Corporate reputation: Top 10 companies in the world

BMW has passed the Walt Disney Company and Google to take the top spot in Reputation Institute's 2015 Global RepTrak 100, the world's largest annual survey of corporate reputations.

"After several years of turmoil tied to the global financial crisis, corporate reputations have begun to stabilize as companies rebuild trust and respect with consumers," said Jamie Bedard, CEO of Reputation Institute. "Continuing a trend, the companies with the strongest reputations are focused on more than just the products or services they sell, with corporate social responsibility – citizenship, governance and workplace – taking on more importance than ever."

Corporate reputations drive a wide range of downstream outcomes, from consumer willingness to buy from, recommend or invest, to stock performance and crisis resiliency. The majority of consumers will give reputable companies the benefit of the doubt in a crisis, compared to only 20 percent for companies with a poor reputation.

The top ten companies in the 2015 Global RepTrak 100 are:

BMW
Google
Daimler
Rolex
LEGO
The Walt Disney Company
Canon
Apple
Sony
Intel

The RepTrak model is the gold standard for reputation measurement, providing a one-of-a-kind measurement of how the public views the world's best-known companies, examining 15 stakeholder groups in more than 25 industries and more than 50 countries for more than 7,000 companies.

The rankings are based on each company's "Pulse" – the emotional connection consumers have to a brand. The results are further broken down into seven dimensions of rationality, which define why consumers feel the way they do.

"The added depth of the RepTrak methodology uncovers exactly those areas where companies must work to better manage their reputations," said Bedard. "Improving reputation by five points coincides with a 6.3 percent increase in recommendation and a more than 5 percent increase in propensity to buy."

In 2015, Reputation Institute conducted more than 61,000 interviews for the Global RepTrak 100 study to measure the public's perception of companies based on seven dimensions: innovation, leadership, governance, citizenship, workplace, performance, and products/services.

By eTN