Sustainability plays an increasingly important role in business practice, reflecting the demands of increasingly environmentally conscious consumers, and it is seen as a fundamental strategy to achieving long-term business success. The adoption of circular practices stimulates companies to transform the entire value chain thereby improving the overall efficiency of the production and delivery process, thus sustaining companies’ competitive advantage and bringing major economic benefits. But CE centered business models can only be effective if the market recognizes their relevance. This study investigates the communication of companies adopting circular economy (CE) practices, with the aim of assessing the extent to which promoting circularity increases their economic performance (measured as return on assetsm, ROA). Employing a unique web-scraped dataset of companies’ websites, the goal is to capture and analyze the online promotional efforts of a sample of Italian manufacturing companies engaged in CE practices. The results show that promotional activities aimed at communicating circularity play a pivotal role in signaling the attractiveness of a company’s offerings, and consequently, at increasing the return from investments in circular practices. For low- and medium-performing SMEs esplecially, the use of CE-focused web communications can make a difference in terms of economic performance and they might benefit from intensively signaling their circularity on their website; whereas for high-performing SMEs, it doesn’t show any additional benefit. Theoretical and managerial implications are put forward.
