Influence of End-of-Life Product Management (EOL-PM) on Corporate Reputation and Market Performance:A Conceptual Framework

End-of-life Product Management (EOL-PM) by producers can benefit two stakeholders in business—consumers and environment. While providing an avenue to consumers for disposing of products after end of their useful life, EOL-PM also helps in preventing negative impact on environment through conservation of resources and proper disposal of harmful materials. In this paper, a conceptual framework linking voluntary EOL-PM by producers to their corporate reputation and market performance has been developed. With a conceptual analysis of stakeholder theory, and using it as the framework, signaling theory and social capital theory are examined for explicating the proposed influence of EOL-PM. This may help guide future empirical research for strengthening the argument that proactive responsible behavior of businesses can be profitable for them. While sustainability implications of product disposal methods have often been studied in extant literature, this paper proposes benefits for producers when they engage with consumers during the disposal of their manufactured products.