ESG-related assets under management passed US$40 trillion in 2025, and mandatory sustainability reporting arrived the same year under the EU's CSRD and the ISSB standards — but publishing an ESG report isn't the same as practising ESG. This paper uses South Korea's SPC Group as a cautionary baseline: a company that reported itself as socially responsible while accumulating failures across all three pillars (unhygienic Dunkin' factories, a worker's death in 2022, coerced pregnant-worker contracts, unlawful trade-union coercion). I ran a 50-person survey that found wide awareness of the resulting boycott (80%) but thin active participation (20%) — and SPC's share price and annual net profit both proved resilient, showing how a weak short-run market signal can mask real reputational and human costs. Against that baseline, I assembled the evidence that substantive ESG does create value: NYU Stern's meta-analysis of roughly 1,400 studies found a positive ESG–financial relationship in 58% of corporate studies and negative in only 8%, concentrated in long horizons and crisis-time downside protection — but only when ESG is a strategy rather than mere disclosure. I then benchmarked genuine leaders (Microsoft's carbon-negative-by-2030 pledge, Ørsted's coal-to-offshore-wind pivot, Schneider Electric and NVIDIA's top ratings, Patagonia's transfer of ownership to a purpose trust) and mapped the "substance gap" that separates them from reporting-heavy laggards.