Why Sustainable Innovation Struggles to Become a Winning Commercial Proposition

Drawing on a postponed recycled-material initiative and a battery redesign, Raquel Rebelo de Mira offers four questions to help product teams find where environmental gains and customer value meet while the specs can still change.

By Raquel Rebelo de Mira | Published 3 days ago | About a 5 minute read

Image: Photo by Kunal Kalra on Unsplash

The environmental case looked strong. The proposed product improvement could reduce impact, the technical team could explain why, and the sustainability team had evidence to support it. Yet one question remained surprisingly difficult to answer: why would the customer choose it?

That question captures a tension I have encountered in sustainable product innovation. Teams can explain what makes an improvement environmentally valuable long before they can explain what makes it commercially compelling.

In one programme, we explored introducing recycled material into selected components for the first time. The opportunity was to reduce the use of virgin material and improve resource efficiency. Sustainability had surfaced in customer research, but only at a high level. We still needed to understand whether helping customers contribute to that resource saving would give them a meaningful reason to choose the product.

The new material also required further technical validation. With insufficient material de-risking and customer validation, the initiative was postponed. A promising idea had reached a decision point before the evidence was ready.

There is no universal sustainable value proposition. A feature that creates differentiation in one category, market or customer segment may be irrelevant in another. The job of sustainable innovation is therefore not simply to reduce a product’s environmental impact, but to understand where environmental improvement and customer value genuinely intersect.

Four questions help make that intersection visible while product specifications can still change.

Which Customer Need Does the Improvement Serve

For the recycled-material initiative, the customer did not need to become interested in the composition of a particular component. The relevant benefit was contributing to resource efficiency through reduced demand for virgin material. The question was whether that benefit mattered enough to influence preference, alongside everything else the customer expected from the product.

A sustainability feature can offer practical value, such as lower energy bills or fewer replacements. It can also help customers act on their values. Both deserve investigation. Assuming every environmental improvement must save the buyer money is as limiting as assuming every buyer will pay more to support it.

A 2022 review of 46 studies on products made from recycled materials identified environmental benefits, perceived quality, safety, risks, emotions and individual differences as factors influencing consumer acceptance. The authors also noted that positive attitudes towards these products frequently did not translate into purchases.

What Evidence Supports That Need

Our customer research offered a useful signal. It had not tested the resource-efficiency benefit as part of a concrete product proposition. A topic appearing in research should prompt better questions, rather than quietly become proof of demand.

A choice experiment involving 800 UK respondents tested a hypothetical circular economy score alongside price, battery life, warranty, appearance and other attributes for mobile phones and robot vacuum cleaners. The score ranked fifth in importance for phones, and third or fourth for robot vacuum cleaners, depending on the experimental scenario. The experiment measured stated preferences rather than actual purchases. Differences also appeared within a single market.

McKinsey’s 2025 packaging survey across 11 countries reported that 25% of high-income millennials in Germany said they would pay “a lot more” for sustainable packaging, compared with 1% of high-income Gen X consumers. These figures concern stated willingness to pay for packaging.

Purchasing data provide another perspective. NYU Stern and Circana’s 2025 Sustainable Market Share Index, released in April 2026, reported that sustainability-marketed products accounted for 25.4% of dollar sales in the US consumer packaged goods market analysed, and nearly half of its growth since 2013.

What Trade-Offs Are Acceptable

The recycled-material decision had two unresolved sides. Customers needed a meaningful proposition, and the new material needed to meet product specifications. Enthusiasm on either side could not complete the work on the other.

Material validation should examine performance, manufacturing consistency and quality, as well as supply availability. Customer assessment should explore the proposed benefit alongside price, functionality and experience. A resource-efficient product still has to do its job.

PwC’s 2024 Voice of the Consumer Survey reported that some consumers said they would pay, on average, 9.7% more for goods meeting specific environmental criteria, including those made from recycled materials. PwC cautioned that this willingness might not translate into actual spending because of inflation, macroeconomic volatility and cost-of-living concerns.

Another programme made this tension particularly visible. New legislation on battery replacement required changes to a product’s design layout. A regulatory requirement had become a product-experience question, prompting substantial investment in a dedicated customer assessment.

The assessment addressed how customers would respond to the changed design. Compliance set the boundary; customer understanding was needed to shape the proposition within it. A replaceable battery may offer longer use, but the design and the customer experience also has to make sense to the person holding the product.

Which Benefits Can Be Communicated Credibly

For the recycled-material proposition, “uses less virgin material” offers a clearer explanation than an undefined promise of being more sustainable. It also creates a specific evidence requirement: the claim must accurately describe the material saving and its scope. Recycled content in selected components cannot justify implying that the entire product is recycled or environmentally superior in every respect.

The battery example poses a similar challenge. Replaceability creates the possibility of extending use. Whether customers realise that benefit can depend on replacement cost, access to parts and ease of replacement. A design feature and a promise about its outcome require different evidence.

These questions belong in development. Leaving them until launch asks communication teams to solve uncertainties that the specification brief should already have addressed.

Give Sustainability a Role in the Reason to Choose

The postponed material initiative and the battery assessment exposed the same need from different directions: connect environmental intent with customer understanding before decisions become expensive to change.

The specification brief should make that connection explicit, naming the customer benefit, target market and segment, acceptable trade-offs and evidence still required. This gives research and technical teams a shared decision to work towards.

The question for sustainable innovation is therefore not simply whether a product can be made more sustainable. It is whether sustainability can influence the choices that determine why the product deserves to exist, why a customer would choose it and why the business should invest in it.