Clean Winners: Sustainability Strategy That Puts Customers First

Despite massive investments, sustainable business still isn't very profitable for most companies. Here's a fresh approach for resetting sustainability for customer value—and profitability.

Store aisles packed with products labeled "environmentally friendly." Businesses scrambling to respond to stakeholder demands that they make their operations sustainable. Ads touting green credentials for all kinds of enterprises. For a long time now, this has been the market landscape we've lived 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 products and services, most companies still aren't seeing the payoff—not financially, not in value for customers, and not in real environmental and social impact. Why not?

As IMD professors Goutam Challagalla and Frédéric Dalsace show in this eye-opening and practical book, the shortfall is due to a strategic misalignment and a misunderstanding of what actually drives customers' purchase decisions. The authors flip conventional sustainability strategy on its head: instead of companies asking "How can we make our offerings more sustainable?" they should be asking "How can we use sustainability as a catalyst to improve the performance of our products, make them more affordable, or both?" Viewed this way, sustainability is an intrinsic, value-generating element of an offering rather than a costly add-on.

The authors call companies that understand this insight—John Deere, Michelin, Schneider Electric, Nespresso, Reckitt, and others—clean winners, or "Resonators." With wide-ranging and instructive stories, they show how Resonators use sustainability to increase customer value and generate 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 also directs IMD's Advanced Management Program and its Strategy Governance for Boards program. He has published extensively in leading academic journals, as well as in Harvard Business Review, and he has worked as a principal at the Monitor Group.

Frédéric Dalsace is Professor of Marketing and Strategy at IMD. Prior to IMD, he was a professor at HEC Paris, where he held the Social Business/Enterprise and Poverty 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." Prior to his career in academia, Dalsace worked at Michelin and as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Company.

The authors codirect the Integrating Sustainability into Strategy program at IMD. Their HBR article "How to Market Sustainable Products" was included in HBR's 10 Must Reads 2025.