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As firms increasingly uncover their activities to key stakeholders through various media, the perception of these activities is becoming more important for firm performance. Traditionally, access to industry-wide databases provides important metrics on customer perceptions of performance, such as customer satisfaction and brand equity. In addition, numerous studies have highlighted firms' innovation-related actions (e.g., R&D spending and patent counts) as critical metrics linked to their financial performance. Perceived Firm Innovation (PFI) emerges as a relatively new and under-studied metric with the potential to impact a firm's financial success. Keiningham et al. are among the pioneers in this area. This commentary views their article as a vital initial step in understanding PFI's impact. Considering that the service sector accounts for over 70 percent of the GDP in any developed country, service innovation is a broad phenomenon. Given the breadth of the area, we point to the challenge of capturing this phenomenon with a single metric like PFI. We also discuss crucial methodological considerations for future research, including estimation methods, sample size, and financial metrics.

The authors explore two important topics related to this special issue. One is how corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities impacts stakeholders, more specifically customers and shareholders/investors. Second is understanding customer recognition and demand for CSR activities. Insight into these topics is gained through the study of contextual differences in this value creation. Previous studies suggest that two important contextual differences have the potential to impact CSR-based value creation, the product versus service nature of the firm and whether the firm operates primarily in a business-to-business (B2B) versus business-to-consumer (B2C) channel. The lower innovative capabilities of service firms and the relative intangibility of services should hamper the impact of CSR activities in service versus product contexts. The impact should be higher, however, in a B2B versus B2C context based on the need for greater organizational alignment, adaptation, and relationship-specific investments. Results from a large-scale secondary dataset reinforce prior findings that CSR activities influence firm value through customer satisfaction. Moreover, the results reveal that this effect is weaker for service (vs. product) firms and stronger for B2B (vs. B2C) firms. The findings offer important implications for marketing theory and practice.