Sustainable Business Requires Customer Loyalty

Posted on February 7, 2008
Filed Under Sustainable Business |

A sustainable business begins with your customers. If you don’t have customers it doesn’t matter how eco-positive your business model is. You’ll never get the chance to make your contribution back to the Earth without having some action to drive your sustainable practices.

When we talk about having a sustainable business, the first defining element should be having a customer base that will endure for a long time. How about customer loyalty that lasts for, say, seven generations? That would be a sustainable business.

I just achieved this breakthrough in my thinking from talking with Synthia Smith, business consultant and executive coach with the Mitra Group. She pointed out that my desire to build a sustainable business is not separate from the desire to have a business that continually renews itself.

The goal of today’s company is to survive the great changes of the modern world, and a large piece of both the problem and the solution at the heart of these changes lies in the fickle and daunting challenges of modern customer service. Getting new customers used to be the principal method of business growth, and it still is for many companies, but there are better ways now. The new advice is to create new markets, blue-ocean markets, and for this task existing customers can be perfect.

If you do have customers they in turn will force you eventually to become an eco-positive company. Customer opinion over time will force you into sustainable business practices, and not mere replacement measures but eventually enhancement practices that enrich the environment.

To create a business that will last for hundreds of years you could be a privileged corporation like the East India Company, or you can buy the advantages of sovereign assistance by bribing your regulators. But eventually the resource you’re selling must run out, or the platform for all commerce starts to fail as its ice-caps melt, and the voters start to get wise to the shortfalls in your accounting.

Then the community - the folk - through political administration will sweep you away along with your abettors. Much smarter in the long run is to get on the good side of these ordinary citizens. Cheating the system or the people is a short-term strategy. Long term, which is what every business may as well be, and what every sustainable business can be - long terms calls for customer loyalty.

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