Despite massive investments, sustainable business still isn’t very profitable for most companies. Here's a fresh approach to aligning sustainability with customer satisfaction—and profitability.
Store aisles packed with products labeled "environmentally friendly." Businesses scrambling to make their operations sustainable and socially conscious. Ads touting green credentials for all kinds of enterprises. For a long time now, this has been the market landscape we live in, with companies such as Unilever leading the way and creating pressure for others to follow suit.
But the uncomfortable truth is that after years of investment in sustainable goods and services, most companies still aren't seeing the payoff—not financially, not in value for customers, not in real social and environmental good. Why not?
As IMD professors Goutam Challagalla and Frédéric Dalsace show in this eye-opening and practical book, it's due to a basic strategic misalignment and a misunderstanding of what actually drives customers' purchase decisions. The authors flip conventional strategy on its head: companies, instead of asking, "How can we make our offerings more sustainable?" should be asking, "How can we use sustainability to improve the performance of our products, make them more affordable, or both?" In this view, sustainability is an intrinsic, value-generating element of an offering rather than a costly add-on.
The authors call companies that understand this insight—such as John Deere, Nespresso, Michelin, Schneider Electric, and others—clean winners, or "resonators." With vivid and instructive stories, they show how resonators use sustainability to create new customer value and robust profits.
Offering practical frameworks, tools, and tactics, Clean Winners is your essential guide to reimagining your sustainability strategy.
Goutam Challagalla is the Dentsu Group Chair of Sustainable Strategy and Marketing at IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is the Director of IMD's Advanced Management Program, Integrating Sustainability into Strategy program, and Strategy Governance for Boards. He has published extensively in the leading academic journals as well as in Harvard Business Review, and he has worked as a Principal at The Monitor Group. He earned a BA from Osmania University, an MBA from Arizona State University, and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.
Frédéric Dalsace is a professor of marketing and strategy at IMD. Prior to IMD, he was a professor at HEC Paris, where he held the Social Business Chair, sponsored by Danone, Renault, and Schneider Electric. He coauthored, with Muhammad Yunus (Nobel Peace Prize, 2006), the 2015 Harvard Business Review article "Reaching the Rich World's Poorest Consumers." Before academia, Dalsace worked in industry at Michelin and for McKinsey & Company. He is a graduate of HEC Paris (MSc), Harvard Business School (MBA), and INSEAD (PhD).
