Mobilising the Power of Public Opinion

The Strategic Lever Missing From Most Regulatory Approaches**

When you work in markets where regulation can reshape entire business models, even the strongest legal strategy is vulnerable to forces operating far outside the drafting room. Public sentiment, political pressure, activist framing and media narrative increasingly decide how investigations land, how policymakers interpret risk, and how aggressively enforcement proceeds. Yet these forces rarely sit within a company’s regulatory strategy.

Traditional lobbying alone can’t bridge that gap. Access is no longer influence. Policymakers hear the same arguments from the same voices, inside a closed loop that produces diminishing returns. What breaks through is not louder advocacy; it’s pressure from outside that loop. And the only actor capable of exerting that pressure at scale is the public.

This is the core of SPQR’s approach: mobilising public opinion as a parallel track to legal and regulatory strategy, creating the environmental conditions in which arguments can actually land. It isn’t PR. It isn’t reputation management. It’s a behavioural and political strategy designed to alter the context in which policymaking happens.

Why public opinion now decides regulatory outcomes

Decision makers can discount corporate submissions; they can’t discount voters. When public sentiment crystallises around an issue, it reshapes the political incentives inside every department, committee and regulatory body. The past decade is full of examples where policymaking moved faster than evidence because the public mood demanded it: HFSS restrictions, EUDR, digital platform rules, plastics and packaging reforms, energy-transition measures, and more.

In each case, businesses were blindsided not by the law itself, but by the narrative that surrounded it.

Mobilising public opinion allows companies to intervene before that narrative settles. It creates permission, pressure, and political cover for more balanced regulatory approaches. And it protects clients from being defined by activist frames long before statutory interpretation even begins.

Traditional tools aren’t built for this environment

Four common approaches fall short:

• Lobbying: still necessary, but easily dismissed as self-interest.
  
  
• Public affairs: valuable relationships, but insufficient against hardening public pressure.
  
  
• Corporate communications: enhances reputation but rarely drives public action.
  
  
• CSR/ESG programmes: build goodwill but don’t translate directly into regulatory influence.
  
  

The gap between corporate advocacy and public sentiment has become too wide. The organisations that succeed are those that connect the two.

A framework for mobilising public opinion

Effective mobilisation doesn’t rely on viral campaigns or mass advertising. It draws on behavioural science and follows four steps:

1. Identify natural alignment between public concerns and the outcomes your client needs. People will act when an issue touches their values, safety, affordability, fairness or community.
   
   
2. Develop communications that turn passive agreement into active advocacy. This means framing issues through loss aversion, value alignment, and immediacy rather than corporate interest.
   
   
3. Provide simple, low-friction pathways for action: digital tools, petitions, direct contact routes to policymakers, community-led engagement, trusted third-party voices.
   
   
4. Optimise through data and feedback loops: sentiment analysis, audience segmentation, message testing, and continuous refinement.
   
   

When executed properly, this doesn’t amplify a corporate voice. It generates thousands or millions of independent voices calling for balanced, workable regulation. That difference is decisive.

Technology has supercharged this model

Digital mobilisation platforms and AI-powered sentiment analysis now make it possible to:

• detect emerging narrative risks before they hit policymaker radar
  
  
• identify the segments most receptive to mobilisation
  
  
• reach them with precision rather than broad messaging
  
  
• track narrative momentum in real time
  
  
• adjust campaign elements long before a consultation closes
  
  

This is where the strategic value lies: regulators move when the public moves, and we now have the ability to anticipate and shape that movement with far greater accuracy.

What this looks like in practice

Across sectors, the same pattern repeats:

• Agri-commodities: By aligning consumer concerns about sustainability with the need for practical regulation, companies shifted public perception among millions and softened punitive proposals that originally threatened market access.
  
  
• Energy transition: Mobilising public sentiment around affordability and reliability reframed companies from “obstacles” to “partners,” allowing for more realistic regulatory pathways.
  
  
• Food and health: In the ultra-processed foods debate, activating nutrition experts and consumers helped resist sweeping, evidence-light classifications that would have distorted entire categories.
  
  

None of these outcomes were achieved by traditional lobbying alone. They happened because public opinion reshaped the political environment in which decisions were taken.

Why this matters for corporate leaders

For CEOs, CMOs, CROs and GCs, the question is no longer whether public opinion matters. It’s whether they have a strategy to mobilise it when regulatory stakes are highest. That requires internal alignment between public affairs, communications, legal and strategy teams; something few organisations have built into their operating model.

Mobilising public opinion fills that structural gap. It complements legal strategy, de-risks high-exposure matters, and protects clients from being boxed in by narratives they didn’t shape.

The real question

Public opinion will shape the regulations affecting your business.

The only decision is whether you play an active role in directing that influence, or leave the field open to those who already are.