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Life-altering events are happening at a rapid pace. The market environment is always evolving, from the broad profile all the way down to individual conversations. In today’s dynamic world, a materiality assessment performed a few months ago can already be considered past its sell by date.

Organisations need to evolve their approach to risk management, business resilience and ESG assessments to match their business environment’s rate of change.

Polecat supports dynamic materiality assessments by placing comprehensive and unparalleled market insights in your hands, in real time. Here are just a few ways teams across a business can use the platform to dynamically track, analyse and understand emerging trends.

Polecat and dynamic materiality

Dynamic vs static views

In a dynamic world, organisations can’t afford to be left in the dark about any new or emerging trend.

Polecat allows users to listen to the whole market conversation – not just a narrow part. Assessments led by stakeholder interviews can be insightful, but they can also miss out on many topics the market is buzzing about. Ultimately, they are led by what organisations already know or think is important.

Polecat shows you how trends are shifting and identifies what new topics are gaining share of the conversation, without you first having be aware of them. It doesn’t just show you what you’re watching, but it uncovers all the topics, themes, relationships and triggers that you never thought to look for.

Polecat also shows you historic views of how trends and impact have changed over time.

Plus, with near instant results users can perform materiality assessments at a much more regular cadence than the traditional interview approaches. Whether it’s historic views, change over time, or understanding the future, Polecat delivers more dynamic ESG and reputational intelligence.

Strategic evaluation with Trend Chart

Trend Chart in the Trends page shows users the broad strokes across taxonomies. I.e., the many topics that sit under the umbrella of ESG in the context of your business. 

This gives organisations an aggregated view of their chosen drivers, showing visually how things have changed over time. It’s quick and easy to identify themes that are or might affect the industry, what’s growing in market share, or what’s had the greatest impact on company perception.

Instead of singular views, users see the dynamic shifts in the market and can react dynamically as a result. This big picture insight is essential for adjusting your activity and planning strategies according to industry dynamics.

Here are the main views you can find in Trends:

• Driver Impact over Time
• Most Emerging Topics
• Most Diminishing Topics
• Highest Impact Topics

Benchmarking against yourself and others

Understanding your organisation’s position in context is key.

Polecat’s Comparison page enables you to benchmark market performance in ESG, sustainability, agriculture, and any other topic, against your past results and other global companies. This is a useful way to see how well your strategies are working in a more frequent way, or if others are leveraging themes that you should take advantage of. 

Depending on what you want to learn, you can look across industries or within your industry. Organisations can also focus in on their own unique footprint which is especially useful for reporting.

We suggest starting broad – looking at Impact over Time or Top Topics by Organisation for example – then diving in to see how these discussions have developed.

This will allow you to analyse your share of the market, where you’re dominating conversation and where others are seeing success.

Here are the main views you can find in Comparison:

• Impact over Time
• Share of Impact
• Share of Impact by Organisation
• Top Topics by Organisation

Analyse in context to understand intention

All the data shown in Polecat is tied to different drivers. So, you aren’t just seeing a static metric on a screen, you can dive into the relationships, keywords, topics and conversations behind it. You can see the brushstrokes behind the painting.

This give organisations a clear view of ‘why’ things are trending, ‘why’ their impact in human rights has dipped this month compared to last, or ‘how’ their competitors have increased market share in different conversations.

It allows you to pull on the thread and uncover what’s driving the dynamic material changes that matter. It provides Intelligence in Context.