Demand Revolution

The Demand Revolution argues that sustainability is reshaping business as deeply as any global trend before it, from electrification to digitalization. This time, however, the force behind the change is the consumer. For many buyers, environmentally sound practices now matter as much as price, quality, and brand. The authors, Andreas von der Gathen, Nicolai Broby Eckert, and Caroline Kastbjerg, call it the first demand-driven, transformative megatrend and present a strategic framework for winning these customers and capturing the commercial opportunity.

According to the authors, the companies that move first can build lasting competitive advantages and high barriers to entry, based on redesigned business model ecosystems and strong customer loyalty. Getting there takes a significant change in thinking. Companies must first catch up with consumers, who place themselves much further along a demand curve than businesses currently realize. Leaders also need to stop seeing sustainability mainly as a cost and start seeing it as a source of growth and long-term profit.

That shift means accepting that the classic adoption curves for innovations, and the strategic playbooks built on them, no longer hold. The book shows business leaders how to move past easy fixes and incremental gains and make bold, high-risk, high-reward moves aimed at the source of exponential growth: the world's consumers.