Stakeholder engagement is vital for corporate sustainability for various reasons from securing legitimacy to spurring innovation. While stakeholder engagement is well established in academic discourse, recent studies have examined the effects of customer segments on this engagement for corporate sustainability. Initial empirical analyses indicated that business-to-consumer companies are more frequently scrutinized on their sustainability activities than business-tobusiness companies, and subsequently they are more likely to report on sustainability activities. Nevertheless, further approaches of stakeholder engagement, including stakeholder engagement tools, environmental management standards, and various activities, have not been investigated thus far. This paper compares various approaches of stakeholder engagement according to customer segment based on a 2012 empirical study of large German companies. The results show that customer segment has no major significant influence on stakeholder engagement, but rather value-oriented aspects of firms, including family-run operations and sustainability values in a company's business, make a difference to these activities.The majority of attention and debate on customer segment is located in conventional marketing literature. The terms B2B and B2C originate from American marketing studies focusing on the various relationships that exist between different parties in the sales and demand structure (LaPlaca & Katrichis, 2009). Additional relational 661
Stakeholder Engagement between B2C and B2B CompaniesThis dataset includes information for each company concerning the total number of employees (in full-time equivalent), annual turnover, legal ownership status, level of stakeholder engagement, knowledge and application of corporate sustainability management tools as well as knowledge and adoption of sustainability standards (stakeholder tools and standards selected for this paper are given in Appendix A). Additionally, several questions were scaled, including the ranking of the influence of various stakeholders on corporate sustainability activities (e.g. consumers, NGOs, etc.).
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