Know what is shaping perception of your organisation, and where you can shape it.

Horizon scanning across your issues, stakeholders and peers, assessed daily against the narratives you track and the positions you want to build.

A considered review of which narratives moved, which stakeholders are driving them, how your position compares with peers, and where the opportunities are.

Narrative intelligence is the measurement of the narratives forming around an organisation and its industry: which are building, who is driving them, how they compare with peers and where a company can lead, respond or hold. Media monitoring reports what has been published; Polecat quantifies the narratives behind it, tracks their momentum and identifies the stakeholders carrying them. Most communications teams run Polecat alongside their existing monitoring, as the layer that decides what matters. How Polecat works

Many narratives start with unions, academics, regulators, investors, think tanks and NGOs long before a journalist writes about them. Polecat scores these voices consistently across more than 1.4 million premium sources, weighting each for authority and reach rather than volume, and compares the result with peers. A frame that is building fast with little evidence behind it, or a grievance that is accumulating site by site, is visible to the communications team while there is still time to shape it.

Polecat scores each narrative on prominence, rate of change and the influence of the voices carrying it, then assesses it against the organisation’s own exposure and the positions of its peers. The result is a posture for each narrative: engage now, prepare, monitor or do not engage, with the evidence behind each recommendation. A narrative that is building fast with no evidence yet is usually an opportunity to lead; one that is dormant but could be reactivated by a decision is one to prepare for.

Yes. Polecat shows where attention is growing, where peers are absent or exposed, and where audiences differ by market or stakeholder group, which is the basis for campaigns, positioning and thought leadership. A narrative that no competitor has yet claimed, or a theme in which a client’s record is stronger than the sector’s, is flagged as an opportunity to lead rather than as a risk to manage. The same scoring applies to both.

Polecat measures reputation as a scored, comparable series rather than a snapshot. Movement is assessed as the last 90 days against the prior 90, with reach measured separately from volume, so a narrative that is spreading among influential audiences is distinguished from one that is merely loud. Each narrative is tracked against the client’s own issues, terminology and priorities, and benchmarked against peers, which separates a lasting shift from a temporary spike.

Yes. Polecat scores a client and a chosen peer set on the same basis, so a communications team can see which narratives are specific to the company and which are shared by the sector, where a competitor is more exposed, and where the client holds the stronger position. Peer benchmarking is built into every narrative assessment and every dashboard, and the peer set can be changed as the competitive landscape changes.

Social channels are among the sources Polecat covers, but Polecat is not a social media monitoring tool and does not measure hashtag reach or follower counts. Polecat analyses conversations and outcomes across news, research, regulatory, investor, NGO and social sources together, scoring each for authority and reach as well as volume. This gives a communications team a measured view of which narratives are reaching the audiences that matter, rather than a count of posts.

Each day a communications team receives priority alerts, routed to the right person when a narrative or stakeholder clears a threshold, and a daily narrative briefing on what moved in the last 24 hours and why it matters. Executive communications briefs summarise themes for leadership. Live dashboards show the organisation’s position on one screen, and narrative assessments and board reports are produced on the client’s cadence. Every format runs on the same scored view.

Yes. Agencies work from the same shared view as the in-house team, with the same scores, evidence and narrative postures, so briefings, responses and campaign planning rest on one set of facts. Access can be scoped to the issues and markets an agency handles. Several Polecat clients use the shared view as the basis for their agency’s monthly reporting, which removes the need to reconcile different monitoring outputs.

Yes. Every narrative score traces back to the source events behind it, each scored consistently for prominence, rate of change, authority and reach. Board reports present reputation as a measured series benchmarked against peers, with the drivers of any movement identified, so a board can see whether a shift is lasting or temporary and what caused it. When a director asks how a conclusion was reached, the evidence trail answers the question.

Polecat’s analysis draws on two decades of scored, comparable data on how narratives have formed, spread and resolved across sectors and companies. That history is what separates a lasting shift from a temporary spike: a live narrative is compared with how similar narratives behaved for comparable organisations, which supports the posture recommended for each. New clients are backfilled against the archive so the baseline is in place from the first briefing.

The Narrative Intelligence Assessment is a fixed-scope, three-week engagement that identifies the narratives moving fastest around a client, the stakeholders driving them, and how the client’s position compares with its peers. It delivers a posture for each narrative, lead, respond, prepare or hold, with the evidence behind it, together with the first live dashboard and daily briefing. It is the usual starting point for a continuous engagement with a communications or corporate affairs team. Talk to our team