All feedback collected by the ethical brand Monitoring Program™ is validated using a variety of techniques to achieve a high level of confidence that:

• The contributor is a real person and they are who they say they are;

• They have the credentials of a bona fide stakeholder;

• Any subjective opinion, assertion or accusation made through feedback is only considered valid for the purposes of authenticating an ethical brand if it is both relevant and substantiated by a sequence of references and or chain of evidence linking the stakeholder to a particular transaction, situation and or event at a particular place and time. In other word these assertions must be legitimate and importantly, this applies to both negative and positively weighted feedback.

We deal only in the most relevant and varifiable facts. Therefore, all three of the above conditions must test true, or else validation fails. Of course, opinions are important and can be very useful and valuable to the authentic ethical brand, but these only add value to the ethical brand authentication process if they are evidently substantiated. Feedback that fails validation for this reason is still shared with the subject ethical brand and may also be followed up by Ethical Brand (International), but it is not processed by the ethical brand rating engine and has no impact whatsoever on the rating of the relevant ethical brand.

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