Building a Sustainability Strategy Around Customers

For sustainability to be a core part of your business model, you might need to rethink how and why you incorporate sustainable policies and products. That's according to IMD Business School professor Goutam Challagalla, who explains that many customers don't want to pay a premium for sustainability. Instead, he argues that good intentions around sustainability can often lead to weak strategy and wasted investment. He explains how instead, leaders should think about sustainability as a way to create innovation and truly drive customer value, by doing things like reducing inefficiencies and creating affordable products. Challagalla is coauthor, along with Frédéric Dalsace, of the book Clean Winners: Sustainability Strategy That Puts Customers First.

You can listen to Building a Sustainability Strategy Around Customers online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Building a Sustainability Strategy Around Customers is an episode from HBR IdeaCast by Harvard Business Review.

This episode is 32:03 long.

This episode was published on Mar 31, 2026.

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