INDUSTRY INSIGHT 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. x www. intelligentcxo. com
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