Shape & Lead
Our claims are about to be checked
Which of the claims already on our packaging and pages can we substantiate, and by when?
Which of the claims already on our packaging and pages can we substantiate, and by when?
The commitments are public. A net zero date, a recycled content figure, a line about responsible sourcing on the packaging, a page on the website that has not been reread since marketing wrote it two years ago. Since 27 September 2026 a generic environmental claim a company cannot substantiate is unfair across the European Union in all circumstances. The French consumer authority was already finding serious breaches in fifteen per cent of the three thousand businesses it checked in 2023 and 2024. Seven per cent of companies with a net zero target meet the minimum integrity criteria, by the Net Zero Tracker's 2025 count. The rest have a commitment and a question.
Inside the company the question is sharper than the regulator's. The sustainability team can defend the target. It cannot explain why last quarter's procurement decision, the bonus scheme or the capital allocation went the other way. Clients, employees and partners often notice before the regulator does, because they read the behaviour before they read the page.
Which claims to keep, which to withdraw, what to change so that the ones kept are true.
The first instinct is a communications programme: soften the wording, add a footnote. It treats a structural gap as a sentence. The gap between what a company says and what it does opens in the mechanisms, long before it shows in the values: the incentive that rewards behaviour A while the strategy calls for behaviour B, the approval process that bypasses the responsibility screen, the procurement logic still built for the model the strategy was meant to replace. The decision the leadership team has to take is which mechanisms to rewire, in what order, so that the claim becomes the default outcome rather than an intention.
The work is the Say-Do Gap Diagnostic. It compares what is said with what is done, traces each gap to the mechanism that produces it, then corrects the mechanism.
We document the declarations: every public commitment, claim and target, from the annual report to the product label. Against them we build the behavioural baseline from the decisions of the last twelve months: capital, procurement, pricing, people. The distance between the two is the gap map, named and quantified where it can be, structured for the board instead of the sustainability committee.
Then we trace each gap to the mechanism that produces it. For the CHRO that is the people system rewarding the wrong behaviour; for the CFO the allocation logic still optimising for the previous model; for the CMO the claim that was written as an aspiration and is about to be read as a fact. And we design the corrections so that the aligned decision becomes the structural default, visible to the clients, employees, partners and communities who decide on the basis of it.
Where the gap turns out to be one of governance and not only of claims, the work extends into the backbone: board-level oversight built to the standard investors, lenders and procurement counterparties apply, a cascade of accountability from board to operations with the incentives attached and an impact scorecard with owners and verification. That is the part of the work that makes the next claim unnecessary to check.
What leaves the room is the gap map, the mechanism audit, the trust risk assessment by stakeholder and the corrections, sequenced. The diagnostic is short, because the evidence already exists on both sides. Rewiring the mechanisms takes the time the organisation needs. We stay for it.
The case that follows takes a company whose commitments are real and whose executive incentives reward the opposite: the gap is not in the strategy but in the pay scheme that governs the decisions. The diagnostic finds that kind of mechanism before an auditor or a journalist does.
78% of large companies link executive pay to sustainability performance. But only 14.2% have pre-defined, measurable targets. Incentive design is where strategy becomes behavior.
ReadPhilippe Bourrat, COO & Co-Founder. Twenty-eight years of customer intelligence and commercial transformation for industrial and B2B leaders. He holds the claim side: what the client reads, what the client checks, what a commitment is worth once it is substantiated.
Fabrice Macarty, Founder, CEO. He works with CEOs on value architecture and with boards on governance. He holds the mechanism side: incentives, approvals and capital rules, with the board-level oversight that makes a commitment bind.
The claim is audited, and capital prices it. A commitment without the mechanism behind it is now a liability with a date.
Read the force in Our Approach: force 05The claims on your packaging, the target in your report, the decisions of the last twelve months. Tell us where they diverge and we will tell you where to start.