IMCD Industrial solutions
Sustainability Survey and Report
To understand the “State of Sustainability,” IMCD Industrial Solutions needed to survey customers about eight sustainability areas.
“Rachel was a true partner in this project, and helped me adapt my drafted questions to maximize the usefulness of the data. Cali-Xie Marketing Analytics has become a go-to partner for survey projects.”
Kathryn Nuckolls
Global Marketing Manager, Industrial Solutions
IMCD Group
The Challenge
When it comes to manufacturing and the chemical industry, small changes to improve sustainability have the potential to have a large impact at scale. But first, any business wishing to make a sustainable impact must understand the market’s current attitude toward these changes, and how sustainable solutions can meet customer needs.
IMCD Group is a global leader in the distribution of specialty chemical and ingredients. In 2023, one of their business verticals, IMCD Industrials Solutions, sought to better understand their markets’ sustainability goals and progress. Their findings were to serve two functions: one, to inform internal business decisions, and two, to educate IMCD employees, clients, and the industry more broadly about the state of sustainability in the field.
The Solution
To meet this challenge, IMCD’s Industrial Solutions business group decided to launch a new initiative, a set of “State of Sustainability” reports to be issued once every three years, beginning in 2024. The findings would be based on an industry survey delving into eight sustainability areas.
IMCD’s Industrial Solutions business area operates with a lean marketing team, so Global Marketing Manager Kathryn Nuckolls hired Cali-Xie Marketing Analytics to collaborate on survey development, lead survey interpretation and write the survey reports.
This 63-question survey, which was produced in 9 languages, was sent to a wide-ranging sample of IMCD clients and generated responses from 25 countries. From these data, Cali-Xie Marketing Analytics and IMCD generated one overarching report and eight subject area reports.
Each report explores the rates at which businesses have adopted or plan to adopt sustainable practices in a given category, their chief drivers of and barriers to the use of sustainable materials and practices, and more. Findings are further broken down by region, company size, and industrial sector, and paired with commentary from IMCD’s subject-matter experts.
In order to share the findings as widely as possible, IMCD Industrial Solutions published both PDF and online versions of all nine reports, and will promote the reports on internal and external social media throughout 2024. Report findings also continue to inform IMCD articles and industry commentary. In this way, the project will keep sustainability progress and goals in the industry top-of-mind for employees, customers, and followers.
Report designs by Natsumi Nishizumi Design.