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Table 17.1 The best corporate reputations in the
United States
Rank
Company name
1 Johnson and Johnson
2 Coca-Cola
3 Intel
4 Ben and Jerry’s
5 Wal-Mart
6 Xerox
7 Home Depot
8 Gateway
9 Disney
10 Dell
11 GE
12 Lucent
13 Anheuser Busch
14 Microsoft
15 Amazon.com
16 IBM
17 Sony
18 Yahoo!
19 ATandT
20 FedEx
Source: Featured in the Wall Street Journal, September 1999
Notably, the Reputation Institute has shown
that the best corporate reputations in the
United States – the world’s major market
(Fisher, 2000) – also means that the companies
perform significantly better than others
in terms of market share and share value (Wall
Street Journal, 1999). The top twenty corporate
reputations are shown in Table 17.1.
Despite the positive influence exerted by
good reputation, good reputation occurs
within environmental circumstances and
the market environment over the past three
to four years has borne significant resemblance
to a tremendous storm out at sea. For
example:
• There are no more stable marketplaces,
only turbulent ones.
• If one compares stock market valuations
using four major indices (e.g., UK (FTSE
100 Index), USA (S&P 500), Japan (Nikkei
225), and Europe (Dow Jones Euro STOXX
50), all markets are dropping overall, and
individual share values enjoy significant
volatilities.
• Investors (corporate and individual) are
searching for ‘safe haven’ investments,
and corporate reputation plays a significant
role in invest/divest decisions.
• Chief executive officers are literally in the
‘firing line’ if targets are not reached, or
markets respond badly to organizational
initiatives.
• Board room doors seem to be continually
revolving.
In this scenario, corporate ability to present
sustainable corporate reputation stories to
consumers, customers, business analysts,
industry analysts, and other interested and
savvy publics and stakeholders, is of crucial
importance. Among many quotations that
could be cited, the following summarize the
current [academic and practitioner] position:
Good reputation is very useful for an organisation;
it may enable it to charge premium
prices for its products, enter into favourable
financial arrangements with banks, attract
graduates from top universities, get in
touch with customers easily, and so on,
such that good reputation constitutes a
valuable asset to the organisation.
(Fombrun and Shanley, 1990;
Shapiro, 1983)
In contrast, an organisation with bad or no
reputation is likely to encounter situations
where the opportunities open to it are few
and the constraints imposed on it are
many.
(Podolny, 1993; Vendelo, 1998)
© 2004 Sandra Oliver for editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters, the contributors