Selling circularity: Understanding the relationship between circularity promotion and the performance of manufacturing SMEs in Italy

Promoting the circularity of business practices and product offerings is a pivotal process in increasing the value of circular products, coming with a still underestimated effect on market response and, thus, firm performance. This study investigates the communication intensity of companies adopting circular economy (CE) practices, here with the aim of assessing the extent to which promoting circularity in-creases their economic performance (measured as return on assetsdROA), disentangling this effect for the different quantiles of the ROA distribution. Employing a unique web-scraped dataset of companies' websites, we captured and analyzed the online promotional efforts of a sample of Italian manufacturing companies engaged in CE practices. Our results show that small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that fall into the lower-mediumeperforming range might benefit from intensively signaling their circularity on their website. Theoretical and managerial implications are put forward.(c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.