FEBRUARY

2020VISION

GLOBAL RISK PERCEPTIONS

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It is not enough for our products to be safe. They must be seen to be safe. If the public does not see them as safe, then concern rises and corporate reputations are put at risk.

For the first time, we pull back the curtain on some of the tools we use to quantify public concern. We reveal some of the proprietary indices we have built to differentiate between different kinds of public concern, and share the data these tools produce.

The TACTIX Risk Score is a measure of:

• How severe the public concern is;

• To what degree is the public mobilizing against your product; and,

• How personal a concern is it to people.

Those of us who manage controversial products and technologies must anticipate whether public concern will blow over or blow up. Monitoring these three indices – severity, mobilization, and personalization – enhances your predictive ability.

Our goal at TACTIX, and with this report, is to help you cut through the noise, add to your perspective, and provide insights to help you continue managing public trust.

TACTIX Risk Report: Preface TACTIX Risk Score (Sept 2019 - Jan 2020 average)

TACTIX Risk Score(Monthly growth across all topics. Sept 2019 = 100)

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Paul S HillierCo-Lead,Risk Communications Practice

Figure 2. Over the past five months, public concern towards these nine technologies in the aggregate has trended upwards. The greatest increase (nearly 25% month-over-month) occurred as we started the New Year.

Figure 1. Amongst the technologies being compared, 41% of real public concern was directed towards vaccines – nearly four times as much as the next closest technology.

Relative positions do not change substantially month-to-month. E.g. public concern towards cosmetics in October skyrocketed 156%; however, this increase was only enough to take cosmetics from 6th place to 4th place in the relative ranking.

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Vaccines41.0%

PlasticPollution11.7%

Cosmetics7.4%

GMO5.9%

Red Meat5.6%

CRISPR4.6%

NuclearEnergy5.4%

Fluoride7.4%

Glyphosate11.0%

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Figure 3. For some technologies, public concern varies considerably from month-to-month. Cosmetics, Glyphosate, and even Fluoride all experienced monthly increases of more than 50%.

Of tremendous consequence is the steady upward trend in public concern towards CRISPR. We are not yet seeing significant mobilization against CRISPR, nor are people currently expressing concern in a highly personalized way. At present, concern is best characterized as growing apprehension.

TACTIX Risk Score (Monthly Variability)

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• With over two decades managing product defense campaigns, we understand what drives people to feel outrage, fear, or uncertainty towards technologies.

• TACTIX’ Risk Indices are measured using a proprietary sentiment analysis algorithm. We built the algorithm specifically to analyze controversial products and practices.

• Generic sentiment filters tend to perform poorly when analyzing these kinds of issues, because they tend to label controversial products and practices as universally negative, which makes it difficult to differentiate different kinds of concern.

• Our bespoke indices of severity, personalization, and mobilization are based on an understanding of how people actually behave, and what real concern looks like.

• If you are looking for historical data, weekly breakdowns, deeper analysis, or for another issue to be added to the tracker, reach out to us at paul.hillier@tactix.ca.

Methodology

Proprietary Risk Indices

• TACTIX uses a suite of AI tools to analyze social media, news media, and global search trends. We track changes in the size and nature of engagement each month.

• Why do we not poll people like many other risk reports do? Because polling asks people what they think they are concerned about.

Problem one: people often do not know what they are concerned about.

Problem two: they are unable to answer why they are concerned about something.

Check out a video of TACTIX’ Dan Gardner explaining the problems of false introspection for a more detailed explanation.

• Ultimately, we want to anticipate the public’s behaviors. And so, it only makes sense, to build risk indices based on actions – the comments people post on social media, their mobilization, what they search and what they read. Behaviors drive attitudes, not the other way around. So we measure behaviors.

Measure Behaviors, not Attitudes

mailto:paul.hillier@tactix.ca

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N98fTm1DJWw&list=PLv5aCbem0ZA4FlcCVmTTKEmauv1dhV4Yk&index=4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N98fTm1DJWw&list=PLv5aCbem0ZA4FlcCVmTTKEmauv1dhV4Yk&index=4

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Severity vs Personalization

Figure 4. In January, we see that no technology faced public concern that was simultaneously both highly severe and highly personal (top right-hand quadrant). Dealing with a highly severe concern requires different strategies than dealing with a highly personal concern. Dealing with an issue that is both at the same time requires a Five-alarm-response.

Severity and Personalization

Two of the proprietary indices we have created are the severity index and the personalization index.

• The severity index measures the percentage of public conversation that is registering as highly concerned.

• The personalization index measures the percentage of public conversation that is associating the concern with a family member.

To highlight how these indices work, we can contrast vaccines and cosmetics.

• It will come as no surprise to anyone who has dealt with the anti-vax movement, that when people are concerned about vaccines, it tends to be highly personal. Note that nearly 50% of the global public concern in January was directly tied to a loved one or family member.

• Concern towards cosmetics, in contrast, tends to be about people in general (the concern is not on behalf of a specific family member; hence it scores low on personalization). However, the severity is very high – when someone is concerned about the potential toxicity of cosmetics, they tend to be very concerned about it.

The following page shows how each of these nine issues have fluctuated over the past five months.

Personalization IndexSeverity Index

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Figure 6. In October, Glyphosate spiked in both the personalization index as well as the severity index shown in figure 5. In contrast, vaccines have generally decreased on both indices since the Coronavirus (a much higher percentage of the conversations around vaccines has been supportive and also less personal).

Figure 5. We monitor both the overall trendlines and the month-over-month spikes. Glyphosate is the only issue that continues to steadily trend upwards throughout the period being measured. However, CRISPR and cosmetics show enormous spikes in November and January (respectively) as public concern coalesced around specific stories.

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Figure 7. Mobilization is the most immediate indicator of a threat to a product or technology. Accordingly, it is the most critical (and obvious) metric to measure. Shifts between human health and environmental are more subtle to monitor, but equally impactful. Successful regulatory managers or brand owners should ensure their reputation management plan has contingencies for when public concern shifts from one issue set to another.

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Mobilization vs Nature of Concern

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0.50When public concern turns into petitions to ban, boycott, or seek political change, the public is mobilizing.

Both environmental concerns and human health concerns are capable of triggering enormous mobilization. Nearly 25% of the global public dialogue around glyphosate and plastic pollution in January was manifesting as mobilization.

However, public concern can frequently blur the lines between environmental and human health concerns.

• Psychologically, once a person feels concern towards a product for one reason or the other, their mind generates negative affect, which makes it much easier for them to imagine the product also has other problems.

• An example of this, on the following page, is red meat. Concern fluctuates month-to-month between being largely a human health concern and an environmental concern.

• GMOs, in contrast, show a stable balance between being both an environmental and a human health issue, but calls to mobilize against GMOs can increase by four times in a single month.

Mobilization and Nature of Concern

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Nature of Concern IndexMobilization Index

Figure 9. CRISPR is starting to follow the same trendline as red meat. Red meat has for many years needed to respond on two different fronts – concerns around the environmental footprint and concerns around human health implications. Public concern around CRISPR is currently dominated by the human implications, but is increasingly including environmental implications as well.

Figure 8. Mobilization around plastic pollution fluctuates erratically because the public does not know what they want to change. Is phasing out plastic straws, plastic bags, and balloon sticks enough? Mobilization will continue to fluctuate until we start responding to what people really want (and in this case, they may need to be told what they want). In contrast, when managing public trust around GMOs, we face a clearly defined set of issues, capable of spiking (as they did in September) to four times the height of any other month.

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Global Risk Communications