Clean Winners, You Don’t Need to Change Your Customers

By Goutam Challagalla and Frédéric Dalsace, IMD Business School, authors of Clean Winners: Sustainability Strategy That Puts Customers First 

There is a belief embedded deep in most corporate sustainability strategies: if we just communicated better and showed customers the science and the stakes around our green products, more of them would come around to buying them (even if they were more expensive).

This may be a reasonable assumption for many services, but as it happens it is also largely wrong and, as our research shows, it is costing companies real money.

Clean Winners: Sustainability Strategy That Puts Customers First

Over the course of several years studying how firms create commercial value from sustainability, where we examined strategy, executive teaching, and consulting across both B2B and B2C sectors, we have arrived at a counterintuitive but commercially important conclusion. It is this: companies that profit from sustainability aren’t the ones that try hardest to convert their customers. It’s the ones that understand their customers most clearly, and design offerings accordingly.

When running sessions with senior executives, we always ask the same question: what is the highest share of customers in any of your product categories who actively prioritise sustainability in their purchasing decisions? Amazingly, the answers generally clusters between 10% and 15%, and that holds across industries and across B2B and B2C markets alike.

This matters because the surveys most companies rely on tell a very different story.

Countless research firms report consumer claims that they will pay more for sustainable products, or that they factor sustainability heavily into purchase decisions. But intent and behaviour are different things. A Zalando study of 2,500 consumers found that 60% said transparency about sustainability was important to them, but only 20% actively sought out such information when actually shopping.

The reality is here: while survey data flatters sustainability, transaction data doesn’t.

In our newly published book Clean Winners: Sustainability Strategy that Puts Customers First, we propose that companies stop thinking about “the sustainable consumer” as a monolith and start thinking about them as three distinct groups. (As the late marketing scholar Ted Levitt put it: “If you’re not thinking segments, you’re not thinking.”)

The first customer segment are the Greens. They place genuine, high value on sustainability in a given product category and will sacrifice some performance or pay more to have it. They are real, and they matter. But, as we’ve seen, they are rarely more than 10 to 15% of any market.

The second are the Blues. They care about sustainability under certain conditions: specifically, when it does not cost them more and does not require them to compromise on what the product actually does. They are the largest group in most markets, and they are winnable but not through moral appeals. They respond to products that simply work better.

The third are the Grays. They are indifferent to sustainability, or actively skeptical. Marketing sustainability to them is not just ineffective. In many categories, it actively damages purchase intent. When airport researchers labelled soap dispensers as “organic,” visitors used significantly more of the soap per hand wash than with an identical, unlabeled soap. That’s because they assumed organic meant weaker.

This is what we call sustainability liability: the perception that sustainable equals inferior. It is widespread in any category where strength, power, or performance is a core value. Bio detergents, construction materials, industrial equipment — in each of these, the sustainability signal can undermine the sales case instead of reinforcing it.

One more thing: these are not fixed identities. The same person can be a Green for energy choices, a Blue for packaging preferences, and a Gray for cleaning products. Context, category, and price point all shift the equation.

The temptation — and we hear it in boardrooms constantly — is to treat sustainability investment as a long-term consumer education play. If we just build awareness, the Grays will become Blues, and the Blues will become Greens. Our research is unambiguous here: a customer’s sustainability values in any given category are the product of prolonged maturation and are resistant to short-term change. Companies that set out to convert their customer base are, in effect, betting their strategy on shifting culture. That is a long game with no guaranteed return.

The more productive question is not “how do we change our customers?” but rather: “how do we build offerings that create real value for the customers we actually have?”

The companies we identify as Clean Winners have figured out a more commercially durable approach. Rather than adding sustainability as a feature and hoping customers notice, they engineer sustainability into the product in ways that make the core offering objectively better. We call this Resonance.

Consider a detergent that uses a natural ingredient that, as a by-product of its sustainability profile, removes stains more effectively and eliminates odour better than conventional alternatives. It may cost more to produce, but it outperforms competitors.

A customer who has no interest in sustainability still has reason to buy that product. A Blue customer gets better performance without compromise. And a Green customer gets all of that plus the ethical dimension. That product wins across the spectrum.

This is what makes Resonance so commercially powerful: it makes sustainability optional.

The firm does not need to lead with RTCs (“Reasons to Care”) for every segment. It can lead with RTBs (“Reasons to Buy”) the core product benefits that drive actual purchase decisions. Sustainability is present in the product. But whether it is present in the purchasing conversation depends on who you are talking to.

Ireland’s tech and innovation sectors are in a strong position here. The companies building software, platforms, data tools, and hardware that make sustainability measurable, efficient, or embedded in operations are not asking their customers to care about the planet. They are offering them something that works better, costs less to run, or reduces operational risk. That is a Resonance proposition.

What is dangerous, but still all too common, is the alternative: wrapping a product in sustainability language without the substance to match, then being surprised when it doesn’t move the needle commercially. Greenwashing is not just a reputational risk. It is a strategic signal that a company has not done the harder work of thinking clearly about what its customers actually value.

The most durable competitive advantage in sustainability is not the loudest claim. It is the clearest understanding of who your customer is and what they genuinely need, and then building something they cannot refuse, regardless of whether they care about the planet.

That is a product strategy. It always was.

Clean Winners: Sustainability Strategy That Puts Customers First by Goutam Challagalla and Frédéric Dalsace is published by Harvard Business Review Press, priced £25

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