Turning sustainability ambition into an ecommerce strategy

The need

Work out what sustainable ecommerce should mean for the business

The company already had strong sustainability ambitions, a growing ecommerce business and some internal thinking and pilots.

What it lacked was enough external evidence to know where that thinking was strong, where assumptions needed challenging and which areas deserved greater focus or continued investment.

Rather than looking for confirmation that its existing direction was right, it needed an external view of how other organizations were approaching the issue and what those experiences meant for its own ecommerce strategy.

The starting point

Internal ambition needed to be tested against experience from outside the category

There was no single competitor model the company could copy.

Relevant lessons might come from retailers, technology businesses, logistics companies or organizations dealing with different parts of the sustainability challenge. But an idea working elsewhere did not automatically make it appropriate for a global consumer-goods business.

The project therefore needed both breadth outside the company and a detailed understanding of the company's own products, business model and routes to market.

What we did

Used cross-sector experience to challenge and refine the company's thinking

We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with senior leaders across FMCG, retail, technology, logistics and government, deliberately looking beyond the client's immediate competitive set.

The research focused on how other organizations were approaching sustainability in practice and what their experience revealed about the barriers, dependencies and changing expectations surrounding it.

Alongside the practitioner interviews, we brought together specialists in consumer goods and sustainability through an advisory panel that included academic expertise. Their perspective added another layer of challenge to the company's existing assumptions and to the examples emerging from the interviews.

The research surfaced operational risks and blind spots, rising standards and gaps between consumer expectations, what companies were doing and how progress was being measured.

At the same time, we researched the client itself in depth. That allowed us to bring each external example back to the realities of its products, business model and routes to market, separating ideas that were relevant and adaptable from those that were interesting but less practical for this business.

What they got

A phased roadmap grounded in outside evidence and the realities of the business

We distilled the research into a set of priorities and actions for the company's ecommerce approach.

Rather than presenting leadership with a catalog of sustainability practices, the recommendations showed how the external evidence applied to the company's own situation and used examples from other organizations to explain the thinking behind them.

The roadmap was phased, distinguishing areas where the business could move more quickly from those requiring longer-term development.

The recommendations were presented directly to the executive team, including the CMO.

Why it mattered

Leadership had outside evidence to guide decisions about how sustainability should shape ecommerce strategy

The work widened the company's view of what was possible while making that outside experience relevant to its own commercial and operational circumstances.

It also turned a broad ambition into specific priorities. Leadership could see where external experience reinforced its direction, where it exposed risks or gaps and where further development was needed before the sustainability ambition could be translated into practice.