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Designing and developing responsible business practices can create various tensions for service organizations. The purpose of this research is to develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between customer engagement (CE) and responsible business practices (e.g. environmental, social and/or governance [ESG], corporate social responsibility [CSR] and diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI]) and explore customer engagement tensions that service organizations may face.

This research develops a list of CE-related responsible business practice tensions and empirically explores their relevance through in-depth interviews with nine ESG professionals.

This paper makes three important contributions. First, we find support for nine distinct but related tensions with implications for CE that organizations must navigate when pursuing responsible business practices. Second, interview participants provide some suggestions for tackling these tensions, which we support with relevant theories. Finally, we develop a conceptual framework that may stimulate future service research and inform the implementation of ESG strategies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to conceptualize and empirically explore the tensions that emerge between responsible business practices and CE. The authors develop a novel analysis of the CE-related tensions that emerge when pursuing an ESG strategy.

The findings are based on a small sample of ESG professionals. Future research may take a quantitative approach to further evaluate the role that these tensions play in engaging customers.

This research provides a conceptual framework that may guide ESG professionals in understanding, framing and navigating CE-related tensions when pursuing responsible business practices.

A social benefit may be found when service organizations are better able to successfully navigate CE-related tensions when pursuing responsible business practices.

While the popularity of online shopping has increased in recent years, surprisingly little research has examined the factors affecting consumers’ behavior in this context. Furthermore, though a widespread problem for companies, the phenomenon of online shopping cart abandonment has garnered even less attention. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of consumers’ mindsets in online shopping cart abandonment.

Three experimental studies were conducted to examine the effect of consumer mindsets (i.e. abstract vs concrete) on purchase intentions.

Results indicate that consumers who have an abstract (as opposed to concrete) mindset when shopping online rate the products they include in their shopping carts to be more important, and consequently are more likely to purchase them, reducing shopping cart abandonment.

The findings suggest that online retailers can reduce shopping cart abandonment by implementing strategies that allow consumers to think abstractly.

This research contributes to the literature by identifying an important underlying mechanism affecting online shopping cart abandonment.

The main goal of this paper is to provide an integrative understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from a corporate marketing perspective, highlighting the critical role of CSR in effective corporate marketing strategies.

The paper is conceptual and draws on the social identification, organisational identity and corporate marketing literatures from the European and US schools of thought.

The paper integrates and builds on extant thinking in corporate marketing and CSR to provide an identity‐based conceptualization of CSR. Based on this, it positions CSR as an optimal managerial tool for promoting alignment between multiple corporate identities (e.g. internal, external), which ultimately leads to key benefits for the company.

The paper is the first to highlight the unique role of CSR in being able to align multiple corporate identities. Furthermore, the paper threads together diverse perspectives on corporate identity and marketing to highlight the potential role of CSR in effective corporate marketing.