How can sustainability performance measurement and evaluation help you build a better brand?

Begin with a Double Materiality Analysis (DMA) to pinpoint essential ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) aspects for your business. Seamlessly weave DMA findings into your SPME strategy to sculpt your sustainability approach, sharpen your market stance, enhance your messaging with ESG focus, and drive continuous innovation. Use strategic planning to define clear sustainability objectives. Align your brand with these objectives through effective positioning. Craft messages that resonate your commitment, and embrace a cycle of experimentation to ensure your efforts remain impactful and relevant.

Sustainability performance measurement boosts brand reputation by showcasing commitment to responsible practices, attracting conscious consumers, and differentiating from competitors. Transparent reporting builds trust, mitigates risks, and attracts talent. It fosters innovation, access to capital, compliance, positive brand associations, and long-term resilience, enhancing brand value and loyalty

Sustainability is not just important for your brand; it should be integrated into your brand. Building a better brand means building a better company—one that serves all its stakeholders. Therefore, brands need to reconsider their purpose first and how they contribute to the well-being of people and the planet. From there, a whole new paradigm will unfold, and naturally, all the work they do on impact strategy, measurement, and reporting will help build a much stronger brand.

In the age of post-truth and the deepfake and modifications impact to trust to general media, sustainability, truthfulness and inclusion are in the in the core of brand building. Its about human-first principle. Taking account and measuring the cleaniness of the corporate responsibility and "this is what we do and are accountable" builds the ground to new sustainable brands. Its not a story, it's based on actual facts. Measuring and transparently showcasing this is requirement at the core, not a quality stamp.

Sustainability indicators for a brand should include the core values of the company and showcase how the entity treats it staff, suppliers, and that combinations overall impact to the ecosystem and it's contribution to the development of science, and equality.

Establishing a benchmarking analysis can be beneficial to compare your data to industry benchmarks and performance standards to assess and compare your performance against others. This can help you identify areas where your brand is doing well and areas that need improvement relative to your competition.

Transparency is crucial to keep in mind for sustainability reporting. When companies openly acknowledge on their websites that they are falling short on certain goals or impact areas, it builds trust and sets them apart from the crowd.

Like any indicator structure that is built the basis is to build the structurisation from ground up with capability to measure; and not add-on, any internal development by testing, queries and so forth. Core in here is to start the business development from the principles set, and the data is there from the beginning. Planning the new indicators should be justified with tested and proven scientific methodoligies.

Sustainability is not a branding strategy, it's a business strategy with brand implications. Starting a sustainability journey with branding as the driving force could create a perverse incentive to exaggerate and greenwash. This is not to say that a credible sustainability strategy doesn't have material branding benefits, but the same way branding alone doesn't create a quality product, branding alone can't create a sustainable company. A company that places sustainability at the core of its brand identity must place sustainability at the core of its business. Having proper measurements, governance, processes, benchmarks, and reporting structure will lend credibility to that sustainability claim.

Unfortunately still many businesses consider it as a branding strategy 🤨.

Sustainability performance measurement and evaluation can significantly contribute to building a better brand by enhancing credibility, attracting customers, fostering loyalty, and driving innovation. Demonstrating a commitment to sustainability through transparent measurement and evaluation builds trust with stakeholders, including consumers, investors, employees, and communities. Accurate and credible sustainability metrics provide evidence of a brand's genuine efforts to minimise environmental impact, promote social responsibility, and operate ethically.