Companies and Brands

10 Companies With the Best Reputations

Paul Ausick

Published: March 1, 2017 9:40 am

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 2:22 pm

A company’s reputation is a fragile thing. Just ask Volkswagen or Samsung, two recent examples of how quickly a good reputation among consumers can turn sour. And when reputation goes, sales often follow.

According to the Reputation Institute, which released its 2017 global reputation study on Tuesday, there are seven key rational dimensions of reputation: products and services, innovation, workplace, governance, citizenship, leadership and performance. The Reputation Institute collected about 170,000 ratings from respondents who are either “somewhat” or “very” familiar with the companies they rated and who have completed at least 75% of the rating survey.

Michele Tesoro-Tess, an executive partner at Reputation Institute, said:

The annual Global RepTrak® 100 spotlights the companies that truly understand what they stand for and how to reinforce the emotional bond with their stakeholders across all the markets they serve. This year’s Top 10 companies come from different sectors: reputation is a cross-industry asset and companies continuously invest on it because their leaderships finally recognized its impact on business performances.

Here are the global top 10 along with their rating scores:

1. Rolex: 80.38
2. Lego: 79.46
3. Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS): 79.19
4. Canon: 78.28
5. Google/Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL): 78.22
6. Bosch: 78.12
7. Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE): 77.74
8. Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC): 77.74
9. Rolls-Royce: 77.66
10. Adidas: 77.27

The Reputation Institute noted that this is the first time in the firm’s 20-year history that a company has posted an “excellent” rating (a score of 80 or higher). A rating score between 70 and 79 is termed “strong,” and no company in the top 100 scored below 64, roughly the middle of the “average” range of 60 to 69.

Volkswagen dropped out of the top 100 last year, but it clawed its way back to finish 100th this year with a rating of 64.73, up 3.4 points from a year ago. Samsung, following the disaster with its Galaxy Note 7, dropped to 70th place in the ranking with a rating of 70.98, down four points year over year. A score of 74.98 would have placed Samsung in 2017’s top 20, pushing out Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), which dropped from 10th to 20th year over year with a score of 74.94.