NEW YORK and COPENHAGEN, Denmark, April 21, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- 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:

  1. BMW
  2. Google
  3. Daimler
  4. Rolex
  5. LEGO
  6. The Walt Disney Company
  7. Canon
  8. Apple
  9. Sony
  10. 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. The complete list of Global RepTrak 100 companies can be found online at http://www.reputationinstitute.com/thought-leadership/global-reptrak-100.

About Reputation Institute

Reputation Institute (RI) is the world's leading consulting and advisory firm for reputation. RI enables many of the world's leading companies to make more confident business decisions that build and protect reputation capital, analyze risk and sustainability topics, and drive competitive advantage. RI's most prominent management tool is the RepTrak® model for analyzing the reputations of companies and institutions — best known via the Global RepTrak® 100, the world's largest and most comprehensive study of corporate reputations, as well as Country RepTrak® and City RepTrak® studies that look at reputation across organizations within a given geography.

Learn more at: http://www.reputationinstitute.com/

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SOURCE Reputation Institute

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