Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB)

Transforming capital markets globally

In the world of capital markets, investors need to understand how a business, regardless of industry, will remain viable and deliver a desired financial return. To make good investment decisions, they need to account for both financial and non-financial issues that are material to a company and its ability to sustain its future.

The challenge that investors face is access to essential information that goes beyond what’s found in traditional annual reports and financial statements. Today’s enterprises must navigate a complex and dynamic landscape of regulations and resource uncertainty—and they must be able to assess and report on how all of these factors affect their operations and risk exposure, in order to maintain the confidence of investors.

Facilitating performance reporting around non-financial issues is what the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) was created to do. Formed in partnership with Bloomberg, SASB was modeled on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which formulates and oversees the benchmarks used for financial reporting.

Together, SASB and FASB provide a comprehensive and consistent set of standards that give investors a more complete understanding of a company’s current performance and future prospects.

As a founding member of SASB’s advisory council, Tenet Partners played a critical role in helping Dr. Jean Rogers, its visionary founder, create a brand that would immediately establish the organization’s credibility within the business, capital markets and regulatory community that was equal to any other in the realm of standards-setting organizations.

In addition to the research, strategy and identity work at the heart of any successful brand, the Tenet team partnered with SASB to create an information architecture designed to make a company’s sustainability metrics more accessible and easier for investors to use.

The result was the highly interactive SASB Materiality Map, which provides an at-a-glance view of materiality scores by industry and issue, allowing click-through access to the data behind the score. By translating a complex data set into something digestible and easy to use, it helps enterprises organize and prioritize the issues that are most important to them—and their investors.

The launch of SASB established it as an essential enabler of standardized sustainability reporting in the United States. Thanks to this success and widespread adoption of its standards, in 2022, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) of the IFRS Foundation assumed responsibility for the SASB Standards and moved them to a global approach embraced by capital markets worldwide.

Sensient Technologies

Enhancing the sensory experience

Vibrant hues. Subtle scents. Flavors that run from sweet to savory and mild to bold. Textures that are pleasing to the touch. Rich sensory experiences are an essential part of being human—and making those experiences better is what Sensient Technologies is all about.

Sensient ingredients are found in a vast array of products, from food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics to industrial coatings, cleaners and packaging.

The highly specialized, technologically sophisticated company now known as Sensient had a surprising start. Its roots go back to 1882, when it was a distillery, and later a producer of yeast. In the 1960s, the company added other commodities and changed its name to Universal Food Products. By the 1990s, the name and brand no longer fit the organization. It had transformed, branching out in new directions as a leading global supplier of colorants, flavors and fragrances. It had become far more than a food company.

The key to development of a new brand was to find the thread connecting all that the company does—the essential idea behind its entire range of products and capabilities.

The Tenet team looked beyond what the company does, to what its products enable. That creative approach led to a simple, universal idea: The company is in the business of enhancing sensory experiences.

The sensory experience notion became the foundation of an entirely new brand encompassing strategy, positioning, architecture, visual and verbal identities. It came to life in several ways, the most visible of which was an evocative new name: Sensient Technologies. The name is powerfully communicative all on its own. In just two words, it telegraphs the promise behind the brand: Enhance SENSory experiences through specialized ingredIENTS, delivered through proprietary TECHNOLOGIES.

The dramatic rebrand accomplished exactly what the company set out to do: Redefine its position in the market and provide a platform for growth. As a result, Sensient Technologies’ (NYSE: SXT) stock price saw a 20% gain after the new brand was launched.

Canon Medical Systems USA

Sharpening the focus on medical imaging

OVERVIEW

Canon Medical Systems USA faced intense competition from long-established global medical imaging vendors. With the competition mainly focused on technology, Canon Medical saw an opportunity to leverage its emphasis on expertise, relationships and the positive impact it has on customers and patients as a way to stand out.

CHALLENGE

Canon Medical’s visual identity was taken from the global Canon brand, which limited its ability to tell a distinctive story tailored for its target market. The critical challenge was to respect that link to the power of the global brand while enabling Canon Medical to stand out as a preferred partner for the medical community.

HOW WE HELPED

Tenet’s approach to developing the visual system was highly collaborative, combining an extensive competitive audit and image review with work done by Tenet brand strategists and input from the client to visually represent key elements of the refreshed brand. In this way, the visual system was firmly grounded in brand strategy.

Strategic elements included themes of meaningful innovation, alignment with Canon corporate brand values, its tagline of “Made For Life” and Canon Medical’s new positioning theme: “With you all the way.”

Picking up on the themes of human expertise and partnership, the photo style emphasizes humans engaging with one another, with the viewer and with technology to complement images of equipment.

The new visual identity links to the global Canon brand in subtle, yet compelling ways, making good use of the corporate red along with gradients and geometric shapes. The system’s graphical underlay is a transformation of the highly recognizable letter C shape that’s part of the Canon wordmark, replicated and rotated to provide a rich texture that suggests technology without overwhelming the more human elements of imagery.

OUTCOME

Canon Medical’s new visual identity and Tenet’s accompanying strategic brand work has been greeted very positively by the organization’s leadership, providing a solid foundation for continued growth and differentiation in the medical imaging market. A few months after the updated brand launch, Canon Medical saw a 45% increase in engagement with its PR and social media content.

Fairtrade International

Empowering farmers and workers

OVERVIEW

Fairtrade International is a non-governmental organization spearheading a global movement to change the way trade works through better prices, decent working conditions and a fairer deal for farmers and workers in developing countries.

CHALLENGE

Fairtrade promotes its agenda through a system of certification marks on product packaging to help brands signal that they are part of a more sustainable, responsible worldwide economy, giving consumers assurance that they are making ethical purchase decisions. It was felt that this multifaceted system was too complex and difficult to understand.

HOW WE HELPED

The organization saw the need to make the scheme more clear, but wanted to make sure any changes were driven by research and a sound brand strategy. Fairtrade came to Tenet Partners for help with streamlining its certification architecture to better communicate with the market.

Building on extensive research, the Tenet team recommended a simplified approach based on use cases. The new system is straightforward, easily understood and modular, with a single certification mark that combines the two legacy marks and supplemental visual elements that can be added or removed based on the use case.

OUTCOME

The new approach makes identification of Fairtrade-certified products easier, while still allowing for the inclusion of relevant information. It also sparked valuable discussion and consensus-building within the organization.

With clarity around adoption of the new architecture achieved, Fairtrade International is poised to move forward with a clean, flexible system that allows qualified businesses to better communicate with their customers—and for the organization itself to advance its vision.