In any sector and circumstance, a good marketing strategy helps to position companies and defend their lines of revenue in a market environment that is increasingly competitive and needs to face new sustainability challenges and in the digital environments that define the economy of the 21st century.
Logically, with more competitors in the distribution of income cake, access to finance becomes at the same time more competitive. Therefore, we can deduce that the marketing strategy must also serve to attract investors. Because capital and financial institutions are also limited and they won't give us the necessary attention if we don't know how to communicate with them and know what they need from us.
And what do shareholders and investors need to know about a company to trust that their investment is safe and reliable? Of course, the first necessary information is related to the company's financial health. But in order to consider an investment as safe and reliable, it is also necessary to know its preparation for the sustainability risks and opportunities that, without a doubt, will occur in the coming decades in all sectors of activity.
Currently, many medium-sized companies understand the communication of sustainability information as a legal toll, a costly obligation in time and resources, and they limit themselves to publishing what the law requires them to do (EINF, in its bureaucratic acronym), like someone who fills out any form in the Commercial Registry. But there is the possibility of giving a positive value to this information if, as the most competitive companies in the financial markets do, they are able to integrate their sustainability information into the company's strategic communication, both in their presentations to investors in professional forums and in the annual reports they share with their shareholders, or in the specific investor sections of their websites.
To give us an idea of the relevance that sustainability information already has in the company's professional financial documentation, 84% of financial institutions operating in Spain consider ESG issues in their investment decisions and 50% of them have adopted public commitments in the area of responsible investment, according to the latest PwC study.
The integration of the management of material aspects of sustainability into the financial management report of companies - a clearly professional and even audited format - gives more credibility to brand positioning strategies because it removes the temptation of greenwashing, which is so used in other communication formats.
In addition, the integrated report allows the investing public to have a joint vision of the strategy of these brands and their capacity to generate value, answering some of the most relevant questions when making decisions about investing or divesting in a company: how can climate change influence the company's financial statements in the future? ; is there real management of this risk? ; Do brands' innovation efforts take into account the growing diversity of their potential markets? ; does the company have control or knowledge of the social or environmental deterioration caused by its suppliers? ; Is there an alignment between the values of your brands and the SDGs proposed by the United Nations? The answers to all of these questions are necessary so that diverse investment communities can trust a company, and a good integrated report will do much better than a non-integrated one.
It is in these months, when companies are already hiring the communication agencies with whom they will work their Annual Report, that we have to ask ourselves this simple question: Will the communication of sustainability information continue to be a toll for many companies to complete by law, or an opportunity to offer their investing public integrated ESG information, capable of giving value and trust to our brands and thus facilitating the investment flows that companies need?
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Emilio Vera Martín
Sigma Rocket senior consultant
