Should aesthetics and design be viewed as strategic marketing tools? We argue in this paper there are currently limited frameworks and empirical evidence to help − should this be the ambition of marketers? We propose a hotelscape as a holistic evolution of the servicescape concept, which is developed to reflect the role that aesthetics and design can play in influencing consumer behaviour within moments of consumption. The study is based on 37 interviews with cosmopolitan type customers. An interpretive phenomenological approach is deployed to explore the lived experiences of art and design in a hotelscape. We conclude that aesthetics and design can support marketing aspirations in hedonistic consumer groups. Further, that it influences customer experience and directly impacts on their spend, word of mouth, repatronage and loyalty.

Do large firms exert power to shape the CSR behavior of their SME partners?" We answer this question by proposing a model built on the stakeholder theory and the shareholder theory, and go on to explain how this impact influences the commitment of the SME towards their large partner.The model highlights the central role that different forms of power exercised by the large firm play in the process. A survey of 291 SMEs confirms the key hypotheses, including the mediating role of reward power. The effects of coercive power are noteworthy and they illustrate the complex and competing forces at play in influencing CSR behavioral change in SMEs. The research makes a novel contribution to practice by highlighting among other things, how power, as a negative force via coercion or positively through expert or reward benefits, support or becomes counterproductive to the change process.

As companies rely on social media to communicate corporate social responsibility (CSR), the need to understand the implications of using this channel grows. This study explored such implications in the context of food retailers' CSR. Drawing on attribution theory, it adopts a mixed method approach to explain how social media communication shapes CSR attributions and influences consumers' scepticism towards CSR. Results identify company-generated social media communication as an important antecedent of CSR attributions. It finds that attributions play a key role in determining the extent to which consumers interact with usergenerated content (UGC), influencing whether it shapes their scepticism. The study offers several implications for academics and practitioners, extending current theoretical arguments related to the use of social media for CSR communication.

As the functional capabilities of high-tech medical products converge, supplying organizations seek new opportunities to differentiate their offerings. Embracing product sustainability-related differentiators provides such an opportunity. Our study examines the challenge for organizations to understand how customers perceive environmental and social dimensions of sustainability. To achieve this, the study explores and defines these two dimensions based on, first, a review of extent literature and, second, focus group research within a leading supplier of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning equipment. The study takes place in the Netherlands in seven different types of hospitals and one private imaging center. Five social aspects, together covering eleven indicators, are identified. These are tested via 22 customer perception interviews with key decision making stakeholders (within the hospitals or imaging center) involved in purchasing of MRI scanning equipment.Respondents find environmental and social sustainability dimensions personally relevant, but professionally secondary to cost, performance, and ability to use MRI scanning equipment within organizations' physical infrastructure. Finally, incorporating a product's environmental and social credentials within marketing of MRI scanning equipment enhances the perception of the product offering in decision making stakeholders' minds and provide differentiation.

The Samenleving and Bedrijf (S&B) network of Dutch organizations seeks to embed corporate social responsibility (CSR) within business practices but faces challenges with regard to how to do so across various organizational practices, processes, and policies. The integration of CSR demands cultural change driven by senior management and other change agents, who push CSR principles throughout the organization. This study examines the change processes that S&B member organizations have initiated, with a particular focus on the role of high potentials-those persons who have been selected for the fast track into senior management. Interviews with nine S&B organizations document their levels of CSR integration and implementation, the role of senior managers, and the effects of high potentials' competencies on the realignment process. High potentials have the ability and opportunity to act as CSR change agents, but organizations' expectations of their purposes as future senior managers prevented them from doing so. In the existing organizational cultures, leadership focused on economic success, and the CSR implementation process had just initiated. Therefore, a measure of CSR embeddedness might refer to the performance measurement and expectations of high potentials as potential CSR change agents.