MarCom Professional

What has materiality got to do with corporate marketing?

Corporate marketing is the process of aligning enterprise capabilities to stakeholder needs.

Practising it demands that we understand deep organisational competencies - and determine how best apply these to the benefit of stakeholders to drive sustainable growth.

In practice this can be an extremely difficult translation exercise, but one approach is emerging  as a valuable way of tackling the problem namely: 'Materiality'

Materiality is a concept emerging from within the CSR community (albeit borrowed from the accounting fraternity).  Materiality looks at the range of issues that may impact an organisation, and asks: how important is it for us to act on this issue? - based on a trade-off between real business impact and stakeholder salience.

Based on this determination, the organisation will make strategic decisions - to invest or not invest in developing its responses, and tactical decisions - to communicate or not communicate.

Here is how think-tank AccountAbility depicts this process: 

CSR-style materiality is a great way to make more transparent decisions around reporting, but unlocking its potential for wider corporate marketing demands a broader perspective.  'Issues' may not be the right entry-point.

Following best marketing principles, a better start-point may be to determine stakeholder expectations and the organisation's capacity to fulfil them.

The other risk is that CSR-style materiality risks being a data-free conversation 

At Glasshouse, we advocate looking beyond materiality of issues and materiality of information to include materiality of data and materiality of value.

Downstream - in stakeholder fulfilment - organisation need to look at materiality of knowledge - how  to deliver information as knowledge that stakeholders can use.

Upstream, when planning - they must consider the quality and reliability of data they are acting upon.  How robust is their decision-making foundation.

Looked at from the perspective of corporate marketing, materiality can provide a robust framework for delivering real (material) value to stakeholders - which is where we came in...