varying effects on financial performance and outcomes, and they vary from showing an impact on consumers that embrace the firm’s CSR initiative (i.e., where there is firm-consumer congruence) and where there is no effect (e.g., consumers without a CSR interest) (Leonidou et al. 2013; Sen and Bhattacharya 2001). The majority of these studies evaluated CSR initiatives based on consumer perceptions of a product or brand. Few studies have evaluated CSR in the context of business-to-business (B2B) services (cf. Ostrom et al. 2015). A major difference between consumer and business markets is that the later usually are made up of fewer actors; some business firms might even know all their customer firms by name which seldom is the case in consumer markets (Håkansson and Snehota 1995). This means that the cost for sustainable initiatives has to be divided into a smaller number of beneficiaries which makes the overhead cost per user viable.