Despite the growing interest towards stakeholder marketing, research aimed at understanding how the marketing function may engage with the different company’s stakeholders (beyond the customers) for value creation is still scant. Therefore, new horizons need to be explored in search for research avenues and effective practices that may entrust a concrete role for stakeholders in marketing. Among the strategic assets that may be used to strengthen relationships with both internal and external stakeholders, corporate heritage emerges as potentially one of the most interesting. Indeed, scholars and practitioners have widely acknowledged the strategic value of heritage, a multifacets construct considered as a specific attribute of corporate identity able to connect past, present and future and inspiring solidity and credibility in different audiences. Thus, heritage has become the core of a specific marketing literature stream. However, the possibility of using corporate heritage (at strategic and operational level) to engage different stakeholders seems to have been little explored to date. This study aims at investigating corporate heritage as a vehicle of multi-stakeholder engagement, through an in-depth analysis of 20 long-lived Italian firms that stand out for the wise use of heritage marketing strategies. Specifically, we adopted an inductive approach to uncover the process of heritage marketing followed by the investigated companies. Thus, the study helps to interpret and deepen the role of corporate heritage as a platform for stakeholder engagement, according to an integrated, strategic and multi-stakeholder perspective that has been to a large extent neglected by previous literature; furthermore, it presents an ideal decomposition of the strategic process of heritage marketing in key stages, with a precise indication of the stakeholder engagement opportunities referred to each stage; finally, it presents a categorization of the main tools and activities that companies may use to convey their historical and cultural heritage to the different stakeholders, both in and out of the business domain.

This paper analyses consumers’ perception of the country image of Italy across 7 emerging countries: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey. Drawing from the international marketing and tourism literature (De Nisco, Papadopoulos and Heslop, 2017; Roth and Diamantopoulos, 2009), 4 main structural dimensions of the Italian country image were chosen as focus of investigation: general country image, product-country image, tourism destination image and cultural heritage image. The empirical research was based on a survey conducted on a sample of 4,550 respondents intercepted through an online panel. Two preliminary exploratory factor analysis (EFA) were ran to refine the scales and to summarize the data into structural factors. The first EFAs grouped measurement scales in 7 components: tourism destination image; general country image; product country image; product accessibility; evaluation of hedonic products; evaluation of utilitarian products; and evaluation of Italy as a tourism destination. The second EFA identified 3 distinct components of the cultural heritage image construct, i) art, literature, history, movies, ii) sociality, cooking, handcrafts and iii) traditions, expression, celebrations. Using the dimensions resulting from the EFA as data input, a latent class analysis was then employed. A 4-cluster solution emerged and the four segments reveal how the general country, product, tourism and cultural heritage components of place image are related and of how they jointly affect consumers’ intentions. Moreover, the study provides additional evidence of country of origin effects from the perspective of consumers from emerging markets, where both the