How are businesses navigating the challenge of communicating their social responsibility in a world where the notion of being ‘woke’ has become a political and cultural battleground? The answer, for many, is simply to keep schtum.
“The rise of strategic silence” is how Ipsos describes the growing tendency for businesses to keep quiet on potentially divisive issues like diversity and inclusion, and net-zero. The insight is contained in the market research company’s latest Ipsos Reputation Council report, which gathers insights from its council members – 161 senior communications leaders from across 19 markets.
Only one-in-five (21%) members say they now prefer to speak out on potentially divisive issues – “a direct response to an increasingly polarised world”, according to the report. That compares to 32% who prefer to stay quiet and 47% who believe the decision is highly situational and requires a strategic, nuanced approach.
It will come as little surprise to Footprint readers that this “strategic silence” plays out prominently in the ESG realm with80% of those surveyed believing businesses will be more tentative in their ESG communications in the next year and 75% agreeing that leaders are diluting their public commitments. “The era of loud, public ESG pronouncements is over,” summarises Ipsos. “The risk of political backlash and accusations of greenwashing/wokewashing now outweighs the reward of public praise, forcing a strategic retreat from the spotlight.”
Yet the report suggests this is not a clear-cut case of ESG as a discipline being on the rocks (albeit there is a growing feeling that the acronym itself has become “a politicised and unhelpful catch-all”), but more about a growing dichotomy between public retreat and private advancement. More than half of comms leaders (52%) feel ESG is fundamentally changing the way businesses operate. “The era of grand, public-facing proclamations is giving way to a more cautious, calculated, and internally focused approach,” Ipsos states. It adds that the focus must now shift from public campaigns to embedding ESG principles into core business strategy and engaging in discreet, targeted communication with key stakeholders. “While the language of ESG is being questioned and public commitments are being muted, the fundamental principles that underpin it are, paradoxically, becoming more deeply embedded into the operational DNA of business.”
This last statement might raise eyebrows among researchers at the TPI Global Climate Transition Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The team have carried out a global analysis of over 2,000 publicly listed companies across all industry sectors and found that 98% have not disclosed plans to shift capital away from carbon-intensive assets or to align spending with their long-term decarbonisation goals. Food companies specifically perform pretty miserably on some key metrics of climate commitment as detailed in one of today’s other news stories.
Elsewhere, we feature a call from a wide range of food and farming organisations to support the shift to more plant-rich diets through the government’s recently published food strategy, and highlight a new campaign that will see restaurant diners given the chance to help tackle hunger across the world.
And lastly this week, as Footprint was going to press news broke of a significant merger between two of the biggest organisations in the charitable food redistribution sector. FareShare UK and The Felix Project are merging to create “a bigger and more ambitious charity”. The pair said that “by joining forces, we’ll unlock more food, more funding, and more influence, strengthening the health, wellbeing and resilience of communities when they need us most”. The merger is expected to be completed during 2026.
