In their book, Clean Winners, IMD Professors, Goutam Challagalla and Frédéric Dalsace, explain how businesses can move beyond simply making products more sustainable, to using sustainability to increase customer value and generate profit. In this feature, they discuss how sustainability isn’t the reason people buy.
Here is a question worth considering next time you go to the supermarket: when was the last time you bought something primarily because it was sustainable?
Not just sustainable along with everything else you cared about. But sustainable as the leading reason that tipped your decision. For most people, the honest answer is rarely ever. And yet an entire industry of corporate sustainability strategy has been built on the assumption that customers will reliably reward companies for doing good.
And that assumption is costing companies dearly. Over the past five years, we have studied how companies generate real business value from sustainability. We surveyed more than 200 executives, conducted in-depth case studies across B2B and B2C sectors and interviewed more than two dozen C-suite leaders and chief sustainability officers. One finding runs through all of it: sustainability almost never triggers a purchase on its own. At best, it’s a reason to care. It becomes a reason to buy only when it makes the product or service genuinely better.
The companies that have understood this (which we call Resonators in our book) are the quiet winners of the sustainability era. They are not asking customers to change their values. They are using sustainability as a lens for innovation and winning the market as a result.
The wrong question has been driving strategy
Most companies begin with a question that sounds sensible but leads them astray: “How do we become a more sustainable company?” The framing is well-intentioned. The strategic consequences are often damaging.
When sustainability becomes the primary objective, companies start making trade-offs that their customers never asked for. They emphasise environmental credentials while quietly weakening performance or affordability. Think of it this way: nobody drinks fair-trade coffee to save a farmer. They drink coffee for the pleasure or stimulation that caffeine brings them. The fact that buying it supports farmer livelihoods might be a welcome bonus, but it is rarely the reason people buy coffee in the first place.
Resonators ask a different question entirely: “How can sustainability help us create more value for customers?” That subtle shift moves sustainability from the centre of strategy to the service of strategy. Instead of a stand-alone aspiration, it becomes a driver of innovation.
What Resonators do differently
Resonators are not defined by how much they invest in sustainability. They are defined by what they use it for. Where most companies measure success by sustainability impact per dollar spent, Resonators measure it differently: how much customer value did this sustainability investment create?
The distinction produces fundamentally different outcomes. Consider Electrolux, the Swedish appliance manufacturer. Rather than simply marketing its washing machines as greener, Electrolux redesigned the drum to be gentler on garments so they would reduce wear and tear and clothes would last longer. Extending garment life by just nine months cuts carbon footprint, water use and waste by 20 to 30%. But that’s not what sells the machine. What sells it is that customers keep their favourite clothes looking better for longer while saving money. The sustainability gains are real and significant. They are also, for most buyers, secondary.
Or take East-West Seed, a Thailand-based company with revenues over US$200 million that supplies vegetable seeds to smallholder farmers across tropical regions. Its founder invested heavily in developing hybrid seeds that are disease-resistant and climate-resilient because inferior seeds and poor farming practices were destroying farmer livelihoods. Better seeds mean better yields, less fertiliser, fewer pesticides and healthier soil. Today, East-West Seed supports more than 160,000 farmers a year with crop planning, pest management and climate-smart techniques. The environmental benefits are immense. But what drives adoption is economics: farmers earn more.
Sustainability as an innovation accelerator
Perhaps the most underappreciated finding from our research is the following: treating sustainability as an innovation lens does not divert a company’s innovation efforts. It accelerates them.
John Deere provides another vivid example. The company discovered that up to 75% of herbicide was being sprayed indiscriminately rather than only where needed, and that more than two-thirds of fertiliser was being applied continuously along rows rather than precisely on each seed. Waste at that scale is both an environmental problem and an economic one. The company responded by investing heavily in computer vision and AI to enable precision application, thereby dramatically reducing chemical use while saving farmers money and protecting soil health. Sustainability gave them the lens to see the problem. Customer value gave them the mandate to solve it.
The practical lesson for leaders
The Resonator approach carries three clear implications for anyone leading an organisation today.
First, stop trying to convert customers. You will not persuade your way to scale. The market rewards value, not virtue. Reckitt’s former CMO captured the Resonator logic precisely: “We have not developed a sustainability strategy. It’s always about selling superior products. What we’ve done is added a sustainability lens to our brands.”
Second, resist the pull of a formal sustainability strategy. In 2024, roughly 60% of global companies had one. Our Resonators largely do not think of sustainability as a strategy at all. When it is positioned as a strategy, it generates its own bureaucracy, competes for resources and produces commitments that front-line managers have no practical path to delivering. When it is embedded as an enabler of customer value, it drives results instead.
Third, choose focus over breadth. Many sustainability reports claim links to a dozen or more UN Sustainable Development Goals as if breadth were a measure of seriousness. It is not. The discipline of coherence (i.e. aligning sustainability initiatives with a firm’s actual sources of competitive advantage) is what separates investments that build durable value from those that merely improve an annual report.
The narrow path is also the most ambitious
None of this is an argument against sustainability. In fact, we believe deeply in sustainability. Reducing emissions, improving labour conditions and eliminating waste all matter regardless of their effect on operating margins. But our evidence is unambiguous: sustainability investments that are disconnected from customer value do not reliably generate financial returns. The Resonator path does, precisely because it refuses to treat doing good and doing well as separate concerns.
The companies that best improve their customers’ lives through sustainability innovation also tend to reduce environmental and social harm most effectively. That is not a coincidence. When customer value and sustainability point in the same direction, the engine of innovation runs hardest.
The firms that will define the next decade of competitive advantage are not those that care most about sustainability, nor those that spend the most on it. They are those that use it most intelligently, as a catalyst for innovation that makes their customers lives measurably better, while quietly reducing the environmental and social cost of doing business.
Sustainability isn’t the reason people buy anything. But it can be the driver for the best products to win in the marketplace.
Goutam Challagalla and Frédéric Dalsace are professors of strategy and marketing at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, and authors of Clean Winners: Sustainability Strategy That Puts Customers First.