What Is the Social Responsibility Score?

Consumer sentiment about brand sustainability has been measured for years. What has been missing is a methodology rigorous enough to convert that sentiment into a single comparable number, one that holds across brands, categories, markets, and time.

The Social Responsibility Score (SRS) is that number.

SRS is a bipolar scale running from -100 to +100. It measures consumer perception of a brand’s social and environmental responsibility and reports it as a single figure for direct comparison. A positive score indicates net positive consumer perception; a negative score indicates net negative. The scale is symmetric, which matters: a brand moving from +20 to +30 represents the same unit of consumer opinion shift as one moving from +50 to +60.

The metric is built on 13 validated drivers across three dimensions. Environmental drivers cover natural resource stewardship, plastic and waste management, wildlife and ecosystem protection, and climate change. Social drivers cover charity support, education and employment contributions, community investment, and health and wellbeing. Governance drivers cover customer care, transparency and honesty, supplier welfare, and doing the right thing.

These 13 drivers were derived from 18 months of foundational research across over 100,000 consumer data points in three markets, itself built from an investigation of more than 40 candidate issue areas. The final 13 reflect what consumers actually respond to, not what regulators mandate or what ESG frameworks require.

The distinction matters. SRS measures the demand signal: what consumers perceive, what they reward, what they punish in their purchasing behaviour. It is not a compliance score, an investment screening filter, or a corporate reporting framework. It is a market measurement tool.

A nationally representative sample of consumers is surveyed on an ongoing basis. Scores are benchmarked against industry averages so any brand can see not just its absolute position but its competitive standing. The margin of error runs below 3% for most brands in the data set.

The result is a clean, longitudinal signal: one number that moves as consumer sentiment moves, decomposed into 13 explanatory drivers that tell brands where to act.