Ricerc@Sapienza

The recent explosion of competition and other issues on the market has upset the balance of companies and led to a crucial recognition: selling products or providing services it’s no longer enough. Market exchange today lies on a fragile and contradictory ground: the offering blowup has eroded value offering, and the impact of digital on consumers’ purchase intentions affected their indifference to advertising and gave them more empowerment (Füller et al., 2009; Spaid and Flint, 2014). In this era of horizontal and inclusive power, the oversupply and the decline of confidence in traditional institutions - equal to 20,8% according to Eurispes (2019) - bring companies at the center of a big challenge: the stakeholder relations management and the creation of trust are new opportunities to create a competitive advantage (Harrison et al., 2010). The missing value offered by companies can be found today in the settlement between society and business, rewinding the evidences of the Multi-Stakeholder Theory (Freeman, 1984) in a modern sustainable approach in order to maximize the value for both the company and its stakeholders. Corporate sustainability should be interpreted not as an additional constraint, but as a key factor for the company's attractiveness, to increase its competitive advantage over its competitors. From this perspective, corporate sustainability is a new model of corporate management and governance based on the satisfaction of stakeholders' expectations (Golinelli, 2000). The pressure towards corporate sustainability has built a context in which companies grow in power and influence through the impact they have on society, through the creation of awareness of its activities and the promotion of its benefits for stakeholders (Carroll and Buchholtz, 2003).