The metric, called the Social Responsibility Score (SRS) and developed by Glow, is based on more than 25 million brand interviews carried out over the past four years, capturing feedback from consumers, customers, employees and investors.

SRS can be benchmarked across brands, geographies and time to help provide a common performance evaluation.

Kantar and PwC Australia are integrating the metric into their existing measurement and transformation tools, and SRS is also being evaluated and piloted by five other global research and advisory businesses.

SRS data is already used in ongoing research programmes supported by Cint, NIQ and publisher 3BL Media that seek to determine the return on investment (ROI) of sustainability efforts.

Tim Clover, chief executive at Glow, said: “The lack of standardised global measures to gauge stakeholder response to ESG/sustainability efforts has made it hard for businesses to prove ROI on sustainability programmes and hampered investment up until now.

“We are excited that Kantar and PwC Australia are supporting SRS. The more we all speak the same language, the more positive impact can be created for businesses, the communities they serve and the environment.”

Jonathan Hall, Kantar’s global leader for sustainable transformation, added: “We hear often from clients that they need a simple, common language for measuring sustainability, which is why we support this industry-wide opportunity to maximise our impact.

“No agency can solve this problem on its own. We have already integrated SRS into tracking for one of our global clients and can see how it adds value to our existing comprehensive measurement framework. We are happy to be collaborating across the industry on a standard metric that promotes positive action.”

PwC Australia markets leader Tom Gunson said: “Quantifying social and environmental risk is now an imperative for boards and executives. Taking an evidence-based approach to measuring the effects of ESG actions on all stakeholders is new and exciting.

“Combining consumer-driven data with our ESG, analytics and consulting solutions provides new insights on what is working well and what areas require more focus.”