Over years of research into hundreds of companies, we've found that businesses fall into recognizable patterns, or mindsets, based on two simple variables: how much they invest in sustainability beyond what regulation requires and how broad or narrow the scope of their initiatives is.

This gives us four broad mindsets: Operators, Strivers, Enthusiasts, and Resonators. The differences between them often determine whether sustainability becomes a costly distraction, a reputational liability, or a genuine source of competitive advantage.

Operators: doing just enough to stay in the game 

Operators are the largest single group we've studied, accounting for around 30% of companies. Their goal is straightforward: retain the social, legal, and customer “license to operate” while spending as little as possible to do it. Initiatives are few, narrow, and chosen primarily because they're required by regulators, by major customers, or by investors who are starting to ask uncomfortable questions.

Where Operators are often most active is not in sustainability programs at all, but in the policy arena. They are good at using lobbying and non-market strategy to slow down or water down the regulations that would force their hand.

Fast-fashion retailer Shein is a clear example: in 2024 alone, it hired well-connected former political staffers as lobbyists in both the United States and France, and its spending on lobbying rose to nearly $4 million for the year. That's not a sustainability strategy in any meaningful sense, but simply a form of risk management.

The danger for Operators isn't reputational, it's structural. As regulation tightens across most major markets, the gap between “minimum compliance” and “what's actually required to be in business” is closing fast. Operators that haven't built any underlying capability tend to find themselves scrambling and paying a premium when the rules finally catch up with them.

Strivers: chasing the trend, opportunistically 

Strivers are the next largest group, with 45% of firms. They've recognized that sustainability is a megatrend that’s impossible to ignore, and they want a piece of the reputational upside. So they launch initiatives across the business, often dozens of them, each chosen because it looks good, generates a press release, or ticks a stakeholder box.

The problem is that Strivers tend to lean hard on what we call “reasons to care,” i.e., the moral or planetary case for a product, often layering it directly onto the “reasons to buy,” which is the practical case for why a customer needs the thing in the first place. When the two get mixed together carelessly, credibility suffers.

Apple is a useful illustration: its sustainability reporting looks impressive at first glance, but a closer read shows ambitious-sounding commitments resting on modest baselines; for instance, the company highlights that millions of devices were refurbished for reuse in a single year, a figure that looks far less dramatic set against the more than two billion Apple devices in active use worldwide. Strivers aren't dishonest, but their sustainability story rarely survives scrutiny.

Enthusiasts: sustainability as the North Star 

Enthusiasts are a smaller group, around 15% of companies, but they are the loudest ones. For these firms, sustainability isn't a workstream; it's the organizing principle of the business. It shapes culture, R&D, marketing, and even governance. Their belief, often genuinely held from the CEO down, is that putting planet and people first will eventually translate into market share and profit. Build it, in other words, and they will come.

While there's something admirable about this conviction, it carries real commercial risk. Enthusiast messaging often crowds out the practical case for the product entirely. Consider Unilever's refillable Dove deodorant campaigns, which centered on waste reduction (a “reason to care”) while saying comparatively little about whether the product worked any better, lasted longer, or even cost less.

When the sustainability message dominates to the point that customers can't answer “why should I actually buy this?”, a large segment of the market simply tunes out. Enthusiasts often discover, painfully, that moral conviction and customer demand are not the same thing.

Resonators: where sustainability and customer value meet 

Finally, there are the Resonators, which represent roughly 10% of firms today. For us, this is the group that every business should aspire to join. Resonators ask a different question entirely. They don’t say “how do we have the biggest sustainability impact?” but rather, “how does being sustainable make our product genuinely better for the customer?”

This is the essence of what we call the Resonance Bridge. Instead of treating sustainability impact and business profit as two separate boxes loosely connected by good intentions, Resonators build a tight, traceable line from sustainability investment, to customer value, to profit capture. Two questions guide everything: will this investment create real value for the customer -- better performance, lower cost, more convenience -- and can we capture some of that value ourselves?

Schneider Electric is a textbook case. The company has roughly doubled its R&D budget over the past decade, increasing spending by over 12% in 2023 alone to more than €1.2 billion. The result isn't just an awards cabinet full of ESG accolades.

It's that the company now attributes around three quarters of its revenue to products and solutions it directly ties to the energy transition and decarbonization. Sustainability, in other words, isn't a separate narrative running alongside the business. It is the business.

So, which one are you? 

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most companies don't choose their sustainability mindset deliberately. It emerges by accident, from whichever team grabbed the budget first, from whatever made for a good annual report headline, from regulatory pressure nobody wanted to deal with properly, or from a compliance function that's never been asked to do more than the bare minimum.

The honest exercise, therefore, is to look at your own initiatives and ask: are we mainly trying to stay out of trouble, with sustainability as a cost to be minimized (Operator)? Are we spreading effort thinly across whatever looks good (Striver)? Are we leading with purpose at the expense of explaining why our product is actually worth buying (Enthusiast)? Or have we done the harder work of tracing a credible line from our sustainability investment to something a customer will actually pay more, choose more often, or stay loyal to longer (Resonator)?

It's also worth being honest and saying that few companies sit neatly in one box. Most show traits of two or three mindsets at once, often reflecting different regulatory environments across markets, or simply a lack of internal consensus about what sustainability is actually for.

That's normal. Every organization tends to have a dominant mindset, which generally shows up when budgets are tight and trade-offs have to be made. Identifying that dominant mindset honestly may be the single biggest determinant of whether your sustainability strategy becomes an asset or a liability in the years ahead.

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