Understanding, Communicating, and Quantifying the Value of Circular Offerings in Business-to-Business Markets
| Project status | in progress |
| Project time | 01.10.2026- 30.09.2029 |
| Funding source | DFG - Individual Grants Programme |
| Project number | KR 6279/1-1 |
| Keywords | Zirkuläre Angebote; Ressourceneffizienz |
Circular offerings (products, services, or integrated solutions that extend lifetimes, enable reuse, and enhance resource efficiency) are pivotal to achieving global climate and resource goals and are rapidly becoming a source of competitive advantage under escalating regulatory, customer, and investor pressures. Despite this clear imperative, their widespread adoption and profitable scaling are lagging due to persistent managerial bottlenecks. Academically, research is fragmented across sustainability, servitization, and B2B marketing, critically lacking an integrated, empirically validated, multi-level framework to explain how the value of circular offerings is created, communicated, and realized. Practically, buying organizations often prioritize immediate cost and risk over long-term, systemic benefits, while suppliers struggle to translate sustainability gains into quantifiable business value, and the conditions under which investors reward circular strategies remain ambiguous. This project addresses this critical gap through three linked research questions across three layers of adoption: (1) Organizational Layer: What internal and external factors drive or impede B2B purchase decisions for distinct circular offering types, and how do these factors interact within buying centers? (2) Relational Layer: Which value propositions and communication frames most effectively convey the economic, environmental, and social benefits of circular offerings to heterogeneous B2B buyers, thereby increasing willingness to adopt and pay? (3) Market Layer: How do investors and other external stakeholders recognize and reward firms’ circular strategies, and what contingencies (e.g., industry, firm maturity) moderate this relationship? The project will investigate an integrative multi-level framework with a sequential, mixed-method design. It will combine a structured synthesis of existing knowledge and in-depth expert interviews with a choice-based conjoint experiment to rigorously quantify buyer trade-offs and willingness-to-pay, and a financial market analysis (content analysis and quantitative modeling) of public corporate communications. Focusing on key European industrial contexts, this design ensures high conceptual rigor, external validity, and immediate managerial relevance. The intended outcomes are a validated multi-level framework and cumulative, evidence-based guidance. The project will yield actionable insights on key organizational decision drivers, effective communication levers for heterogeneous buyers, and critical boundary conditions for positive investor responses. Ultimately, the results will advance marketing research at the sustainability-servitization interface and equip managers and policymakers with a roadmap to accelerate the profitable adoption and performance of circular offerings in B2B markets.