Kantar Partners to Launch Sustainability Trends Measure

Kantar and Oxford University's Saïd Business School have partnered to launch an analytics tool called Issue Radar, through which to map online conversation and forecast UK consumer sustainability trends.

Issue Radar has so far analysed more than one billion online news, search, and social media posts, to provide a detailed insight into the sustainability concerns of British consumers. Beyond measuring the breadth of conversation, Issue Radar also measures sentiment and how brands engage, and are perceived, in the 'sustainability conversation' online. In addition, by analysing volume and sentiment of branded conversation, Issue Radar produces a ranking of the brands that are best regarded with relation to sustainability.

Alongside Issue Radar, Kantar and Saïd have launched an approach called Hypertrends, which identifies interconnections across disparate data sets, enabling the identification of why trends are becoming central to consumer decision making. Unlike AI-based approaches to forecasting, Hypertrends uses an understanding of the diffusion of content that underlies decisions and outcomes, even with little to no data history.

Jonathan Hall (pictured), Managing Partner of Kantar's Sustainable Transformation Practice, comments: 'Issue Radar, together with predictive Hypertrends, is designed to help brands understand their true position in the sustainability debate and how sustainability will reshape their market. Together they support companies in their digital transformation journey and allow us to create a holistic set of KPIs to monitor a brand's performance against the sustainability issues they have prioritised.'

Web sites: www.kantar.com and www.sbs.ox.ac.uk .