Climate Change Replaces Living Wage As Top Social Issue Confronting Corporate Brands

NEW YORK, Jan. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- High Lantern Group, a strategic consulting firm specializing in business leadership and reputation, today released the second edition of its Brand Pressure Index, a comprehensive measure of social issues impacting corporate brands.

Climate change leads the new rankings, replacing living wage as the issue creating greatest social pressure on corporate brands. Sustainability issues overall jumped significantly year over year, comprising 6 of the top 20 business issues. Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet were the top three corporate brands being targeted by the most influential public actors. Boeing and McDonald's rounded out the top five.

The HLG Brand Pressure Index provides a comprehensive measure of social issues at the forefront of public discourse with the greatest impact on corporate brands, as prioritized by a universe of 3,000 leading activists, influencers and political figures. The analysis spans 6.2 million tweets in 2019 in association with 300 top social issues and their intersection with 1,000 top corporate brands.

Key insights include:

• Climate change is now the #1 brand pressure issue, with a 77% increase in mentions of corporate brands in association with the issue by leading public actors over the past 12 months. The issue replaces living wage as the topic affecting the most companies.
• Plant & lab-based foods is #2, with a 274% increase, due to rising concerns about food production & consumption and association with responsible behavior and sustainability.
• Living wage has declined. Labor insecurity issues ? while high on the list ? have declined year over year ? suggesting that those flashpoints may have crested as businesses work to increase wages and implement education and retraining programs.
• Data security and privacy issues have declined at an even faster rate ? although these issues tend to be incident-driven and could rise again quickly if a new flashpoint occurs.
• Overall issue-related pressure against businesses increased 3.8% in the past year in comparison to the previous twelve months, signaling public expectations of corporations to lead on issues will continue.

"Engaging on social issues is now a necessary feature of business strategy," said Rob Gluck, Managing Partner of High Lantern Group. "The decision every CEO must make is how to engage on these issues in a way that is true to their brand and leverages the core competencies of their business."

High Lantern Group is a strategic consulting firm that specializes in business reputation and leadership in the public arena. The Brand Pressure Index is powered by HLG's proprietary data processing platform, which tracks more than 3,000 elite stakeholders and uses natural language processing techniques to identify the issues most likely to shape public dialogue and corporate reputation. For more information about our firm and services, please visit us at highlanterngroup.com.

SOURCE High Lantern Group