As any CEO and leadership team knows, making a business more sustainable is a complex undertaking, especially in an organization that wasn’t built to be sustainable from the outset. What begins as a genuine intention can quickly get derailed by competing priorities, internal resistance or simply a lack of clear pathways to act.
And when businesses do try, they can face accusations of greenwashing, not necessarily because they’re being disingenuous, but often because of the difficulty of retrofitting change into systems never designed for it.
Set against a fast-changing political environment that’s deprioritizing sustainability, businesses that are committed to their green agenda face a whole new set of challenges. Unsurprisingly, the term ‘greenhushing’, where companies underplay their green credentials and broader purpose endeavors, is increasingly in use.
If sustainability feels hard for corporates, it’s equally problematic for governments and institutions, which continue to struggle to address the climate crisis. The scale of the challenge is global, yet the levers of change and the solutions available to those governments and institutions often feel local, fragmented, short-term, slow-moving and simply not up to the task; 195 governments are rarely aligned in their approach to the world’s most urgent problems.
Brands represent more than products; they carry values, influence culture and inform what’s desirable.
In this context, companies and brands matter more than ever, not just as vehicles of commerce but as levers of meaningful change.
Think about it; brands shape the way we buy, the way we behave, and increasingly, what we believe. They represent more than products; they carry values, influence culture and inform what’s desirable. Their impact is profound: brand value contributes around 20 percent of company market capitalization on average, and up to 40 percent for service-based businesses.
Zoom out further, and their impact is even clearer. Economies are, in many ways, the sum of their brands. All goods and services carry brand identity to some degree. And as consumers, we use brands as a way to express who we are and what we stand for.
This is why brand – and specifically brand design – has a crucial role to play in shaping a different future. Not just as a communications device or selling tool, but as a mechanism for businesses to rethink how they operate and grow.
How many CEOs will have considered using brand design as a way to drive change both inside their organizations and for those organizations to then drive change across society at large?
We need to rethink what brand design is for
Traditionally, brand design has been used to drive consumption. Its job was to help businesses and brands stand out, look cool and sell more. And while that model has created value, it’s also embedded a type of growth that’s become increasingly incompatible with planetary boundaries.
But what if brand design could do something different?
What if, instead of helping companies sell more ‘stuff’, brand design helped them grow differently by creating value through experiences, knowledge, services and community?
What if, instead of helping companies sell more ‘stuff’, brand design helped them grow differently, by creating value through experiences, knowledge, services and community?
That requires us to stop thinking of brand as a marketing function and start seeing it as a strategic tool, one that can help reconfigure how a business operates, how it delivers impact, and how it measures success.
Moving toward a regenerative model
At FreshBritain, we’ve been working with Simond, the Decathlon-owned mountaineering brand based at the foot of Mont Blanc. There, climate change isn’t theoretical; the brand has watched the glaciers around it steadily disappear. This visible urgency prompted a rethinking within Simond of how it needs to grow in the future.
Instead of focusing on producing and selling more physical gear, much of which ultimately ends up in landfill, Simond is shifting to a business model built around experiences, education and circular services that are both sustainable and commercially viable. Its framework includes:
• Coaching and tutorials to help people explore the mountains safely and sustainably
• Rental and repair programs to extend product life and reduce waste
• Fitness and nutrition guidance to prepare clients for outdoor activity
• Community-building and knowledge-sharing to deepen engagement
As Simond evolves this offer, it is also redefining how success is measured. New questions are being asked: How many people have gained the confidence and skills to explore the outdoors responsibly? How much equipment has been repaired, reused or kept out of landfill? What cultural or community value has the brand generated?
These aren’t conventional KPIs. But they are fast becoming essential indicators of long-term corporate relevance and resilience. They are new drivers of profitable growth and value that is deeper and more enduring.
What needs to change at the top
This kind of transformation won’t happen if it stays isolated within product or brand teams. It needs to be championed from the top. Without board-level commitment, regenerative strategies remain surface-level.
There’s a clear opportunity for boards to consider how they define and measure success. Of course, profit still matters. We’re not talking about dismantling 300 years of capitalism, but rather working with it to rethink what and how we produce.
Progressive leadership means developing new metrics that track:
• Positive community impact
• Cultural enrichment
• Environmental regeneration
• Access to knowledge and skills
• Improvements in wellbeing
When these kinds of indicators are deeply rooted and tied to incentives, they create the conditions for a more sustainable kind of success – growing profitably while doing good and doing right.
If proof were needed that the business world is getting on board, Decathlon CEO Barbara Martin Coppola told more than 700 INSEAD alumni in London back in 2023 that “Profit is not an accurate measure of business success,” and added that being driven solely by the bottom line is detrimental for business, as well as human happiness and the planet’s future.
Why the market is ready
Despite growing evidence, cynics will inevitably question whether there is mainstream appetite for this shift, especially in an era of ‘drill, baby, drill’ or the plastic straw ban reversal, trivial though it might appear.
But Gen Z offers a compelling signal of where we’re headed, and it’s worth noting that this cohort expects businesses to step up and enable them to make more sustainable purchasing decisions.
This generation is less interested in what they own and more interested in what they do. They value experience, identity, purpose and contribution. They want the brands they support to reflect their worldview, and they’re increasingly choosing the ones that do.
We’ve spent decades using brand design to fuel consumption. The time has come to use it to fuel change.
They’re not an anomaly or an outlier. They’re a preview of the coming mainstream.
Brands and businesses that align with these values won’t just grow, they’ll lead. Experience-based models, from coaching to repair services to community platforms, are scalable and profitable. And they offer governments new ways to tax and reinvest profits for the public good.
This isn’t a fringe strategy. It’s a new, viable route to growth.
A better system, designed from the brand out
If we want regenerative business to become the norm, we need more than one-off pilots and good intentions. We need a critical mass of brands designed to operate and be seen to operate differently.
That’s where brand design becomes essential. Not as the finishing touch to a campaign, but as the starting point for how an organization defines, delivers and communicates value.
Done well, brand design aligns strategy with culture, guides operations and unlocks new forms of growth. It gives companies the tools to reimagine what they are for and what kind of world they want to help build.
We’ve spent decades using brand design to fuel consumption. The time has come to use it to fuel change.
