Hi everyone! We’re Heba Baker and Josh Garcia, and we’re excited to introduce ourselves before we head out on this trip. Heba joined Chapman’s MBA flex program in Spring 2025, and Josh has been at it since Fall 2024. Between the two of us, we bring backgrounds in operations, business development, and marketing, along with a shared habit of asking “but why does that actually work?” when we see something that looks too clean on paper.
Neither of us has been to Scandinavia before. Heba is based in the greater L.A. area, currently working in the construction and design industry where she handles business operations and marketing. Josh comes from a marketing background with a focus on how brands build loyalty and communicate value. So when we sat down to figure out our blog angle, the answer was pretty obvious: we wanted to look at sustainability through a marketing lens, specifically how Scandinavian companies sell green values to consumers and whether any of that is actually exportable to the U.S.
We’re calling our series Selling Green.
Why this topic
In Los Angeles, “sustainable” is usually a premium add-on, something you pay more for and feel good about. In Scandinavia, from everything we’ve read, it’s closer to the default. That gap is fascinating to us not as an environmental question but as a business and culture question. How did they get there? What role did marketing, policy, and consumer behavior play? And what would it actually take to replicate it somewhere like the U.S.?
We’ll be looking at everything from how products are packaged and labeled, to how companies talk about their environmental commitments internally and externally, to what “green” even signals to a Scandinavian consumer versus an American one.
Our hypotheses going in
Hypothesis 1: Sustainability is normalized, not marketed
- The most effective green “marketing” in Scandinavia isn’t advertising. It’s infrastructure. Policy, urban design, and social norms make the sustainable choice the easy one. If true, the U.S. doesn’t have a messaging problem. It has a systems problem.
Hypothesis 2: There’s still a sell, just a quieter one
- Even in markets where sustainability is normalized, brands still compete on green credentials. We expect to find deliberate but understated storytelling, very different from the loud virtue-signaling we see at home.
Hypothesis 3: The real lesson is B2B, not B2C
- Some of the most interesting sustainability work may not be at the consumer level at all. It may live in supplier standards, procurement practices, and internal company culture. As someone who works on the operations side, Heba is particularly curious about this one.
We’re going in ready to be wrong about all three. That’s kind of the point.
On a personal note, Heba is most excited to see how design thinking manifests in everyday life, as her day job involves numerous residential and commercial design decisions. Josh is holding out hope for a decent smørrebrød. We’ll keep the bar for culinary discovery appropriately low.
Stay tuned, next post comes from the ground. Follow along as we test our assumptions and report back from the land of good design and very sensible bike lanes.
