The 94% Effect: What Cadbury's ESG Awareness Data Reveals

Mondelez partnered with Glow to embed the Social Responsibility Score within their measurement and insight framework for the Australian market. Cadbury was already a recognised leader in its category on ESG performance: the SRS data confirmed this and quantified the advantage. But the analysis also revealed something more actionable.

As part of the diagnostic work, consumers were surveyed on their awareness of six key ESG programs run locally and globally by Cadbury. The finding was unambiguous: consumers aware of at least one of those programs rated Cadbury’s SRS 94% higher than consumers who were not aware of any programs.

A 94% differential in a perception metric is not incremental. It is structural. It suggests that the primary constraint on Cadbury’s sustainability perception is not the quality or scale of its programs: it is consumer awareness of those programs.

This pattern appears across the data set, not only for Cadbury. The SRS of brands with high ESG program investment but low program communications consistently underperforms relative to what the investment would suggest. The gap between what a brand is doing and what consumers understand it to be doing is the single largest addressable lever in sustainability perception.

The practical implication: sustainability investment and sustainability communication are not the same activity, and the second does not happen automatically as a result of the first. Consumers do not discover ESG programs through passive exposure at the level that moves aggregate scores. They need to be told, specifically, in the channels where they are paying attention, with enough detail that the program is legible, not merely gestured at.

Cadbury used these SRS findings to shape its program communications strategy and refine its investment approach, moving from broad ESG positioning to specific program disclosure. The direction the data points is clear: tell consumers what you are doing, in terms they can repeat.