Nielsen to introduce ‘Brand Sustainability Score’, marking brands on sustainability perception vs reality

News 31 May 2022 - 3 min read

Nielsen to introduce ‘Brand Sustainability Score’, marking brands on sustainability perception vs reality

By Sam Buckingham-Jones - Deputy Editor

Nielsen will release a Brand Sustainability Score for brands to benchmark their sustainability messaging against public perception.

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Tags: Nielsen Greenwash

Global measurement company Nielsen will soon release its Brand Sustainability Report, which will include criteria to measure brands’ sustainability messaging and public perception. Aussies want to buy brands with a sustainability focus – but can’t figure out which ones are doing well.

What you need to know:

Nielsen is working with Dentsu, the AANA and Edge Environment to create the Brand Sustainability Report, an assessment system that measures what a brand is saying versus how the public perceives it.
Marketers and advertisers would be able to benchmark their own performance against their category – this won’t be a public list.

Nielsen will release a new report ranking brands based on how the public views their sustainability messages.

Created with Dentsu, the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) and Edge Environment, the independent Brand Sustainability Report includes an “industry-recognised assessment standard to evaluate a brand’s sustainability communication efforts”, Nielsen said.

The report won’t be a public list ranking brands, but it will provide companies with a set of criteria against which they can measure their sustainability practices and perception. Individual brands will be able to access their own ‘Brand Sustainability Score’ and see how it compares to their category rivals.

In other words, the scores weigh consumer sentiment against a brand’s sustainability communication, letting marketers and advertisers measure how their messages are being viewed by their customer base.

The report comes as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission cracks down on “greenwashing”, gunning for brands making spurious sustainability claims.

“A key priority for the ACCC in 2022/23 will be environmental claims and sustainability,” an ACCC spokesperson said.

“This will include focusing our compliance and enforcement efforts on businesses that make false or misleading environmental or ‘green’ claims in relation to consumer goods, or about the carbon neutrality or environmental benefits of their production processes at the retail or corporate level."

More than half of Australians would like to support sustainable brands, but most don’t know to what extent the brands they like are being sustainable.

“Sustainability is now an integral part of a brand's business strategy,” Nielsen’s Head of Media Analytics in Australia, Andrew Palmer, said. “We want to help agencies heed those numbers and implement the right media activation strategy to close the sustainability promise gap.”

Angela Tangas, CEO of Dentsu ANZ, said: “People are increasingly wanting to know more about where their products come from and how they’re made, and are choosing brands that can provide this level of transparency… As an agency partner, this means using our influence to help our clients become better corporate citizens and support them in finding meaningful ways to grow their business.