ESG Market & Stakeholder Sentiment

Value Creation through Stakeholder Alignment on ESG Issues

Increased attention among a business’ key stakeholders (customers, employees, investors, regulators etc.) to ESG topics (particularly climate and other environmental topics, but also diversity and inclusion) will increasingly impact on its value generation capacity and even its social and regulatory licence to operate.

ESG is not just about managing reputational risk and regulatory compliance, but about how to deliver greater sustainable value creation for stakeholders.

That’s why every ambitious business needs to know how they are perceived by their key stakeholders, and what ESG topics may become materially relevant to their future success.

Key client challenges

Missing ESG market perception data to understand different stakeholder views
Missing comparable ESG perception metrics by industry and competitor
Uncomplete or missing baseline data to develop a market and stakeholder driven Sustainability Strategy
Measuring market sentiment and how important Sustainability is for my business
Create better understanding of stakeholder needs and develop an impactful stakeholder strategy
Difficulty to develop a consistent sustainability strategy and narrative that’s informed by trusted insights

How we can help

Measuring Sustainability Market & Stakeholder perceptions

We use public and social data from over 150 million data sources combined with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand, monitor and benchmark the sustainability and ESG reputation and risk of your company, suppliers and competitors. Furthermore, we detect ESG controversies and issues in the perception of your brand based on real-time market and the different stakeholder (clients, employees, investors, media, regulators, NGO’s…) perceptions.

Benefits

Develop ESG Strategy: Chart a clear course for an ESG Strategy informed by stakeholder and market insights
Assess ESG Brand: Develop strategic recommendations to address gaps and align brand purpose with ESG strategic priorities
Benchmark ESG performance & ESG perception: Identify gaps, risks of greenwashing and opportunities to differentiate

Create ESG Growth Opportunities: Identify sources of growth and acquisition strategies by assessing market and consumer sentiment
Get Stakeholder Insights and Analysis: Understand stakeholder ESG perceptions and priorities
Develop Stakeholder Engagement Strategy: Map ESG touchpoints and interactions for different stakeholders

We've done this before

ESG Market & Stakeholder perception and benchmarking for global client
ESG Brand as value driver for Private Equity

ESG Market & Stakeholder perception and benchmarking for global client

The situation

The client wanted to better understand the market perception of their portfolio companies in terms of their ESG initiatives and practices. With the recent increase in non-financial reporting and increasing consumer awareness of sustainable brands, our clients had been steadfast in publishing disclosures, in integrating a robust ESG programme into their core strategy, and in implementing initiatives to make their portfolio companies more sustainable. However, they lacked any real-time clarity around if/ how the market perceived these efforts and how they were perceived compared to their competition. They were looking to develop target KPIs based on consumer and market data and to build an ESG market perception index to assess and track the strength of their ESG image in real time.

What we did

We created a unique ESG market perception index and tracker, based on digital data and consumer sentiment. We captured all online mentions of the portfolio companies and their competitors across all media types: news, blogs, forums, and social sites. Segmenting all the results into those related to one of the three pillars of ESG, we extracted key metrics such as sentiment direction, total number of results, total unique authors, and engagement and integrated them into our custom scoring algorithm to produce composite indicators of ESG perception strength.

Visualising and benchmarking these scores in a dashboard enabled the clients to better understand current market sentiment as well as their current position within the market. It can also help the client to easily pinpoint any issues in the perception of its brand’s ESG as well as key strengths of their competitors, potentially impacting strategic business and investment decisions.

Value created

Easy to monitor composite KPIs based on a data set of over 150 million online sources to quickly assess a company’s ESG reputation
Market and stakeholders insights on Sustainability, SDGs, ESG… messaging and actions
Tracking public opinion of your brand, strategies & policies to monitor reputational risks.
Benchmark and monitor your ESG market perception against key competitors.

Integrate societal trends and relevant topics into your materiality matrix?
Understand which sustainability and ESG topics are most relevant with your different stakeholders
Provide stakeholder market insights and sentiment as baseline and input to develop your sustainability strategy and stakeholder engagement approach

ESG Brand as value driver for Private Equity

The situation

Leading private equity firm lacking brand & sustainability market sentiment and metrics to assess portfolio companies along the deal cycle from diligence, ownership and exit.
Monitor portfolio companies’ mentions globally across multiple web and social media sources, with real-time alerts of spikes in negative sentiment results
A special focus on ESG topics set-up to assess alignment of corporate strategy with portfolio companies public perceptions

Value Created

Highlighting tangible benefits and consumer and market driven KPI’s to support the equity story
Measured brand value of portfolio company brands
Outlining ESG key opportunities for the client and insights on how to integrate the findings into investor presentations and wider market communications