Your materiality assessment isn’t working. Here’s why.
Most companies have done a materiality assessment. Surveys, scoring, a matrix, a report. Job done. But doing the exercise and getting value from it are two very different things.
At our recent webinar, Materiality, made useful, Lucy Smail (Client Services Director) and I unpacked why so many assessments look complete on paper but land nowhere near strategy. Watch the full recording here, or read on for the highlights.
The problem isn’t methodology. It’s what happens around it.
I see teams pouring effort into the process – building long lists, structuring the scoring, running stakeholder engagement – and have nothing left for the bit that actually matters: deciding what it all means. The result is a matrix nobody quite knows what to do with, and often a list of 20-plus “material” topics that hasn’t prioritised anything at all.
“The gap between a useful assessment and a box-ticking one rarely comes down to methodology. It comes down to the quality of the conversation happening throughout.”
A good assessment does three things at once
Strategically useful. Defensible. Decision-driving. Most manage one, maybe two and quietly lose the rest along the way. All three, together, is the bar.
Four shifts that actually move the needle
- Make it cross-functional. Materiality can’t sit with sustainability alone. Finance, risk and strategy need to be in the room to agree thresholds and pressure-test scoring — it changes the output and how credible it lands.
- Use judgment, not just scoring. ESRS explicitly allows it. If something obviously clears the bar, apply the “reasonable person” test, document your reasoning, and move on. Save the heavy scoring for the genuinely borderline calls.
- Engage stakeholders on purpose, not by default. A thousand people scoring topics they have no context on isn’t rigour. Go to stakeholders for the questions you actually need answered.
- Build the strategic review in from the start = not as a bolt-on you never get round to. Make it the final, planned step, not the thing you or your team are too tired for by the end.
The five-question test
Want to know if your last assessment actually worked? Ask:
- Could an exec name your top three material topics?
- Were thresholds agreed before the findings came in?
- Did finance, risk or strategy help shape it — or did sustainability run it alone?
- Can you show the audit trail without rebuilding it?
- Has it changed a single real decision in the last year?
I pointed to our client, Aston Martin Lagonda, as an example of this done well – transparent methodology, clear cross-functional ownership, and every material topic mapped straight to a strategic pillar. Worth a look if you want to see the theory in practice.
Where this leaves you
If your materiality work feels complete on paper but unclear in practice, that’s where we step in. We help clients with refreshes, full resets, strategy linkage and reporting realignment – whatever stage you’re at.
If any of this struck a chord, or you’re already weighing up a refresh or reset, let’s talk it through. Just hit reply. Or catch the recording again here if you want to revisit any of it.
How brand mascots create deeper emotional connections
Think about the last time you saw a meerkat on your TV and immediately knew it was a car insurance ad. Or spotted a stripey tiger on a cereal box from across the supermarket aisle. You didn’t need to read a single word. That’s the magic of a great brand mascot.
At its simplest, a mascot is a character that represents a brand – an animal, a person, a cartoon or something completely made up. It gives a brand a personality that’s often more memorable than a logo.
The Michelin Man (real name Bibendum – a fun fact for your back pocket) has been going strong since 1894. Captain Birds Eye first sailed onto UK screens in 1967. Tony the Tiger joined the party in 1952. These characters have outlasted generations of ad campaigns, CEOs and marketing trends.
In Asia mascots aren’t a novelty – they’re serious economic drivers and cultural icons. Japan treats mascot performance as a legitimate craft with dedicated mascot schools and a ‘mascot economy’ employing thousands. Characters represent products, services and even places, such as ‘Kumamon’ the bear created to boost tourism and civic pride in Kyushu.
Why do they work?
Humans are wired to connect with faces and characters. When we see a mascot, our brains engage the same social instincts we use with real people. Researchers call this anthropomorphism.
The numbers back this up. A 2021 study by the Moving Picture Company found that “long-term campaigns featuring mascots delivered a 41% increase in market share gain” versus 29.7% for campaigns without them. System1’s four-year study of Super Bowl adverts found a similar pattern: Ads featuring a brand character scored an average of 3.8 stars, against 2.7 stars for celebrity-led ads, alongside short-term sales impact and 88% brand recall.
The benefits:
They’re memorable. Characters stick in our minds in a way that abstract logos don’t. You can describe the Compare The Market meerkat to someone who’s never seen the ad.
They show emotion. Warmth, humour, confidence or reassurance – things a font or logo can’t convey as directly.
They make brands feel human. In cold or complex industries like insurance, finance or tech, a mascot softens the offering. This is one reason why chatbot characters are becoming more popular with AI and tech companies.
They carry stories. A mascot can run across multiple campaigns and years and still feel familiar. That consistency builds trust.
Case study: Duolingo's owl
Duo is a masterclass in modern mascot strategy — a full-blown internet personality built through memes, unhinged TikTok content and the running joke that he really wants you to do your Spanish lesson. It’s self-aware and it works: the mascot isn’t just a logo, it’s the brand’s entire social presence.
B2B mascots are an underrated opportunity
Successful B2B brands don’t use mascots for the sake of it. They’re doing a specific job: making complex, intangible products feel approachable and human. A character turns dry specs into a story that hits home, and builds the kind of familiar, trustworthy feeling that helps risk-averse buyers feel more comfortable making a decision.
Case study: Doxi
Our work with Doxis shows what this looks like in practice. Through primary research, we uncovered the cultural importance and brand equity already built into their mascot, Doxi. We elevated the character front and centre and built a practical visual identity toolkit around it – new logo, colour palette and typography – so the whole system worked together coherently.
How to create one
Start with identity, not aesthetics. Get clear on what your brand stands for and who you’re talking to before you think about what the character looks like. The mascot has to embody those things, not just look cute.
Ask your audience. Tony the Tiger was chosen through consumer research – real feedback before committing saves a lot of pain later.
Play the long game. The market share data comes from long-term campaigns. A mascot is a strategic commitment, not a one-season trial.
Design for flexibility. A great mascot isn’t a single image – it’s a character that holds up across formats, sizes and contexts. Pringles’ 2021 rebrand gave Mr. P a full range of facial expressions, including an agonised face for spicy flavours, showing how modern mascots are built as flexible systems, not fixed images.
Build for platforms, not just print. Mascots can now do more than sit on packaging. AR, AI chatbots and personalised animation let them move, speak and respond to individual users – Duolingo’s owl is the clearest example, driving the brand’s entire social presence rather than just appearing in ads.
Attention is scarce and everyone’s shouting. A mascot is how you get remembered — and liked – instead of just seen. Want to find yours? Let’s talk.
When AI reads your Annual Report first, what’s left of your story?
Most of the AI conversation in reporting has been about whether AI can find your content. Our 6 October webinar looked at the next question: what happens to your story once it does?
Stephen Butler, our Reporting & Advisory Director, was joined by Luna Raphael, Luminous’s Creative Director and Digital Lead. Also on the panel were Hannah Boore, Senior Manager, Investor Relations at Lloyds Banking Group, and Ross Hawley, Head of IR at ZIGUP and Chair of the IR Society’s AI Steering Group. Here’s what we learned.
Accurate isn’t the same as distinctive
Over the summer we asked AI tools the questions investors ask, then compared the answers with companies’ own reporting. AI mostly got the facts right, but the stories came back flatter. On average, companies lost 16% of their distinctiveness. Business models suffered most. In one review, AI skipped the business model altogether and went elsewhere to work out how the company made money.
The reports that held up best followed a simple pattern: a clear claim, how it differs from peers, the proof, and the “so what”. That last part matters most, because AI tends to keep the metric and drop what it means.
Get your own content into the answer
When Hannah asked AI tools about Lloyds’ key messages, none of the sources were Lloyds. They were Reddit threads, news articles and blogs. So the team moved key content from the PDF into HTML. They added searchable performance tables and AI-friendly FAQs, and they used plainer wording. The result was a 71% rise in AI-referred traffic year on year, and the site is now cited around five times more than the PDF. They’ve since done the same for results day, which Ross pointed out is the moment that actually moves the share price.
Clean up the data
Ross cleaned up the metadata on 300 documents. He made the company the author, added proper descriptions and fixed the keywords, and his discoverability score went to 20 out of 20. Luna added the technical basics: pages that work without JavaScript, CDN settings that don’t block AI crawlers, and a text version of every chart and video. Her rule of thumb: “Design and structure your pages with people in mind, build them so the machines can read them.”
Use AI to think, not to write
The panel agreed AI earns its place in proofreading, consistency checks, condensing copy and sentiment analysis. First drafts are a different matter. In Ross’s words: “Don’t delegate your drafting to AI. Use AI to give yourself the space to think and make the right judgement calls.”
One thing to do this week
Hannah’s advice: put your key messages, and the questions investors ask, into AI tools. See what comes back, what gets lost, and whether the things that set you apart survive.
Watch the full recording below:
Want to see how your investor story holds up when AI retells it? Get in touch.
Your voice: Use it or lose it
A strong corporate website should do more than inform. It should differentiate.
Too often, corporate websites all take a similar approach: the same basic structure; the same content based around regulatory requirements, and the same approach to quarterly updates. The businesses that stand out are the ones that treat their digital presence as a strategic brand tool, not just a communications platform.
Learning from the brand world.
Corporate websites could learn a lot from their B2C counterparts. For these brands the digital experience is key to how they communicate their positioning, point of difference and value.
Brands that break out and think harder about how they communicate and engage can create a more distinctive experience – much as leading B2C brands already do, using a curated, brand-led approach that feels personalised to every stakeholder.
We’ve embedded this way of working into our approach to corporate websites. We start with their brand. Working with our clients to understand their specific business goals, objectives and challenges. Taking a deep dive into their purpose, mission and positioning; how they compare to their peer group; where they see themselves in the future to tease out their clear point of difference to help them stand out from their crowd. We use this insight to develop both their verbal and visual brand language, making sure that both work together to tell a compelling story.
This insight-driven approach is key to crafting digital experiences that blend compelling narrative storytelling with engaging, brand-led experiences. Transforming corporate websites from purely functional to distinct, memorable experiences for all audiences.
The following case studies show how we’ve helped ambitious businesses redefine how they present themselves online – from global rebrands to growth-focused digital transformations.
Faria
Faria, a global leader in EdTech solutions, was entering a company-defining new chapter but it lacked a clear and compelling position.
We positioned Faria as an innovative leader in a growing, evolving category. Centred on the idea of the ‘Relentless pursuit of better’, we overhauled their website with a bold, new visual identity to engage global audiences and fuel growth.
Hubexo
After private equity investment, Byggfakta needed a brand with global appeal to support its growth ambitions. We renamed the Group as Hubexo, and created a dynamic new visual identity and website that reflected its position as a leader in construction tech.
The new website incorporates the visual identity and messaging, with a modular, scalable design that can grow with the business. The rebrand unifies 26 companies, 33 offices and 2,500 employees across 20+ countries under a single, cohesive vision.
If you are rethinking your corporate website, brand positioning or digital experience, get in touch with the Luminous team to explore how we can help you stand out from the crowd.
Winning the answer without losing your voice
Everyone’s racing to be readable by machines. Almost no one’s asking what happens when they all start to sound like one.
Search has changed and the numbers aren’t subtle. Around 69% (Similarweb) of Google searches now end without a click, and on current trajectories AI search will overtake traditional search within three years (Semrush). Investors, journalists, analysts and prospective employees are increasingly encountering your organisation through AI-generated answers before they reach your own content.
The term is Answer Engine Optimisation. Call it AEO, GEO, LLM SEO – the goal is the same: make sure that when an AI describes you, it describes you accurately, favourably, and in your words rather than a third party’s.
If an AI can’t find or trust your site, you don’t just rank lower, you disappear from the answer entirely, and the machine fills the gap with someone else. For businesses this isn’t a marketing inconvenience, it’s a reputational risk.
But here’s what the current wave of AEO advice tends to skip.
The real risk isn’t invisibility. It’s sameness.
The problem is when every brand in a sector runs the identical playbook, you get a sea of content that is structurally perfect and completely interchangeable.
That’s the trap. In a landscape where AI makes information increasingly similar and easy to find, legibility is key and distinctiveness is what will make a brand stand out and get chosen.
Being yourself is the strategy, not the sacrifice
It’s tempting assume that you must choose between craft and crawlability. You don’t.
The content AI engines preferentially cite is content with a point of view: original research, proprietary data, a genuine and defensible perspective, first-hand experience. Models are built to reward credibility and specificity, which is exactly what a strong, human, opinionated piece delivers and a templated one doesn’t.
There’s a second half to this that AEO conversations often miss. Winning the answer is about discovery.
Fewer people may click, but those who do arrive with greater intent: they want to validate, go deeper or act. That makes the destination more valuable, not less. AI can summarise your strategy, it cannot replicate the feeling of a well-designed experience, an interaction that builds understanding or a story told with real craft.
The goal isn’t to win the answer or protect the experience. It’s to do both, deliberately, and to recognise that they feed each other.
What this looks like in practice
If you’ve got solid SEO foundations, AEO is the next step. The trick is making content easy to parse without flattening it.
1. Content. Build content that answers real audience questions clearly, with structure that serves both the skim-reader and the deep-diver. Add the FAQs, summaries and self-contained content blocks that give AI something clean to cite.
2. Authority. Strengthen E-E-A-T with genuine expertise, earned media and co-marketing, and invest in the website experience itself. Design here isn’t decoration, it’s a credibility signal that both people and machines respond to.
3. Technical. Do the unglamorous, essential hygiene: clear headings and hierarchy, clean metadata, fixed broken links, automated schema across your core page types, fast load speeds, real accessibility.
The brands that come out of this shift ahead won’t be the most optimised. They’ll be the most themselves, and technically sharp enough for the machines to notice.
Want to see how your investor story holds up when AI is the first reader?
Get in touch to arrange one of our website audits tailored to you.
How defensible are your disclosures?
Most organisations don’t have a reporting problem. They have a confidence problem.
Anyone can produce a report. But not every report survives scrutiny. Investors, auditors, regulators and stakeholders aren’t reviewing your report. They’re reviewing what sits behind it.
The challenges
1. Your reporting is stronger than your foundations
You have a report. You have some data. The question is whether what sits behind them would withstand challenge. As expectations increase, confidence no longer comes from what you’ve published. It comes from what you’ve published. It comes from knowing the materiality and strategy beneath it are robust enough to defend.
2. You're drowning in requirements
CSRD. ISSB. UK SRS. TNFD. Lender expectations. Customer demands. Your challenge isn’t understanding everything. It’s knowing what matters most.
3. It’s harder than ever to build story and substance
Anyone can tell a compelling story. The challenge is ensuring every ambition, target and claim is supported by evidence, action and progress. The strongest disclosures don’t choose between story and substance.
They do both at the same time.
How defensible are your disclosures?
Take our quick self-assessment to see where you stand, identify potential gaps and understand how robust your disclosures are.
Complete the self-assessment and book your Disclosure Assessment today.
Secrets to a stronger B2B brand
Today, a strong brand in B2B is critical. It proves that businesses can enhance the effectiveness of demand generation activities, lower the cost of sales and command a price premium.
For 23 years, Luminous has seen first-hand what moves the dial when building a strong brand.
To help companies understand how strong their brand is, we’ve identified four helpful principles that best-in-class B2B brands live and thrive by:
The four principles of a strong B2B brand
- Elevate your story
- Invest in distinctiveness
- Be consistent
- Align internally
Wondering how strong your brand is?
Request access to find out more and take our brand strength quiz →
Ready to build a stronger brand?
We empower you to embrace change and turn untapped potential into strategic advantage.
Get in touch: [email protected], [email protected]
The power of the outsider
Have you heard the expression “You can’t read the label from inside the jar?” It means you are too close to your own work, problems and habits to see them objectively, and that you need an outsider’s view to understand how others view your business.
This is particularly relevant during a rebrand.
Many of our clients have fantastic capabilities inhouse. They know their audiences, business and brand better than anyone else. So why wouldn’t they also be capable of delivering a full rebrand from start to finish? As budgets gets squeezed, we completely understand why a business would want to save the money.
But we do believe that getting an outsider’s expertise and perspective during this critical moment adds considerable value.
So why partner with us, or another brand consultancy for that matter, for your rebrand?
We're objective
It can be difficult to be objective about your business and your strengths. Over time, internal opinions tend to converge, blind spots appear and people are too deep into operations.
As external advisers, we don’t carry any preconceived ideas about your strengths and what your brand should be. We approach our research with a blank slate, open to hypotheses and avenues to explore. What’s more, we find that customers, employees and senior management tend to be more open and honest with us as an outsider. As a result, we get deeper into valuable insights to help you identify your real, compelling strengths that you may not even see.
We challenge
Great brands are created on the edge. They break sector conventions. They have a point of view. They are clear on the space they occupy. A lot of B2B brands tend to converge into a sea of sameness and need a gentle push to go beyond industry standards.
Our role is to encourage you to be brave and to challenge you. Challenge the way you’re doing things and challenge your messaging to evoke conversations and clarity on what makes you special and how you’re helping your customers. It’s usually easier to play that role as an outsider looking in.
We have dedicated focus
What tends to happen when clients take on a rebrand internally is that business as usual takes over and the project slips. The ambition is there. The talent is there. But the project keeps getting pushed back because there are a hundred other things demanding attention. The rebrand doesn’t get the space it needs. And the result tends to show it.
We’re not running the brand program alongside our day jobs. This is what we do for a living. And we dedicate all our focus to it, not just ‘when time allows’. This enables the momentum that a rebrand requires and deserves.
If you’re about to embark on a rebrand project and fancy a chat about how we can support you, drop me a line.
Distinctive and Connected: How to protect the investor story when AI reads first
You spent months making your annual report distinctive. Somewhere right now, AI may be undoing that work in seconds.
Investors increasingly use AI to search, summarise and interpret the corporate narrative. In many cases, AI is becoming the first reader – shaping how a company is understood before an investor ever reaches the source material.
Most of the conversation about AI and reporting has focused on discoverability, on whether AI can find your content and read it accurately. Those questions matter, but our research points to a bigger and quieter risk
We asked AI the questions investors ask, then scored what came back against the source reports. The answers were rarely wrong. But they came back flatter than the source, stripped of the difference that separates one investment case from another. What survived was a version of each company that could just as easily have described its competitors.
What we found
Inside the report
Which parts of the investor story survive AI and which are the first to go, why the Chair and CEO’s voice is the most vulnerable content in any report, a simple formula for building claims that AI cannot flatten, and six principles for protecting the investor story when AI reads first.
Download research below:
Get in touch to find out what’s possible.
Becoming one IMI: interview with Erica Lockhart
IMI is a FTSE 100 global leader in fluid and motion control, with over 10,000 employees in 50 countries. We worked very closely with Roy Twite, CEO and Erica Lockhart, Group Communications Director and the wider IMI team to rebrand the business. Since then, we continue to support the business with brand communications.
Going through a rebrand can be challenging, but if done right the results are rewarding. We were excited to catch up with Erica to reflect on the rebrand and the lessons learnt.
Key takeaways:
Luminous: What was the catalyst for the rebrand?
Erica: IMI is about 160 years old. It’s grown through many acquisitions, so we had a complicated structure and a huge portfolio of brands. There was lots of sub-brands, divisions, different colours and completely different logos everywhere. It was a very confusing business to understand, even if you worked inside it, let alone if you were on the outside.
It’s a great business doing great work, but brand complexity was getting in the way of our ability to sell and tell our story. Even though rebranding is a huge exercise, we felt that if we want to have business in ten years’ time that everyone understands and has a clear proposition, then we had to fix that.
In fact, one of the divisions wanted to rebrand itself. We knew that if they did that, it would set the horses racing. We couldn’t do this piecemeal. We had to deal with the whole thing.
Luminous: What were some of the challenges when creating the new brand?
Erica: The biggest challenge was the worry that we would lose brand equity in our portfolio of brands, and that by trying to shift to a simplified model that we would lose customer loyalty and recognition. We also had lots of discussions over whether we could lose the colour red. One of our brands had a very strong red, and could we ever contemplate losing that? IMI’s core brand was blue, which is a very engineering colour, and there was a lot of nervousness about not being blue and how much other people care about our name and colours.
You can go round in circles on that and people really worried. There was also lots of worry that our employees would have loyalty to their brand and that they wouldn’t go on the journey with us. But thankfully, employees have been amazing and they’ve loved the rebrand. I think everyone needed it. It wasn’t a worry that came to fruition in the end, but it dominated the early conversations.
Luminous: A few years on from launch, how would you describe the impact of the rebrand?
Erica: Internally it’s helped to break down silos. People were in their own world and by taking all of that out, we’ve been able to drive a one-IMI approach to processes. I don’t know if that’s something I expected, but it’s helped drive simplification through the business and it’s easier for people internally to understand IMI.
Externally it’s made our narrative to investors and customers much clearer. Because of how complicated we were, you had to work much harder to understand who we are and what we do. We used to spend the first 10 or 20 minutes of new customer meetings explaining who we are and the complicated divisions and brands.
We make products, but also a huge part of what we do is solutions. We’re exposed to three big global megatrends: energy, automation, and healthcare. Today, the IMI brand is much more about deep applications engineering expertise and solutions in those areas. That’s quite different to focusing on a product brand. IMI is a great business, it’s doing really well, it’s got a great culture and it’s modern in lots of ways. The brand now reflects that.
Luminous: In your opinion, what does it take to develop a strong corporate brand?
Erica: I think as much as possible, simplicity. In all companies, there’s lots going on internally, but you want to make it as simple as you can for the outside world to understand your business
Luminous: What would be your advice to a business that is about to go through a rebrand?
Erica: I think doing lots of pre-work before. We did some analysis in the lead-up to deciding whether we would do the rebrand and the problems we were trying to solve.
The exam question for me was: how do we want IMI to look in 10 years’ time? Because if we don’t have that goal, we’ll never get there. You can’t really rebrand without an end vision. So really understanding where you want to get to. I think getting the exec alignment early on about why we’re doing this is key.
And then as you go through, as we did with Luminous, everyone gets a lot more comfortable. We had monthly meetings, to get through that process, and it takes people on a real journey. It’s such a cliché, but it really does. If we’d started out and said, we want to rebrand, no one would have ever agreed.
Originally, we said we’d make everything the same colour blue. But as we got more into it, we just kept asking questions. If you jump to, we’re going to do this, this and this, it’s harder for people to agree. We did it properly because we did it slowly and asked all those questions. It’s about having that open-mindedness.
Rebrands aren’t easy. There’s still bits of old things that haven’t been rebranded yet. It’s definitely a process. But our employees grabbed it and ran with it, which made it a lot easier as well.
Get in touch to find out what’s possible.