The Top 100 Companies: What’s on the Agenda for a Greener Future?

In recent years there has been a global shift towards businesses operating in a more environmentally sustainable way. The world’s biggest companies are increasingly disclosing information on emissions and other energy metrics – with consumers acting as judge and jury.

To find out what’s on the agenda when it comes to environmental pledges, we took the time to analyse YouGov’s Top 100 companies – based on public perception – to discover exactly what pledges are being made to help the environment

Consumer needs

By identifying the most used keywords within each brand’s environmental pledge, we’ve been able to profile the trend frequency and understand consumer interest through Google Trends data. Google Trends ranks search terms from 0 to 100 – with 100 showing that volume has reached peak level and a term is being heavily searched for.

If you look at the graph on this blog post, you’ll see that ‘sustainable’ has a frequency score of 96, ‘energy’ has 95, and ‘reduce’ has 91 over the course of 2020. This is a good indicator to see just what consumers are looking for– when it comes to the environment and what they expect to see from the businesses they buy products from.

Pledge match – high and low

As illustrated by the Green Transformations infographic, the top five companies who use the highest percentage of keywords per pledge, are:

• KFC (82%)
• House of Fraser (69%)
• Sainsbury’s (67%)
• Waitrose & Partners (67%)
• IKEA (61%)

Whilst the five companies with the least number of keywords per pledge, are:

• Panasonic (16%)
• Deloitte (15%)
• Heinz Beanz (15%)
• Levi’s (13%)
• Hargreaves Lansdown (10%)

This shows that KFC currently leads the conversation around sustainability, with the remaining four companies – with the highest keywords per pledge – proving they are in the right ballpark for consumer passion.

For Hargreaves Lansdown and the other companies with the least keywords, it’s important that they start to own the conversation around what people care about the most when it comes to pledges.

The pledge wall

The pledge wall shows a word cloud that identifies the top keywords used within the sustainability pledges of the top 100 companies – with everything from plastic to time-sensitive targets like 2030 covered.

When we looked at high-frequency words like ‘plastic’ and ‘packaging’, we could see that these terms were trending when these pledges were created.

2020 pledge trends

Again, using Google’s handy Trends tool, we were able to see which words have seen the biggest increase in search volume between 2019 and 2020. When companies put together strategies for achieving a greener future, it’s important that they know exactly what consumers are talking about and thinking about, when it comes to green transformations. This is something which will help businesses maintain brand loyalty and improve transparency.

Year-on-year, there was a 22% increase for ‘sustainable’, a 24% increase for ‘emissions’, and a 41% increase for ‘recyclable’. As the world gets to grips with reducing carbon emissions, being more environmentally-friendly, and trying to achieve high levels of sustainability, these three search terms are key indicators for where businesses can focus their attention, if not already, to start their own transformation.

The show must go on

Seeing a growing trend in not just search terms but in businesses pledging to do more for the environment, is something that needs to be celebrated. But it’s not a case of writing words on a policy or a press release. It’s important that pledges turn into action.

Here at Flogas, we’re on our own mission to become more sustainable. You can find out how we’re fuelling sustainability by committing to provide off-grid LPG and LNG solutions that help UK homes and businesses save energy and reduce their impact on the environment. We now offer carbon offsetting to commercial and domestic customers as our latest step towards sustainability.

Methodology

To work out what’s on the environmental agenda when it comes to company pledges, we took the top 100 companies based on public perception from YouGov – the global public opinion and data company.

We analysed the keywords used in their environmental pledges to see what the biggest companies are talking about.

We profiled this against current consumer trends from Google Trends to discover whether companies are following what consumers are most passionate about when it comes to pledges.