Walmart Emergent Sustainable Product Strategy

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CMRXXX10.1177/0008125617695287CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEWWalmart’s Emergent Low-Cost Sustainable Product Strategy
Walmart’s Emergent
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DOI: 10.1177/0008125617695287
https://doi.org/10.1177/0008125617695287
Product Strategy journals.sagepub.com/home/cmr
Andrew Spicer1 and David Hyatt2
SUMMARY
This article traces the strategic initiatives that Walmart undertook over the last decade
to implement its ambitious vision of selling more sustainable products. This effort has
been characterized by a gradual shift away from customer-facing initiatives aimed at
labeling sustainable products toward supplier-facing initiatives targeted at improving
environmental or social performance without raising customer prices. It highlights
the role of institutional intermediaries, transaction costs, and experiential learning in
shaping firms’ capabilities to translate ambitious sustainability goals into operable,
mass-market initiatives.
Keywords: sustainability, corporate social responsibility, strategic planning
“What if [Walmart] used our size and resources to make this country and this
earth an even better place for all of us: customers, Associates, our children, and
generations unborn? What would that mean? Could we do it? Is this consistent
with our business model? What if the very things that many people criticize us
for—our size and reach—became a trusted friend and ally to all?”
—H. Lee Scott, Walmart CEO, October 23, 2005
L
ee Scott’s 2005 speech, announcing the company’s far-reaching cor-
porate sustainability strategy, is often cited as an example of what
companies can do to move large-scale sustainability initiatives to the
mainstream.1 In his inaugural speech, Scott acknowledged, “As one
of the largest companies in the world, with an expanding global presence, envi-
ronmental problems are OUR problems.”2 He then identified three goals to direct
Walmart’s future strategies: produce zero waste, be fueled by 100% renewable
energy, and sell products that sustained people and the environment. Scott
1University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

2University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA
1
2 CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW
acknowledged the experimental nature of the endeavor, noting, “These goals are
both ambitious and aspirational, and I’m not sure how to achieve them . . . at
least not yet.”
In this article, we present the findings of a multi-year project to trace the
strategic processes that Walmart undertook to implement Lee Scott’s vision, focus-
ing on the third goal to “sell products that sustained people and the environment.”
Like other research that examines processes of organizational change and learning
during the implementation of sustainability programs,3 we analyze Walmart’s les-
sons learned from an “emergent strategy” perspective that suggests that corpora-
tions often update and adapt their original plans as managers learn from experience
over time.4 Based on this perspective, we view Lee Scott’s speech as starting an
ambitious search for initiatives to translate his ambitious sustainability vision into
concrete, measurable results. Our research was designed to identify Walmart’s own
lessons learned during the first decade of its sustainability journey.
Given Walmart’s size and reach, its experiences have the potential to inform
other enterprises wishing to implement an ambitious sustainable product’s strat-
egy as well as other firms wishing to respond to Walmart’s initiatives. Its experi-
ences also provide a unique opportunity to explore the meaning of sustainability
for firms that operate within a low-cost business model. Researchers who explore
the business case for branding and selling sustainable products often study firms
that pursue a differentiated product strategy that pushes additional costs to cus-
tomers.5 In contrast, Scott envisioned extending the sustainability marketplace to
serve a more price-conscious customer segment. One Walmart sustainability
leader described the strategy as an experiment in the “democratization of sustain-
ability,” since one of its goals was to accelerate the mainstreaming of the market
for sustainable products and practices.6 Exploring Walmart’s experiences as it
sought to introduce sustainable products to a mass market provides the opportu-
nity to ground new theoretical ideas and concepts in the study of low-cost corpo-
rate sustainability strategies and outcomes within the experiences of one of the
largest companies in the world.
Tracing Walmart’s Emergent Strategy in Sustainable Products

Numerous authors have called for more research from an “emergent”
strategy perspective to directly explore the processes by which companies
implement environmental and social initiatives.7 These researchers suggest that
the study of implementation processes, rather than formal plans or final out-
comes alone, allows for a closer examination of failed experiments, strategic
inflection points, and learning by doing that may offer important insights to
other firms facing similar issues and challenges. From this point of view, cor-
porate activities are not driven solely from the visions of top leaders, but also
from the strategic choices made throughout the entire organization about what
to do and how to interpret formal plans and visions. Organizational learning,
adaptation, and search over time are critical components to understanding
long-term strategic outcomes.8
Walmart’s Emergent Low-Cost Sustainable Product Strategy 3
A “process tracing” methodology is frequently used to capture patterns of

emergent strategies.9 Process tracing differs from conventional cross-sectional
analysis as it does not look to infer underlying causal mechanisms based on analy-
sis of observed outcomes, but instead directly examines decision-making processes
as they unfold in real time. To trace implementation processes of Walmart’s sus-
tainability strategy, we first wrote eight cases. The cases move deliberately across
time and levels of the organization. All these cases, except for the introductory
one about Lee Scott, were based on primary interviews with the protagonist of the
case. Walmart allowed us to interview sustainability leaders but exercised the
right to review all cases for factual accuracy and legal implications. The major
choices of interpretation and case writing were left to the academic authors, and
only minor changes to the cases were suggested during the process of legal review.
All the cases were designed to be in the voice of its particular protagonist,
describing the strategic process that they experienced in facing the problems. Each
of our protagonists, some of whom sat for multiple interviews, personally reviewed
all quotations and the case for any factual discrepancies. With the exception of a
transportation case, which was completed in 2014, interviews were conducted
and the cases were written during 2011 and early 2012, and were published in
December 2012.
For the case project, interview sessions were conducted with 28 current or
former Walmart employees as well as seven people from stakeholders that worked
directly with Walmart (suppliers, NGOs, consultants). The interviews included
seven conducted by phone and the rest were conducted at participants’ offices.
The 45- to 90-minute interviews were recorded and later transcribed by reputable
transcription services. For some interviewees, we captured their retrospective
accounts, but others were in the process of enacting sustainability strategy. Overall,
these interviews produced over one thousand pages of interview transcripts. This
article solely uses the quotations already published and reviewed in the cases, as
these are publicly available.
To develop a fuller, theoretically informed narrative based on the cases, we
followed multiple procedures to further analyze our data. First, we identified all
the major product-related initiatives described in the cases. As most of the cases
were finished in 2012, we also updated our list of product-related sustainability
initiatives until the end of 2015 based on Walmart’s public announcements.
Instead of viewing these initiatives as separate and independent events, we
instead explored the company’s cumulative lessons learned as its leaders discov-
ered and adapted to what did, and what did not, work over time. To help identify
higher-level themes, we first developed a list of all the quotations from the cases
that related to sustainable product initiatives, identifying over 50 quotations
across the case series. We also analyzed hundreds of other documents (press
accounts, including Walmart’s press releases, Global Responsibility Reports, and
videos) as well as sustainability presentations made by Walmart personnel. We
also attended Walmart’s Sustainability Milestone Meetings to more fully capture
Walmart’s own perspectives of the events as they unfolded in real time.
Following a typical strategy in narrative-based, process tracing research,10

we then moved from the development of initiative chronologies and insider inter-
pretation to the analysis of emergent themes that explain strategic patterns across
time. Based on our review of the timeline of individual initiatives and related
quotations, as well as our experience in writing and teaching the cases across sev-
eral years, we identified three interrelated themes that helped to explain patterns
in Walmart’s strategy over time.
The first shift in the pattern of initiatives relates to a movement away from
product-specific sustainability claims toward projects aimed at developing a more
generalizable and holistic sustainability index. This shift represents a movement
from stories to scorecards, from telling narratives about individual products to
developing measurement tools that could be used to guide and evaluate multiple
product initiatives.
The second observed pattern relates to the level of the analysis at which
Walmart’s sustainability leaders focused their attention. We observed a move-
ment away from firm-level initiatives taking advantage of existing standards
and frameworks for sustainability toward institution-focused strategies deliber-
ately aimed at the “formation and transformation of institutions, fields and the
rules and standards that control those structures.”11 In institution-oriented
strategies, the language justifying an initiative switched from what was just
good for Walmart to what would be good for the entire set of private and public
actors that were interested in providing more credible and meaningful informa-
tion to customers.
A final pattern relates to a general switch from consumer-facing initiatives
to supplier-facing ones. The lessons learned about the difficulties of constructing a
credible customer-facing index contributed to a discernible shift in the company’s
approach to defining what selling more sustainable products would mean within
its existing low-cost business model. Over time, the implementation of scorecard-
based product initiatives emphasized communications with suppliers to better
identify low-cost innovations that improved economic or social performance
without raising prices rather than communicating with customers to provide
additional information so that they could better evaluate the sustainability attri-
butes of particular products.
To better provide an underlying narrative of these lessons learned as
they unfolded over time for corporate participants, we designed a multi-level
map of Walmart’s emergent strategies, as illustrated in Figure 1. While our ana-
lytical goal is to explain why the three themes identified above came to interact
to explain strategic choices and outcomes over time, we choose to describe our
findings according to the chronological order presented in Figure 1 to illustrate
the emergent nature of Walmart’s lessons learned. We do not wish to imply a
strict chronological ordering in which new initiatives became implemented
only after the company learned about the limitations of earlier ones nor suggest
that our simplified model represents a comprehensive list of all of Walmart’s
product-related initiatives. Instead, we propose that the pattern presented in
Figure 1. Walmart’s emergent low-cost sustainability strategy.
Institutional Sustainability
Strategy B Consortium
Formal Vision: Demand for a “Live Better”

Firm
Sell Low-Cost Low-Cost Scorecards and
Strategy Sustainable Products Sustainability Index Sustainability Leaders
A D
T0 T10 years
Figure 1 provides an accurate road map of the general direction of Walmart’s

most important strategic choices and lessons learned over the first decade of
implementing Lee Scott’s ambitious vision of selling sustainable products in
U.S. markets.12
Walmart’s Emergent Low-Cost Sustainability Strategy

The Growing Demand for a Low-Cost Sustainability Index, 2005-2008
The first major strategic inflection point in Walmart’s efforts to imple-
ment Lee Scott’s goal of selling sustainable products relates to efforts to move
beyond stories as the company recognized the demand for a systemic index to
define, measure, and compare product sustainability. This is described as a set of
learning points along Path A in Figure 1. With experience, sustainability leaders
increasingly sought a holistic measure of what actually constituted a sustainable
product, so that they could better measure their own progress toward meeting
Lee Scott’s goal to sell sustainable products and, at the same time, better commu-
nicate to customers what exactly they were selling.
At the beginning of the broader sustainability initiative, the telling and
retelling of individual stories provided the momentum to encourage a wide search
for possible product and marketing innovations. Storytelling did not require for-
mal measurements of all potential attributes of sustainability but instead relied on
the internal and external dissemination of individual cases that clearly achieved
success on some commonly understood metric. For instance, in Scott’s 2005
speech, he provided concrete stories about reducing toy packaging, which con-
served natural resources and saved money, and using organic cotton in yoga out-
fits, which were quickly demanded by customers, thus providing tangible
illustrations of the way in which a company like Walmart might both sell sustain-
able products that excited customers and engage in innovation that improved the
impact of the company’s products on the environment. Andy Ruben, Walmart’s
first vice president for sustainability, who deliberately encouraged story-telling as
a tool for building momentum for the sustainability program across the organiza-
tion, noted “We did end up with those stories; but instead of three to four, we had
hundreds of them.”
Many of the success stories became embedded in company rhetoric as

exemplars of shared value creation. For instance, CFL light bulbs were a preex-
isting product innovation, but they matched Walmart’s goals to sell more sus-
tainable products, so the company used its extensive reach to make this product
more easily available to customers. The technology for concentrated detergent
also was readily available, but Walmart helped bring it to market by promising
suppliers equal or greater shelf space, despite the smaller product size. Using a
“lens of sustainability” in evaluating the packaging for a Kid Connection car/
truck toy set, Walmart determined that the packaging was several inches larger
than needed for safe shipment, reporting that the resulting packaging reduction
in this single product category saved $3.5 million on transportation while also
saving 5,100 trees and using 1,300 fewer barrels of oil.13 These stories, and oth-
ers, were retold over and over, building momentum to explore other potential
cost savings.
The broader packaging initiative represented exactly the type of shared
value innovations that Walmart hoped to use to define its sustainability program.
It decreased Walmart’s costs while also contributing to its ability to meet transpor-
tation efficiency goals. Reduced packaging meant more products on trucks.
Combined with innovations in pallet configurations and logistics routing improve-
ments, these shifts improved the sustainability metric of cases of product moved
over fuel used and contributed to the eventual achievement in 2015 of the 2005
goal of doubling fuel efficiency.14
Decreased packaging and transportation costs represented two clear
dimensions for measuring product sustainability, but questions remained about
how to compare these dimensions against a host of alternative definitions of
sustainability. Some advocates focused on the human costs of producing certain
products, such as “dirty gold” in jewelry.15 Others called for better management
of renewable natural resources, such as by selling only certified sustainable fish
in stores. Still others demanded lower amounts of pesticides or chemicals in
products or encouraged initiatives to decrease product-related greenhouse gas
emissions.16 Another group pointed to consumers’ product use and disposal as
the “hot spot” for environmental impacts, questioning Walmart’s sale of prod-
ucts such as bottled water.17
At first, Walmart responded to these issues with individual initiatives. For
example, it announced a partnership with Conservation International to develop
supply chain transparency for a line of jewelry, known as the “Love, Earth” col-
lection, using environmental, human rights, and community criteria.18 Sam’s
Club introduced a range of gourmet coffees with three certifications: fair trade
certified by TransFair, responsible harvesting certified by the Rainforest Alliance,
and organic certified by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Walmart also committed to using third-party certification (Marine Stewardship
Council) for wild-caught fish and helped cotton suppliers to become USDA
Certified Organic.19
However, over time, these individual product initiatives presented new

issues. For instance, Walmart relied on self-reported data from its Love, Earth
jewelry suppliers, but an investigative reporter reported that a key Bolivian man-
ufacturer was falsifying data and contracting with sweatshops.20 The lesson was
that relying solely on suppliers’ accounts without independent verification would
be risky if Walmart hoped to make sustainability claims to consumers. Walmart
also struggled with whether the sale of certain products with poor sustainability
attributes, such as bottled water, fell within its broader sustainability goals, but
eventually asserted that it would not exclude products that customers demanded.
As Lee Scott told a Wall Street Journal reporter, “If the customer wants bottled
water, we are going to sell bottled water.”21
Measuring and labeling sustainability attributes across a wide range of prod-
ucts also emerged as an ongoing challenge, particularly when making claims to
customers. The need for a holistic standard crystallized when Walmart asked sup-
pliers for proposals for a 2008 Earth Day promotion. Suppliers, having no common
standard by which to gauge sustainability, responded with such a vast range of
claims, across multiple dimensions of the product attributes (e.g., reduced packag-
ing material, percentage recycled content, use of non-toxic ingredients, product
recyclability) that Walmart’s sustainability leaders could not figure out which prod-
ucts to include. The concept of a “sustainable product” transcended any individual
product dimension, such as packaging or recycled content, and therefore corporate
actors were wary of calling a product sustainable based on the evaluation of a
single dimension, noting the risk that Walmart might discover later that some data
were inaccurate or that the product was not sustainable on alternative criteria.
Matt Kistler, who followed Ruben as the senior vice president for sustain-
ability in 2007,22 took a logical next step and asked external experts how to pro-
ceed. However, even a team of advisers that Kistler called the “council of elders”
could not articulate a clear, consensus answer:
We were doing the circular for Earth Day and were struggling to figure out which
products to put into the circular—which ones were truly “green.” And we were
wracking our brains over what qualified. So we ended up creating a council of
elders—a leadership council of NGOs and academics to vet the products that the
merchants had given us. It was after that we realized we must have a science-
based tool—this council approach was not going to work. We were going to get
labeled as greenwashers—it’s just not scientific.
For example, one promotion presented Campbell’s Condensed Soup with a

green label (instead of the customary red one) as a sustainable alternative because
it was condensed. However, this choice generated external criticism and accusa-
tions of greenwashing—that is, that sustainability at Walmart meant taking exist-
ing products and putting green labels on them. In the absence of a credible, holistic
measure of sustainability, the company learned through experiences like the
Earth Day promotion that comprehensive marketing campaigns remained both
difficult and risky, particularly given the expectation that any product claims
would receive wide public scrutiny.
Summarizing these early lessons, Rand Waddoups, a senior manager work-
ing with Kistler on the problem of defining and communicating product sustain-
ability, noted,
We always had the same two questions: One, how do you gather and purpose
data? How do you do it in a way that is really efficient and effective? Two, once
you get all that data, how do you purpose it to ensure that you will actually get
value from it?
As Walmart’s leaders searched for answers to these basic questions, they

came to believe that the issue was not simply that suppliers or Walmart didn’t
know, or even that the “council of elders” disagreed over best practice; rather, it
was that the holistic solution that Walmart sought simply did not yet exist. As
Waddoups elaborated,
We struggled to find someone who could really help us do this; but increasingly
we realized that the solutions we saw were only different parts to the puzzle—
there was no holistic solution. The more we explored, the more we discovered
that there are resources, beginning points, but we needed so much more. How
were we going to measure water and the importance of water? What’s the dif-
ference between water in water-starved regions in India versus water in North
Dakota, where they’ve got plenty of it? How do you deal with the differences in
geography and the real impacts associated with decisions you have to make? . . .
We’re a retailer and building an index is not our core capability.
Walmart wanted a comprehensive solution, but its retail experience did not give
it the capabilities to develop holistic standards across the wide range of products
in its stores.
Waddoups described existing certifications, standards, and approaches as
only a starting point in the search for a holistic standard. Thus, while emergent
product-labeling organizations did exist at the time, such as in seafood, organic
food, and forestry, Walmart’s decision to define, compare, and communicate sus-
tainability across its entire product line meant transcending product category
approaches. Walmart identified the company GoodGuide as having the type of
holistic index it hoped to develop. This technological start-up company aimed to
develop, evaluate, and compare product sustainability attributes—health, envi-
ronment, and social—across a wide range of product categories. Relying on an
extensive array of public and private data, GoodGuide scored products on sustain-
ability attributes along a 1 to 5 scale and provided an overall product score that
customers could use to compare different products. However, the mechanisms by
which these scores were determined were secret. Kistler, ever wary of the risk of
greenwashing, recognized that “GoodGuide was much more holistic, but it did
not meet our criteria for transparency.”
Walmart’s sustainability leaders hoped to develop a holistic and trans-

parent index that could withstand the type of criticism and challenges that
they knew the company would likely encounter, but, over time, they came to
believe that the institutional infrastructure of the sustainability product mar-
ket had yet to develop a systemic solution to this problem. These early lessons
shaped the company’s subsequent strategic choices, as the company moved
from trying to bring specific products to market, as illustrated in its 2008 Earth
Day initiative, toward defining the standards for the marketplace as a whole.
The Sustainability Consortium, 2009-2015

In this section, we further explore Walmart’s strategic movement away
from customer-facing initiatives through their experiences in founding and
helping manage The Sustainability Consortium, a collective action organiza-
tion designed to develop holistic and public standards to define and measure
product sustainability attributes. The rationale of Walmart’s institutional strat-
egy announced in founding the Consortium is illustrated in the learning points
represented in the upward line B in Figure 1, and the realized outputs of the
Consortium by 2015 are illustrated in the downward line C.
The demand for initial shared, institutional work was clearly articulated in
the July 2009 Walmart Sustainability Milestone Meeting, when Walmart CEO
Mike Duke announced the formation of the Consortium, first reviewing the les-
sons Walmart had already learned:
As I look back at our progress over the past few years, I think the most difficult
challenge has been to measure the sustainability of our products. Despite all the
work that’s been done, we see only bits of information, but not the full picture
across the supply chain. We don’t know the patterns, hidden costs, and impacts of
the products we make and sell. Nor do we have a single source of data or a com-
mon standard for evaluating the sustainability of products. If we want to help the
customer of the future live better, we need that data. We need that big picture
view.23
This “big picture view” required more than imagining what Walmart could
accomplish as a single organization; it demanded cooperation with others to col-
lect the data and create the sustainability standards that would improve and
expand the market as a whole. To spark this cooperation, Duke provided start-up
funding for the Consortium with the explicit goal of developing a sustainability
index that firms could use to transparently measure and communicate product
sustainability:
The Index will bring about a more transparent supply chain, drive product inno-
vation, and, ultimately, provide consumers the information they need to assess
the sustainability of products. . . . It is not our goal to create or own this Index; we
want to spur the development of a common database that will allow the consor-
tium to collect and analyze the knowledge of the global supply chain.24
Duke remarked that, as an engineer, he preferred “data and an elegant

process” to solving problems and hoped to help work with stakeholders to create
“a single source of data or a common standard for evaluating the sustainability of
products” through the Consortium. He noted in his speech that the “ultimate step
of the Index is to translate the information stored in the database into a simple
tool that informs consumers about the sustainability of products,” thus highlight-
ing Walmart’s continued search to provide customers transparent, simple, and
holistic tools to evaluate product sustainability.
Bolstering the attempt to signal and build support for a transparent, public
standard, Walmart established leadership of the emergent multi-stakeholder
Consortium within two universities, the University of Arkansas and Arizona State
University.25 As Kistler explained, the choice of universities as key leaders stemmed
from the desire to develop an “unbiased, science-based source” of information in
the marketplace:
I think of colleges and universities as being “neutral.” If an index like this comes
from any particular sector—like business, NGOs, or government—then it’s
unlikely that the other sectors will see it as credible. So universities are the closest
thing I know to an unbiased, science-based source.
Still, skeptics questioned any effort that would be dominated by industry players
who had strong incentives to write standards to their own advantage.26
Others, including Jon Johnson, the new co-director of the Consortium
from the University of Arkansas, believed that firms could be motivated to partici-
pate in standards development that would improve market communication. To
explain the reasoning of why firms would benefit from the cooperative work of
the Consortium, Johnson used the concept of a “pre-competitive” space to iden-
tify the production of quality and credible information as a joint project from
which all companies wishing to sell sustainable products could benefit:
In a pre-competitive space, companies can create conditions under which they

can later compete more effectively and efficiently. Information is the raw mate-
rial of markets, and truly efficient markets require perfect information, but the
information they have is imperfect. If firms can collaborate in a pre-competitive
way to create better information with fewer information asymmetries, more cred-
ibility, more certainty, and most importantly, more harmonization so that every-
one is speaking the same language, then they can later interact more effectively in
a competitive market, because they’re exchanging better information, and doing
so more efficiently. Developing standards is a perfect example because companies
should protect proprietary information but release the kinds of information that
are necessary for decisions to be made across organizational boundaries.
While the concept of managing the commons is often applied to the study
of the natural environment in sustainability research,27 Johnson makes a similar
argument about the benefits to cooperation in managing common standards. In
the latter case, the benefits to common standards relates to “fewer information
asymmetries, more credibility, more certainty, and . . . more harmonization” for

all participating Consortium members. Johnson thus refers to a positive-sum
game in which cooperative behavior in constructing and sustaining common
standards would improve the ability of participating firms to better communicate
with interested suppliers, customers, and stakeholders about sustainable product
attributes. Under these “pre-competitive” conditions, firms’ collective interests in
constructing new forms of market intermediation would increase the flow and
credibility of information across the market as a whole.
The concept of a positive-sum game in managing common resources also
shaped the language of Walmart’s own support for the Consortium. In justifying
his support, Kistler remarked that developing collective sustainability standards
are
a collective good for the entire industry, similar to packaging changes. Packaging
changes that a manufacturer makes for Walmart tend to ripple through the entire
supply chain. We win, and our competitors win too. We know that by reducing
packaging, by improving energy efficiency, our competitors gain the same advan-
tages. But ultimately, its consumers we really care about, and the consumer wins
regardless.
Like Johnson, Kistler believed that collaboratively developed standards, such as

packaging initiatives, represent “a collective good for the entire industry.” Not
only would Walmart benefit, but its competitors and customers would as well.
Yet, while Walmart’s early challenges in defining and measuring sustain-
able products led the company to help found the Consortium, subsequent experi-
ences led them to new lessons about the challenges and delays to collective action,
as illustrated in the learning points along line C in Figure 1. The Consortium faced
its own growing pains, including funding, member recruitment, organizational
and governance structure, staffing, and leadership that took time to put together,
delaying the implementation of the Consortium’s strategic agenda.28 However,
even as the Consortium began to operate, it faced challenges in managing the
multiple scientific, political, and organizational issues that came with constructing
a workable measurement system for product sustainability.
One major obstacle to producing a sustainability index was the science
itself. Johnson noted,
We expected in the beginning that a full, LCA [life cycle assessment]-based meth-
odology for all products and all dimensions was going to be quite difficult to
achieve in the near term, but we didn’t know how far we could get with it. Many
experts told us any kind of LCA-based approach would be impossible, while others
were saying that it was ready to go out of the box. Rather than engage in an end-
less discussion among the academics, NGOs, and corporates, we decided to just try
to build an LCA-based system and see for ourselves what was possible, what was
impossible in the near term, what was impossible in principle, and how we could
adapt the systems to generate something usable in the short term and aspirational
in the long term.
Adopting a trial and experimentation approach, the Consortium first chose

seven products to assess on the basis of internationally accepted life cycle analysis
standards, to derive and support science-based sustainability claims. Two years
later, the Consortium determined that the LCA approach was not economically
scalable and reported that the LCA community had failed to come together in a
way such that real progress could be made by the Consortium in a timely, collab-
orative manner. The early search for ways to develop and aggregate sustainability
efforts thus revealed that producing original, scientific information took more
time than initially expected, particularly as stakeholders increasingly expected
that the search would end so that a sustainability index could be implemented.
In response, the Consortium moved from a strategy of collecting original
scientific life cycle data to a reviewer model, which aggregated the opinions of
scientific experts, industry leaders, and published studies (including LCA studies).
Based on this aggregation approach, the Consortium in 2011 moved toward creat-
ing product category-specific “knowledge bases” or later, “dossiers.” Dossiers
included analyses of product category “hot spots” with generally acknowledged
and potentially significant environmental or social impacts. A dossier also included
a “category sustainability profile” that organized these hotspots by the different
life cycle stages (e.g., raw materials extraction, manufacturing, and distribution)
and for each of these stages delineated the environment and social impacts. Last,
from the category sustainability profile, the Consortium produced a set of key
performance indicators (KPIs) and category improvement opportunities that
reflected the salient sustainability dimensions of the product category. By 2015,
the Consortium had created a list of 110 fully completed categories that included
a publicly available “Sustainability Insight” for general audiences and a “Product
Sustainability Toolkit” free to paid members and available to others for a fee.29
While the Consortium eventually developed sustainability metrics that
could be voluntarily adopted by member organizations, it refrained from entering
the business of actually presenting sustainability labels to customers. Johnson
described the difference between developing metrics and owning a label in the
following manner:
There is a fundamental difference between a system containing data sufficient to

create a label and the label itself. That is to say, different stakeholders could create
different labels from the same data system. Those differences would result from
the different political, competitive, moral, social, and cultural beliefs emphasized
by those groups. For instance, social dimensions such as working conditions might
be important for one group but not another. Those kinds of judgments are just not
within the purview or even expertise of the Consortium.
To Johnson, the challenge of developing any labeling system extends beyond

reaching agreement about the environmental or societal impact of a single prod-
uct attribute to making difficult “political, competitive, moral, social, and cultural”
distinctions about which attributes should be included—with what weight—in
assessing those impacts. In the same way that the “council of elders” had earlier
proved incapable of arbitrating between different approaches to measuring
product sustainability, the Consortium was unable to coordinate consensus over

what should be included and how data would be collected and weighted to pro-
duce a label.
The coordination challenges of creating a shared, common database became
especially salient in 2013, when Target announced it would be introducing a sus-
tainability product index for about 7,500 of its products, based on supplier-pro-
vided information. Target reported that it had been working with GoodGuide, “in
partnership with industry experts, vendors and NGOs, [to] help establish a com-
mon language, definition and process for qualifying what makes a product more
sustainable.”30 Underwriters Laboratories had purchased GoodGuide in 2011,
suggesting the strong market opportunities for similar sustainable product infor-
mation intermediaries. Target’s decision to implement its own solution, rather
than join the Consortium, demonstrated that Walmart’s goal of creating a collec-
tive market standard would not be easily achieved. Target’s announcement only
further increased the market fragmentation of sustainability standards and limited
the potential reach of the Consortium’s efforts.
The gap between the aims of Walmart’s institutional work, as exemplified
in line B in Figure 1, and the outputs of its efforts, as illustrated in line C, shaped
Walmart’s subsequent strategic choices. For instance, as the Target example illus-
trates, the emergence of a market standard remained distant. At least by 2015, the
Consortium’s KPI metrics did not yet represent a shared database that enabled
comprehensive product comparisons across firms. In addition, the Consortium’s
decision not to own any collectively managed sustainability index or conduct
original scientific research into life cycle impacts meant that member companies
still needed to incur the transaction costs of reporting, auditing, aggregating, and
communicating sustainability product information if they wished to implement
any firm-specific labeling initiative. These limitations shaped Walmart’s subse-
quent strategic choices on how to use the Consortium’s metrics to further their
ongoing search to translate Lee Scott’s vision to sell sustainable products into con-
crete initiatives that worked within its low-cost business model.
Live Better Scorecards and the Sustainable Leaders Program, 2009-2015

To further explore Walmart’s strategic adaptation to an evolving insti-
tutional environment, we now return to a firm-level perspective on Walmart’s
search to implement a sustainability product index, as illustrated in line D in
Figure 1. These efforts ran in parallel to the company’s institutional work with
the Consortium,31 but the outputs of the Consortium, as represented by line C,
moderated what Walmart eventually considered possible to implement at the
firm level.
Identifying low-cost, supplier-based innovations represented an early stra-
tegic initiative for Walmart. In 2009, the company began asking over 100,000
suppliers to provide answers to 15 questions on the sustainability of their opera-
tions in four areas—energy and climate, material efficiency, natural resources,
and people and community—in an effort to encourage suppliers to begin thinking
more deeply about their practices. These questions covered such areas as green-
house gas emissions, procurement policies, and supply chain transparency. By
2012, the company began to pilot the KPIs from the Consortium, producing what
it called “Live Better” scorecards for several product categories for suppliers who
completed the Consortium-based questionnaires.
However, even as the company began to implement scorecards within its
supply chain, it still had not figured out how to best communicate that informa-
tion to its customers. Walmart Board Chairman Rob Walton’s response to a ques-
tion at the 2012 Fortune Brainstorm Green conference illustrates the company’s
challenge of implementing a customer-facing strategy:
One of the questions was about [the sustainability index] not going fast enough.
But good gosh, this is really complicated stuff. And, it’s giving our buyers informa-
tion to inform decisions and compare products. It will be a great day when we can
give consumers that information.32
Walton’s acknowledgment that the systemic constraints on developing a sustain-

ability index were “really complicated stuff” was tied to his subsequent argument
that external observers should instead look to Walmart’s accomplishments with
its suppliers to evaluate progress toward the company’s goal of selling sustainable
products. Even though Walmart was moving slowly in communicating with its
customers, Walton suggested that the company was moving more quickly in
working with its suppliers.
By 2013, the scorecard initiatives included 200 of the largest merchandis-
ing categories in its U.S. stores.33 The company also promised at that time that, by
the end of 2017, it would buy 70% of the goods it sells in U.S. Walmart and Sam’s
Club stores from suppliers that used the scorecard to evaluate and share sustain-
ability product information. Walmart also announced changes in the evaluations
of its global sourcing merchants, to make sustainability an even more important
part of buyers’ day-to-day jobs, such that 5% of their performance evaluations
would be driven by sustainability objectives. Walmart began training buyers to
understand the Live Better Scorecards for the products they purchased to imple-
ment this new initiative, looking specifically for supplier innovations that pro-
duced more sustainable products at little or no additional costs.34 Devon Douglas,
a senior manager of sustainability at Walmart, explained this emergent supplier-
focused strategy in the following manner: “Are we trying to use [sustainability
indexing] as a strategy to sell certain products? No. Our approach is to work with
suppliers to create better products.”35
Walmart quickly applied the Live Better Scorecard to supplement and sup-
port a number of broader, sector-specific initiatives that it was implementing in
tandem with its suppliers. For instance, General Mills agreed in a 2014 summit to
co-sponsor an innovation challenge with Walmart to encourage innovators and
farmers to find promising ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in fertilizer
management. The Dairy Farmers of America promised that by 2020, more than
90% of its 9,000 member farms would participate in its Gold Standard Dairy pro-
gram, focused on resource efficiency and optimization.36 The strategy of working
with suppliers to look for such improvements and efficiencies still sought to main-
tain the everyday low prices that defined Walmart’s existing business model and
supply chain expertise.
However, even as the Consortium completed the analysis of more catego-
ries in 2015, and over 1,300 suppliers were participating in the Index, Walmart
still faced the decision about the best way to implement the use of these score-
cards in its own communication with consumers. Walmart created the
Sustainability Leaders program in early 2015 to address this issue. Rather than
making claims about product or even product category sustainability, the
Sustainability Leaders program aimed to identify its best-performing suppliers. An
aggregate ranking of companies was made by product category (e.g., televisions,
computers, toys). Suppliers that scored at least 80% or ranked top in their cate-
gory were deemed “sustainability leaders.” On Walmart.com, the company high-
lighted 3,000 products produced by those companies and communicated to
consumers that the dedicated Sustainable Leaders shop made “it easier to find
products made by companies that have scored as best in class in Walmart’s
Sustainability Index.”37
Yet, even while reporting its top performers, the website clearly stated that
the information provided did not represent any sort of endorsement of a particu-
lar product and that customers were responsible for doing their own research:
The badge does not make any representations about the particular environmen-
tal and/or social impact of a specific product. While not perfect, we believe this
approach highlights companies that are leading among their peers and allows all
industries to participate. We encourage you to do your own research and learn as
much as you can when purchasing a product.38
One reason for such a qualifying statement is that the Sustainability Leaders
badge was based on a company score at the level of a product category rather than
an analysis of any individual product. Therefore, if a company earned a badge
within any product category, then all the products that a supplier sold within that
category were labeled with the designated Leadership label. Since the Consortium
had developed its performance metrics at the product category level, and Walmart
had designed its own surveys and ranking system around this system, the com-
pany did not possess the data to report comparative scores at the level of individ-
ual products.
Another limitation the company acknowledged was the lack of transpar-
ency. Although Walmart provided links to category sustainability information on
the Consortium’s website, neither the individual scorecard dimensions for a cat-
egory nor the criteria for weighting and aggregating them for its suppliers were
publicly available or subject to any external scrutiny or independent verification.
In response to a hypothetical frequently asked question on its website about
reporting limitations, Walmart also called the Sustainability Leaders badges “not
perfect, but an important first step.”39
Given these limitations, the Sustainability Leaders program sparked exter-
nal concerns. Critic Stacy Mitchell suggested the Sustainability Leaders program
was “straight out of Walmart’s ten-year-old greenwashing playbook,” noting that
the website called a “giant 150 pound roll of bubble wrap” sustainable.40 Former
Seventh Generation CEO Jeffery Hollender assessed toilet paper on the site but
found that it lacked any attributes normally associated with sustainable paper
products.41 Despite all its precautions in acknowledging the limitations of its
Sustainability Leaders program, the company still had difficulty clearly communi-
cating a sustainability index that distinguished more or less sustainable products
to customers.
From Walmart’s perspective, its cautionary approach implementing the
Sustainability Leaders program illustrates a careful institutional adaptation strat-
egy; it wanted to work within the constraints of the existing sustainability indica-
tors as put forth through the consortium and also did not want to promise
customers more than it could implement in practice. Thus, the company warns
that the program does not perform some of the functions that even the company
itself had initially hoped it might be able to accomplish; for instance, the index
does not differentiate between more or less sustainable products, as it reports on
aggregate company results rather than disaggregated product scores. Nor is the
index based on a common database that extends beyond Walmart’s own suppli-
ers; thus, it does not report on the most sustainable products, but instead reports
on the relative performance of low-cost suppliers within its own supply chains.
While some claim that these limitations represent greenwashing, Walmart’s
own answer to this critique is that they understand that the program is “not per-
fect, but an important first step.” That is, despite its deviations from even its own
original goals, the Sustainability Leaders index represents a first step toward the
broader goal of developing more accurate and verifiable standards over the long
run: “Our goal is to share the results, learnings, and best practices over time—and
adapt accordingly.”42
Discussion
To generalize from Walmart’s experience, we first return to the original
questions posed by Lee Scott in his 2005 speech about what a sustainability strat-
egy would mean for the company and whether it would be consistent with its
low-cost business model. An evolving answer to this question is related to the
movement away from customer-facing initiatives aimed to shift consumer pref-
erences and label sustainable products and the movement toward supplier-facing
initiatives that searched for innovations that improved environmental or social
performance without raising costs. The latter did not require the direct buy-in
from customers since more sustainable products continued to compete favorably
in terms of price.
Moreover, our analysis suggests that the company’s eventual low-cost

strategy emerged through experience. In its early steps along its sustainability
journey, the company began to learn of the challenges of marketing sustainable
products to consumers and, to address these issues, expanded its original vision of
selling sustainable products to include a broader, more complex understanding of
sustainability labels and standards. Mike Duke called for a “big picture view” of
sustainability when announcing the formation of the Sustainability Consortium
to develop a public, sustainable product index. Board Chair Rob Walton similarly
expressed the dawning recognition that the development of a customer-facing
sustainability index is “really complicated stuff” and still distant. From their early
efforts to promote more sustainable products toward their later efforts to work
with the Consortium to develop a common label, Walmart sought an inexpensive
means to measure and communicate credible information about the sustainability
attributes of mass-market products.
The lessons learned from Walmart’s experience extend beyond the need to
understand the complex underpinnings of sustainability labels to also identify the
real-world challenges of implementing such standards within a low-cost business
model. Motivating a potentially competing set of Fortune 500 companies to coop-
erate to build a collective standard proved to take more time and be more difficult
than originally expected, thus creating new questions for the firm about the best
way to adapt Lee Scott’s original goal into operative initiatives that worked within
the existing institutional context. The Sustainability Leaders initiative represents
one example of such a compromise to figure out what could be done within exist-
ing resources and constraints.
Our historical analysis of Walmart’s search processes differ from those
that accuse Walmart of greenwashing for not meeting its own sustainable prod-
uct goals. These external critics note that Walmart’s full goals in selling sustain-
able products have not yet been met, and attribute this failure to a lack of
commitment on the part of Walmart’s leadership.43 An institutional perspective
provides an alternative explanation of why Walmart, or any large corporation,
might not always end up fully implementing initial goals. In terms of Walmart’s
experience, this institutional moderating effect is illustrated in the interaction
between lines C and D in Figure 1. At least over the short run, Walmart felt
constrained by what it could accomplish as a firm because of the limited nature
of the systemic inputs that the company received from the broader institutional
environment.
The study of failed, partially implemented, or highly adapted sustainability
programs like the Sustainability Leaders program offers an opportunity to move
beyond the observation that many ambitious sustainability visions are not quickly
or easily implemented and to move toward a better understanding of why and
under what circumstances. To generalize from the Walmart case, the concepts of
institutional intermediation, transaction costs, and experiential learning help to
explain why many firms may deviate from original visions when implementing
ambitious sustainability goals.
Institutions, Transaction Costs, and Low-Cost Sustainability Strategies

To explore the relationship between institutions and low-cost sustain-
ability strategy in more general terms, we turn to an emerging markets litera-
ture that applies a transaction cost framework to analyze why institutions often
moderate the ability of firms to successfully introduce new strategic initiatives.44
From this perspective, markets are transactional arenas in which buyers and sup-
pliers meet; if sellers face difficulties in communicating exactly what they are
selling and customers remain skeptical about the information that they receive,
then the transaction costs of exchange may lead many potential customers to
exit the market altogether.45
In developed markets, institutional intermediaries often emerge to provide
information about product quality and characteristics that customers find difficult
to directly observe or experience.46 Some institutional intermediaries are private,
profit-seeking firms (e.g., Consumer Reports, JD Power, UL), whereas others are
non-profit, collective action organizations that provide general public goods in
shaping the quality of information and knowledge within the marketplace as a
whole.47 Industry and credentialing associations, such as the Fair Labor Association
or the Forest Stewardship Council, represent open institutional intermediaries
that strive to provide credible assessments and standards without the formation of
independent, private companies.48
However, in the absence of established public or private institutional inter-
mediaries to lower transaction costs, which this literature often identifies as “insti-
tutional voids,” firms are required to internalize the costs of defining, validating,
and communicating new product attributes to customers. For example, in the
market for sustainable products, some customers may invest the time to buy their
food from area farms that they can physically inspect, while others might be will-
ing to pay a premium to trust organizations like Whole Foods or local cooperatives
to present a viable range of sustainable options. In contrast, Walmart hoped to
attract customers unwilling to make these investments, creating the challenge of
constructing low-cost solutions to the problems of information and labeling in the
emerging sustainable product marketplace. Therefore, unlike more differentiated
competitors, low-cost retailers like Walmart are less likely to voluntarily incur
additional transaction costs given the difficulty that these companies face in pass-
ing these expenses onto customers.
Under these conditions, it is not a surprise that Walmart’s emergent strat-
egy strayed away from incurring the transaction costs of trying to change cus-
tomer attitudes and behaviors and toward seeking low-cost innovations that
aligned with its existing low-cost strategy. To reduce waste and improve energy
efficiencies in its stores, Walmart deployed its considerable resources to pursue
well-defined goals, which enabled it to make significant progress on its original
goals for waste reduction, transportation efficiency, and product packaging. In
contrast, the lack of external metrics and internal capabilities to measure and
communicate progress toward its product sustainability goals led Walmart to forgo
a systemic customer-facing sustainability strategy and to focus instead on
encouraging suppliers to seek operational efficiencies similar to those that Walmart

had been able to achieve.
While Walmart did not fully succeed in designing a fully developed sustain-
ability label that other firms could use effectively with little cost, the company’s
emergent supplier-focus strategy may have nonetheless stimulated activities for
low-cost sustainability innovations. For instance, responses to an open-ended
question in one study indicated that Walmart was the top-cited retailer (79%)
driving suppliers’ investments in product sustainability.49 Since Walmart’s sup-
plier-facing initiatives focused internal attention on the sustainability attributes of
products, such as tying the pay of Walmart’s buyers to sustainability improve-
ment, its programs lowered suppliers’ transaction costs in marketing more sus-
tainable products specifically to Walmart, even if these products would nonetheless
need to compete equally well on other dimensions of performance such as price.
Decision Making under Institutional Uncertainty

The emerging markets literature suggests three types of strategic responses
to competing under conditions of weak market intermediation: avoid the market
until new standards become accepted and consolidated, engage in institutional
work to change the business environment, and adapt strategies to fit existing
institutional conditions.50 This framework of strategic decision making under
institutional uncertainty also provides insights for firms of all types wishing to
understand and respond to the emergent institutional conditions within the sus-
tainable product market.
The implications of an avoidance strategy relate to the arguments presented
above. If the institutional standards of competition remain fragmented, then many
low-cost competitors are likely to avoid even trying to pursue direct mass-market
customer appeals given the high transaction costs that such strategies might entail.
In this case, other types of sustainability programs, such as improving operational
efficiencies (such as packaging improvements and energy reduction) are most
likely to fill a corporate portfolio of sustainability-related initiatives.
While some low-cost companies may simply wait on the sidelines to allow
other companies to incur the costs of constructing new standards, Walmart chose
to promote institutional work via the Consortium to reduce transaction costs and
harmonize standards. In the broader literature, institutional work views corpora-
tions not only as passive actors that respond to given rules of the game, but also
as agents who may, deliberately or accidently, act to change those rules.51 In the
Walmart case, the company openly acknowledged in forming the Sustainability
Consortium that public standards and information sharing could lower the trans-
action costs of measuring and marketing the sustainability attributes of products.
These benefits would accrue to all market actors—including competitors, suppli-
ers, and customers.
Moreover, Walmart’s efforts to design the Sustainability Consortium
relates to a broader literature on cross-sector partnerships and alliances as a
means of institutional work. Some authors refer to this as a “societal-sector plat-

form concerned with altering sectoral relationships to redefine the nature of a
social need and the possibilities for coping with it.”52 Problems on such plat-
forms tend to be “meta-problems” or those that are not solvable by any one
sector of society. Instead of working product by product, or even industry by
industry, Walmart hoped to reach beyond its boundaries to new partners in
order to develop a holistic understanding of the problem and develop metrics
that it hoped would become a global standard for addressing both environmen-
tal and social concerns.
In this case, the idea of institutional work means more than simply trying
to determine what is best for a particular product line or strategy. It also involves
determining what types of collective action organizations and potential partners
are most likely to contribute to the development of the broader market as a whole.
Figuring out what types of alliances and partners are necessary to pursue collec-
tive goals and determining how much and in what way to contribute to coopera-
tive efforts are likely to represent important strategic issues for any firm wishing
to enter into the emergent marketplace for sustainable products.
Walmart’s experiences point to both the necessity of institutional work as
well as to its limitations. Numerous researchers across multiple literatures have
noted that a purely functionalist account of institutional emergence on the basis
of market demand alone problematically explains observed outcomes in industry-
led collective action organizations. In contrast, a political and organizational view
of collective action in market arenas regards institutional work as a multi-stake-
holder negotiation across multiple domains, involving states, NGOs, non-market
actors, and firms that often lead to unexpected outcomes.53 Negotiated and politi-
cal processes often lead to delays, struggles, and limitations to firm-level efforts to
fully control the institutional environments in which they operate.54 Walmart’s
lessons therefore extended beyond realizing the benefits to changing the external
environment, as illustrated in line B in Figure 1, but also to the necessity of adapt-
ing to it, as illustrated by the intersection of lines C and D.
An adaptation strategy requires modifications to original plans as firms
learn through experimentation and trial over time. Under these conditions, sus-
tainability initiatives may not fully meet the ideals of original visions nor repre-
sent a complete avoidance strategy; instead, observed outcomes may represent
emergent solutions to less-than-desirable institutional conditions as firms figure
out what is possible to accomplish given existing resources, capabilities, and
knowledge.
The Sustainability Leaders program represents an example of such an
emergent strategy that adapts to the existing institutional environment rather
than attempting to change it. In contrast to critics who claim that the Sustainability
Leaders program represents yet another illustration of the company’s “ten-year
greenwashing” agenda, we have instead placed the choice of this individual initia-
tive within the context of a decade of experiments that revolved around the com-
mon theme of how to define, capture, and communicate sustainability information
to customers and suppliers. The initiative clearly deviates from an ideal version of
what a sustainability index or label might be able to accomplish, but nonetheless
represents at least what Walmart suggests is a “step in the right direction” that
aligned with its emergent supplier-facing strategy.
In exploring strategic adaptation and learning-by-doing in the implementa-
tion of sustainability programs, Simon Zadek suggests that “judging and ultimately
guiding corporate performance requires an examination of whether a business is
doing what it can do given its range of external options and internal competencies.”55
Since aligning strategies, internal business capabilities, and external market envi-
ronments is a long and uncertain task, Zadek points to the need to look at learning
as one marker by which to guide and judge performance:
A business’s contribution to sustainable development therefore needs to be under-

stood in terms of [whether it] takes full advantage of opportunities for learning
and action in building social and environmental objectives into its core business by
effectively developing its internal values and competencies.56
From this perspective, a close examination of what firms do, and how
they learn from these experiences, pushes the discussion of implementing sus-
tainability programs beyond solely examining top-leadership commitment or
long-term visions to broader discussions of what is feasible under existing insti-
tutional and business conditions to accomplish in a reasonable time frame. In
this case, one criterion for evaluating Walmart’s future sustainability efforts is
whether the company will continue to allow the experimentation and trial that
explores the boundaries of what is possible or whether it will grow more con-
servative in managing to measurable outcomes in order to avoid public failure
and criticism.
Limitations and Future Research

Walmart’s emergent low-cost sustainability strategy raises numerous ques-
tions for future research and practice. One relates to exploring more companies
attempting to find a profitable niche within a broader mass market for sustain-
able products, particularly given the high transaction costs in systemically defin-
ing, measuring, and marketing the sustainability of any individual product.
A second question relates to the responsibilities of mass-market retailers like
Walmart if they do enter into this marketplace. For instance, a potential criti-
cism of Walmart’s emergent supplier-focused strategy is that solely working with
suppliers to encourage low-cost innovation may miss the opportunity to build
consumer preferences for more sustainable products that creates pressure on
less sustainable products and producers. Studying the balance between supplier-
and customer-facing sustainability initiatives across multiple cases and over time
remains an ongoing topic of research into the design and implementation of low-
cost corporate-wide sustainability strategies.
Another limitation of exploring only a single case is that while we examine
what Walmart insiders came to believe what was possible to accomplish, we did
not present any external standard by which to evaluate the validity of these
beliefs. The lack of comparative cases makes it difficult to clearly identify the
counter-factual of what might have been accomplished if different strategies or
more resources had been committed to the problem.
Moreover, our story cautions against solely using Walmart’s own goals as a
definite measure of success. While implementation gaps between initial visions
and realized goals may reflect a lack of commitment, our analysis supports the
finding of other researchers that these types of unpredicted outcomes also reflect
learning processes that shape emergent strategies over time.57 From this perspec-
tive, a challenge of using company’s espoused goals as benchmarks to evaluate
future progress is that such a strict adherence to intentional strategies might hin-
der the search for unexpected innovations that accompany the implementation of
complex goals through emergent strategies.
Instead of providing a definitive benchmark by which to evaluate Walmart’s
progress, we suggest that the case illustrates that questions of what counts, and
who does that counting, remains at the heart of the broader firm and societal level
issues of sustainable development. For instance, another limitation of our study is
that we have looked mainly at the process of defining sustainability from the cor-
poration’s own perspective; we likely missed many issues that other actors might
suggest are needed to enhance a broad sustainability agenda. For example, our
interviews included scant discussion of government, even when the provision of
public goods was the central topic. Nor did the sustainability participants discuss
labor standards or wages when defining factors to include in sustainability stan-
dards, even though such issues are clearly expressed in Walmart’s supplier code of
conduct and sustainable agriculture initiative. Nor did a measure of product qual-
ity become a part of the “Live Better” Scorecards, despite an argument that the
durability of any product might be strongly related to its long-term environmental
impact. Issues of corruption might have been included too, particularly consider-
ing accusations that later emerged that Walmart Mexico made questionable pay-
ments to political officials during the same time period that it was establishing its
sustainability program.58
Walmart’s experiences illustrate that any sort of holistic set of criterion of
how to evaluate the sustainability of organizations and products still remains con-
tested and uncertain, suggesting that firms that wish to enter into this nascent
marketplace might better approach it from the point of view of an emerging rather
than developed marketplace. In developed market settings, institutions often
work so quietly behind the scenes that market participants simply take them for
granted. However, in emergent market conditions, stable rule-making, collective
understanding, and credible communications cannot be expected, and firms often
must respond and adapt to an institutionally fragmented, contested market envi-
ronment. Managing in such complex and dynamic environments requires joint
work by multiple actors to build new forms of market intermediation to provide
meaningful and credible information to customers and suppliers as well as cross-
sectoral cooperation to produce a level playing field better able to define the
emergent rules of market competition. It also requires companies to actively man-

age strategic learning and adaptation processes as they inevitably respond to
unexpected deviations from original designs.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our two schools, the Darla Moore School of Business at
the University of South Carolina and the Sam M. Walton College of Business at
the University of Arkansas, for their support of this project.
Author Biographies
Andrew Spicer is an Associate Professor in the Sonoco International Business
Department at the Darla Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina
(email: aspicer@moore.sc.edu).
David Hyatt is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management in the
Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas (email: dhyatt@
uark.edu).
Notes
1. Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister, “Big Brand Sustainability: Governance Prospects and
Environmental Limits,” Global Environmental Change, 22/1 (February 2012): 36-45; Chris
Laszlo, Sustainable Value: How the World’s Leading Companies Are Doing Well by Doing Good
(Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, 2008).
2. H. Lee Scott Jr., “Twenty First Century Leadership,” Remarks as Prepared for Delivery,
Bentonville, AR, Wal-Mart, 2005, accessed January 29, 2016, http://news.walmart.com/
executive-viewpoints/twenty-first-century-leadership.
3. Lynne M. Anderson and Thomas S. Bateman, “Individual Environmental Initiative:
Championing Natural Environmental Issues in U.S. Business Organizations,” Academy of
Management Journal, 43/4 (August 2000): 548-570; Pratima Bansal, “From Issues to Actions:
The Importance of Individual Concerns and Organizational Values in Responding to Natural
Environmental Issues,” Organization Science, 14/5 (2003): 510-527; Monika I. Winn and
Linda C. Angell, “Towards a Process Model of Corporate Greening,” Organization Studies, 21/6
(November 2000): 1119-1147; Maurizio Zollo, Carmelo Cennamo, and Kerstin Neumann,
“Beyond What and Why: Understanding Organizational Evolution towards Sustainable
Enterprise Models,” Organization & Environment, 26/3 (September 2013): 241-259; Sanjay
Sharma, “Managerial Interpretations and Organizational Context as Predictors of Corporate
Choice of Environmental Strategy,” Academy of Management Journal, 43/4 (August 2000):
681-697.
4. Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters, “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” Strategic
Management Journal, 6/3 (July-September 1985): 257-272.
5. For instance, see Forest Reinhardt, “Environmental Product Differentiation: Implications for
Corporate Strategy,” California Management Review, 40/4 (Summer 1998): 43-73.
6. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in this manuscript were collected during a
set of interviews during our study of Walmart’s sustainability strategy and are part of a
series of case studies. The cases were produced through a joint project of the University
of South Carolina and the University of Arkansas and are publicly available at http://
moore.sc.edu/walmartcases and http://sustainabilitycases.uark.edu. The cases were
written solely for teaching and academic purposes; there was no financial or consulting
relationship between the academic authors and Walmart.
7. Bansal, op. cit.; Donal Crilly, Maurizio Zollo, and Morten T. Hansen, “Faking It or Muddling
Through? Understanding Decoupling in Response to Stakeholder Pressures,” Academy of
Management Journal, 55/6 (December 2012): 1429-1448; Magali A. Delmas and Michael W.
Toffel, “Organizational Responses to Environmental Demands: Opening the Black Box,”
Strategic Management Journal, 29/10 (October 2008): 1027-1055; Winn and Angell, op. cit.;
Simon Zadek, The Civil Corporation (London: Earthscan, 2007); Zollo et al., op. cit.
8. Richard M. Cyert and James G. March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1963); Mintzberg and Waters, op. cit.; Andrew M. Pettigrew, “The Character
and Significance of Strategy Process Research,” Strategic Management Journal, 13/S2 (Winter
1992): 5.
9. Andrew H. Van de Ven, “Suggestions for Studying Strategy Process: A Research Note,”
Strategic Management Journal, 13/S1 (Summer 1992): 169; Brian T. Pentland, “Building
Process Theory with Narrative: From Description to Explanation,” Academy of Management
Review, 24/4 (October 1999): 711-724; Pettigrew, op. cit.
10. Ann Langley, “Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data,” Academy of Management Review,
24/4 (October 1999): 691-710.
11. Thomas B. Lawrence, “Institutional Strategy,” Journal of Management, 25/2 (April 1999): 161-
187, at p. 167.
12. On the whole, Walmart left implementation decisions of its sustainability goals across its
global operations to local subsidiaries. Over time, they began to implement globally orga-
nized initiatives, such as the sustainable agriculture project that coordinated cross-national
activities.
13. Scott, op. cit.
14. Walmart, “Walmart Marks Fulfillment of Key Global Responsibility Commitments,”
Bentonville, AR, 2015, accessed December 12, 2015, http://news.walmart.com/news-
archive/2015/11/17/walmart-marks-fulfillment-of-key-global-responsibility-commitments.
15. N. Craig Smith and Robert Crawford, “Walmart: Love, Earth (A),” INSEAD Case 09/2011-
5830, Bedfordshire, UK, 2011; Marc Gunther, “Green Gold?” Fortune, September 3, 2008,
pp. 75-78.
16. Conrad MacKerron, “Prius Envy and the Greening of Wal-Mart: A Blind Spot for the Human
Cost,” GreenBiz.com, 2008, accessed December 30, 2015, http://www.greenbiz.com/
blog/2008/06/29/prius-envy-and-greening-wal-mart-blind-spot-human-cost; Wal-Mart Watch,
“It’s Not Easy Being Green: The Truth behind Wal-Mart’s Environmental Makeover,” 2007,
accessed December 30, 2015, http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/factsheet/walmart-watch-
fact-sheets/its-not-easy-being-green-the-truth-behind-wal-marts-environmental-makeover/.
17. Marc Gunther, “The Green Machine,” Fortune, July 31, 2006, pp. 34-42; Edward Humes,
Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (New York, NY: Harper
Business, 2011).
18. Smith and Crawford, op. cit.
19. Erica L. Plambeck and Lyn Denend, “The Greening of Wal-Mart,” Stanford Social Innovation
Review, 6/2 (Spring 2008): 52-59.
20. Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, “Walmart Greenwashing: Workers Pay the Price,” Miami New
Times, January 6, 2011. http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/walmart-greenwashing-
workers-pay-the-price-6379374
21. Alan Murray, “Waste Not: Wal-Mart’s H. Lee Scott Jr. on What the Company Is Doing to
Reduce Its Carbon Footprint—and Those of Its Customers,” The Wall Street Journal, March 24,
2008. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120611920074555201
22. Andrea Thomas followed Kistler in September 2010, serving through December 2014.
Manuel Gomez followed Thomas, and Laura Phillips assumed the role January 1, 2016,
reporting to Kathleen McLaughlin, President of the Walmart Foundation and Chief
Sustainability Officer for Walmart.
23. Mike Duke, “Mike Duke, President and CEO of Walmart: Sustainability Milestone Meeting
July 16, 2009,” Remarks as Prepared for Delivery, Walmart, Bentonville, AR, 2009, accessed
April 20, 2011, http://walmartstores.com/download/3880.pdf.
24. Ibid.
25. Arizona State University and the University of Arkansas jointly administered the
Sustainability Consortium, but the official university affiliation grew to include Nanjing
University and Wageningen University.
26. Joel Makower, “Inside Walmart’s Sustainability Consortium,” GreenBiz.com, 2009,
accessed February 7, 2017, http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/08/17/inside-walmarts-
sustainability-consortium; By 2015, Consortium membership included over one hundred
global NGOs, government agencies, academics, and firms representing over $2 trillion in
market capitalization.
27. See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
28. This section is not designed to provide a full overview of the Consortium history, but instead
focuses on the primary issues that shaped the limitations of the sustainability index as
compared with its initial vision. For other histories, see the case study by David Hyatt and
Andrew Spicer, 2012, “Walmart’s Sustainability Journey: Defining Sustainable Products (B),”
http://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=scmtwscp or the
case study by N. Craig Smith and Robert Crawford, 2011 “Wal-Mart’s Sustainable Product
Index,” INSEAD Case 07/2011-5751. https://centres.insead.edu/social-innovation/what-we-
do/documents/5751-WalMart-A-CS-EN-0-07-2011-w.pdf.
29. More information about the Sustainability Consortium can be found on its website at http://
www.sustainabilityconsortium.org/.
30. Target, “Introducing the Target Sustainable Product Standard,” 2013, accessed January 13,
2015, https://corporate.target.com/discover/article/introducing-the-Target-Sustainable-
Product-Standard, 2013.
31. Space does not permit a full accounting of Walmart’s product sustainability initiatives, which
were numerous. The reader is directed to Walmart’s Global Responsibility Reports for more
detail.
32. Andy Serwer, “Wal-Mart Chairman: How We Came to Embrace Sustainability,” Fortune,
April 17, 2012, accessed February 7, 2017, http://fortune.com/2012/04/17/wal-mart-chair-
man-how-we-came-to-embrace-sustainability/. Mr. Walton was responding to a question
that he had heard directed towards a Walmart panelist leading an earlier session.
33. Walmart, “Walmart Sustainability Index—Program Overview,” Bentonville, AR, 2013,
accessed December 30, 2015, http://customers.icix.com/?wpfb_dl=34. Note that there is not
a direct articulation between the number of categories completed by the Consortium and
Walmart’s categories—Walmart’s are more granular.
34. Ibid.
35. GreenBiz, “Inside the Sustainability Consortium: Session Note with Jon Johnson and Devon
Douglas,” State of GreenBiz Forum, 2011, accessed January 13, 2015.
36. Walmart, “Walmart Sustainable Product Expo Supplier Commitments,” Bentonville,
AR, 2014, accessed January 13, 2015 http://corporate.walmart.com/walmart-sustainable-
product-expo-/_news_/supplier-commitments.
37. Walmart, “Introducing the Walmart Sustainability Leaders Shop,” Bentonville, AR, 2015,
accessed May 20, 2015, http://corporate.walmart.com/global-responsibility/environmental-
sustainability/sustainability-leaders/introducing-the-walmart-sustainability-leaders-shop.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Stacy Mitchell, “Walmart Puts Green Label on Products It Doesn’t Even Claim Are Green,”
The Huffington Post, 2015, accessed May 14, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-
mitchell/walmart-puts-green-label-_b_6807876.html.
41. Jeffrey Hollender, “Is Walmart Selling Unsustainable Products from ‘Sustainability
Leaders’?” GreenBiz, 2015, accessed May 14, 2015, http://www.greenbiz.com/article/
walmart-unsustainable-products-sustainability-leaders.
42. Walmart, “Sustainability Leaders Shop.”
43. Mitchell, op. cit.; Guy Pearse, Greenwash: Big Brands and Carbon Scams (Collingwood,
Australia: Black Inc., 2012).
44. Tarun Khanna, Krishna Palepu, and Richard Bullock, Winning in Emerging Markets: A Road
Map for Strategy and Execution (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2010); Tarun Khanna,
Krishna G. Palepu, and Jayant Sinha, “Strategies that Fit Emerging Markets,” Harvard
Business Review, 83/6 (June 2005): 63-76.
45. George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market
Mechanism,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84/3 (August 1970): 488-500; Khanna et al.,
Winning in Emerging Markets.
46. Nilanjana Dutt, Olga Hawn, Elena Vidal, Aaron K. Chatterji, Anita M. McGahan, and Will
Mitchell, “How Open System Intermediaries Address Institutional Failures: The Case of
Business Incubators in Emerging-Market Countries,” Academy of Management Journal, 59
(2016): 818-840; Khanna et al., Winning in Emerging Markets; Johanna Mair, Ignasi Marti,
and Marc Ventresca, “Building Inclusive Markets in Rural Bangladesh: How Intermediaries
Work Institutional Voids,” Academy of Management Journal, 55 (2012): 819-850.
47. Dutt et al., op. cit.
48. Tim Bartley, “Institutional Emergence in an Era of Globalization: The Rise of Transnational
Private Regulation of Labor and Environmental Conditions,” American Journal of Sociology,
113 (2007): 297–351.
49. Pure Strategies, “The Path to Product Sustainability: A Pure Strategies Report,” Gloucester,
MA, 2014, accessed February 7, 2017 info.purestrategies.com/.
50. Khanna et al., Winning in Emerging Markets; Khanna et al., “Strategies that Fit Emerging
Markets.”
51. Robert Z. Lawrence and Roy Suddaby, “Institutions and Institutional Work,” in The SAGE
Handbook of Organization Studies, ed. Stewart R. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, Robert Z. Lawrence,
and Walter R. Nord (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006); Thomas B. Lawrence, Roy Suddaby,
and Bernard Leca, eds., Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of
Organizations (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
52. John W. Selsky and Barbara Parker, “Platforms for Cross-Sector Social Partnerships:
Prospective Sensemaking Devices for Social Benefit,” Journal of Business Ethics, 94/S1 (July
2010): 21-37, at p. 26.
53. See Bartley, “Institutional Emergence in an Era of Globalization,” pp. 297-351; Tim Bartley,
“Standards for Sweatshops: The Power and Limits of Club Theory for Explaining Voluntary
Labor Standards Programs,” in Voluntary Programs: A Club Theory Perspective, ed. Matthew
Potoski and Aseem Prakash (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 107-32.
54. See also Timothy J. Hargrave and Andrew H. Van de Ven, “A Collective Action Model of
Institutional Innovation,” Academy of Management Review, 31/4 (October 2006): 864-888;
Lawrence and Suddaby, op. cit.; Lawrence, op. cit.; Lawrence et al., op. cit.
55. Zadek op. cit., p. 37.
56. Ibid.
57. Mintzberg and Waters, op. cit.; Crilly et al., op. cit.
58. David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, “The Bribery Aisle: How Wal-Mart Got Its
Way in Mexico,” The New York Times, December 18, 2012, A1.

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Product Strategy journals.sagepub.com/home/cmr

Andrew Spicer1 and David Hyatt2

Keywords: sustainability, corporate social responsibility, strategic planning

—H. Lee Scott, Walmart CEO, October 23, 2005

1University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

Tracing Walmart’s Emergent Strategy in Sustainable Products

A “process tracing” methodology is frequently used to capture patterns of

Following a typical strategy in narrative-based, process tracing research,10

Figure 1. Walmart’s emergent low-cost sustainability strategy.

Formal Vision: Demand for a “Live Better”

Figure 1 provides an accurate road map of the general direction of Walmart’s

Walmart’s Emergent Low-Cost Sustainability Strategy

Many of the success stories became embedded in company rhetoric as

However, over time, these individual product initiatives presented new

For example, one promotion presented Campbell’s Condensed Soup with a

As Walmart’s leaders searched for answers to these basic questions, they

Walmart’s sustainability leaders hoped to develop a holistic and trans-

The Sustainability Consortium, 2009-2015

Duke remarked that, as an engineer, he preferred “data and an elegant

In a pre-competitive space, companies can create conditions under which they

asymmetries, more credibility, more certainty, and . . . more harmonization” for

Like Johnson, Kistler believed that collaboratively developed standards, such as

Adopting a trial and experimentation approach, the Consortium first chose

There is a fundamental difference between a system containing data sufficient to

To Johnson, the challenge of developing any labeling system extends beyond

product sustainability, the Consortium was unable to coordinate consensus over

Live Better Scorecards and the Sustainable Leaders Program, 2009-2015

Walton’s acknowledgment that the systemic constraints on developing a sustain-

Moreover, our analysis suggests that the company’s eventual low-cost

Institutions, Transaction Costs, and Low-Cost Sustainability Strategies

encouraging suppliers to seek operational efficiencies similar to those that Walmart

Decision Making under Institutional Uncertainty

means of institutional work. Some authors refer to this as a “societal-sector plat-

A business’s contribution to sustainable development therefore needs to be under-

Limitations and Future Research

emergent rules of market competition. It also requires companies to actively man-

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