ESG Intelligence: When Your CEO Asks “What’s Our Competitor Doing?”

Whenever  your CEO Asks “What’s Our Competitor Doing?” do you just react or furnish him with a competitive ESG Intelligence that Informs? The latter is it.

Yes, the question comes, as it always does, in the final minutes of the meeting. You have just presented your quarterly sustainability update, progress on emissions reductions, community engagement metrics, a new partnership with a reputable NGO. The board members nod approvingly. Then the CEO leans forward, and with the particular tone of a leader who has just returned from an industry conference, asks: “So, what are our competitors doing? I heard that Apex Bank just launched a $50 million green fund. And I saw that FirstChoice FMCG published a sustainability report with some kind of blockchain traceability thing. Do we have that?”

In that moment, your entire carefully constructed narrative shifts. You are no longer the strategic driver of a long-term agenda. You are suddenly cast as the responder, the tracker, the one who must keep up. Your instinct will be to scramble, to compile a frantic dossier of competitor press releases, to rush a benchmarking exercise that simply lists what others are doing and where you appear to fall short. This is the reactive trap, and it is where most corporate sustainability functions lose their strategic credibility. The CEO’s question, innocent in its intention, becomes a weapon of self-inflicted irrelevance when answered with nothing more than a catalogue of imitation.

The solution is not to stop monitoring competitors. It is to fundamentally reframe the purpose of that intelligence. Competitive ESG intelligence is not about copying what others do. It is about understanding the strategic logic behind their actions, assessing its relevance to your own context, and determining whether to match, ignore, or leapfrog. The goal is not parity but rather an informed differentiation. This requires a disciplined framework that moves your function from reactive tracking to strategic foresight.

The first layer of this framework is materiality-based benchmarking. Before you even look at what competitors are doing, you must be anchored in what is actually material to your own business. As the BusinessDay analysis makes clear, many Nigerian firms still treat ESG reporting as a compliance burden rather than a strategic asset, but the companies that gain competitive advantage are those that focus relentlessly on the issues that drive enterprise value in their specific sector. For a manufacturing firm, this might be energy efficiency and water stewardship; for a financial institution, it is data privacy and financial inclusion; for a fast-moving consumer goods company, it is supply chain labour practices and packaging waste.

Before you ask what your competitor is doing, ask yourself: Is this issue material to us? If the competitor is investing heavily in a sustainability initiative that sits outside your materiality map, their action is not a gap to be filled; it is a strategic choice you have consciously deprioritised. This is not weakness; it is focus.

The second layer is strategic logic decoding. Once you have identified a competitor initiative that does intersect with your material issues, your task is not to ask “should we do this too?” but “why are they doing this, and what does it tell us about their broader strategy?” Research from the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business offers a critical insight here: the financial impact of ESG investments depends fundamentally on a company’s competitive strategy . Companies that compete through differentiation, premium brands, unique products, high customer loyalty can leverage ESG to enhance reputation, build brand equity, and command higher prices. For them, a high-profile green fund or a blockchain traceability platform is a marketing and positioning asset. Companies that compete on cost, however, face a different calculus. For them, ESG initiatives can become a financial strain unless tightly linked to operational efficiency and risk reduction. McDonald’s and Walmart, the research notes, face inherent challenges in balancing stakeholder expectations with low-price business models . When you decode your competitor’s strategic logic, you may discover that their flashy initiative is perfectly aligned with their differentiation strategy and that copying it without your own differentiated positioning would be a costly and confusing mistake.

The third layer is ecosystem and partnership analysis. BCG’s Sustainable Business Model Innovation research reveals that top-performing companies are 50 percent more likely than their peers to go beyond basic partnerships and leverage entire ecosystems of organisations to create and share value . These companies understand that competitive advantage in sustainability is rarely built through solitary action. When Brambles, the reusable pallet firm, developed its share-and-reuse pooling model, it did not simply improve its own operations; it created a network of customers whose collective participation generated a self-reinforcing advantage that competitors could not easily replicate . Your competitive intelligence must therefore look beyond what your competitor is doing internally to examine who they are partnering with. Are they collaborating with NGOs, academic institutions, technology providers, or even competitors? Are they participating in industry-wide initiatives that set new standards? This ecosystem lens reveals not just what they are doing, but how they are structuring their approach to create durable, scalable advantage.

The fourth layer is gap analysis with intent. Only after completing the first three layers do you conduct a gap analysis—but with a crucial shift in framing. Traditional gap analysis asks: “Where are we behind?” This framework asks: “Where should we be ahead?” It forces you to distinguish between compliance gaps that must be closed to maintain market access, and innovation gaps that represent opportunities to lead. A compliance gap might be a failure to disclose according to emerging ISSB standards; Nigeria became the first African country to adopt these frameworks, and companies that lag in reporting alignment will face exclusion from global capital and supply chains . This is a gap to close urgently. An innovation gap, by contrast, is the absence of a bold, distinctive initiative that could become your signature. This gap requires not imitation but invention, informed by your unique capabilities, market position, and stakeholder relationships.

The final layer is intelligence integration into strategy. Competitive ESG intelligence should never sit in a silo within the sustainability department. It must flow directly into enterprise strategy, risk management, and innovation planning. As the Strategic Consortium of Intelligence Professionals notes, intelligence is evolving from a corporate advantage into a force for global good, enabling organisations to detect patterns, anticipate policy shifts, and identify innovation pathways that serve both shareholders and society . When your CEO asks “what are our competitors doing?”, your response should not be a defensive benchmarking report. It should be a strategic briefing that answers five distinct questions: What is the competitor doing? Why are they doing it, given their competitive strategy? How does it align with their material issues? What ecosystem are they leveraging? And most critically, what does this mean for us not in terms of catching up, but in terms of making smarter, more focused, more distinctive choices about where to play and how to win?