Ford’s Reputation Badly Battered

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 23, 6:40AM EDT

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Ford’s Reputation Badly Battered — © Toa55 / iStock via Getty Images

24/7 Insights

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) rates poorly in the 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100 reputation rankings.
Electric vehicle struggles may be why its stock has underperformed the market.

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F), reeling from its electric vehicle (EV) failures and a struggling stock price, posted an extraordinarily bad performance in the new 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100 reputation rankings. Most other car brands rated did much better.

The study’s complex methodology involves finding America’s 100 most visible brands. The researchers then create a “reputational quotient” based on nine “dimensions of reputation” (the full methodology is here). Versions of the study have been published since 1999.

The Rankings

Who ranked better than Ford?

Ford ranked 55th on the list with a rating score of 73.6. The highest score among the 100 was Nvidia at 81.2. The lowest score was the Trump Organization at 54.0.

Ford’s score dropped the second most among all brands on the list, tied with Anheuser-Busch (rating of 69.1). Both posted a ranking that dropped 23 positions from the prior survey. Anheuser-Busch fell to the 80th spot among all brands rated. The only company with a worse performance was Starbucks (69.5), whose rank fell 29 places to the 77th position.

The car brand that rated highest was Honda. It took the seventh spot in the rating at 79.3, up six positions from the year before. The second-highest car company was Toyota, with a score of 78.6. Its ranking fell six places to 12th position.

Because the methodology does not describe why each company had the rating it did, that is left to speculation. News about Ford’s withdrawing from the EV business might be a factor. Its stock price is down 1% this year. The S&P 500 is up 11% over the same period. Toyota’s stock price has risen 18% since the start of the year.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.