US household goods companies and technology giants win out in battle for public opinion but don’t escape the corporate backlash unscathed.

New York, July 21st – Vision Critical, the strategic interactive research and technology company, and its public affairs arm Angus Reid Public Opinion, release their Corporate Reputation Rankings from the diagnostic reputation measurement and management tool ReputationPlus™.

ReputationPlus looks beyond the presence or absence of positives and probes negative responses like executive compensation, management’s short term thinking, secrecy, greed and arrogance. In these hyper-critical times examining negative as well as positive metrics helps create a clearer picture of weakness and vulnerability as well as competitive strengths.

John Gilfeather who has been working with Vision Critical on ReputationPlus says, “In forty years of studying corporate reputation, I have never seen this level of vitriol aimed at larger corporations. It is not just an erosion of positives, but also a rise in distinct negatives.” Gilfeather continued, “If companies do not start communicating – and communicating better – about why they should be respected, this trend will continue.”

Johnson & Johnson tops the list of most favorably perceived companies, in a top ten dominated by CPG companies and the big three computing and technology companies. The top ten all rated favorably on fundamentals like value, quality and trust and being welcomed into a local community, all signs of well managed companies and good corporate citizens. These companies are not just household names but valued household guests – their products staples of most American households.

The top ranking companies have generally avoided any major recent scandals, reflected by a lack of the most negative label of “idiots” – the public’s shorthand for arrogance, greed and secrecy. However these companies still attracted comment about executive compensation and putting their profits above what is good for the country.

ReputationPlus Rankings

High profits judged in context of other scores

Many of the top ten receive above and sometimes very much above average scores for making “a lot of money for shareholders”. Clearly companies can be highly profitably but still maintain superior reputations as long as they aren’t perceived as behaving like greedy “idiots”. However there is a mixed picture. It is not news that almost half of Americans think that BP puts profits ahead of what is good for the United States. But it is news that one out of five Americans feels this way about widely admired companies like Kraft and Johnson & Johnson.

The second ten companies share many of the same positive characteristics of the top ten. Ford (17) deserves special mention by considerably outperforming the other auto companies studied. GM (30) and Toyota (44) have clearly struggled through one of the most challenging periods of automotive history notable for the scale of bankruptcies, bailouts and auto recalls.

The bottom half of the rankings are dominated by financial services and health insurance companies. Those with the least favorable rankings are ones that have been splashed across our television screens and newspaper front pages – and not for positive reasons. Health insurers, major banks, Toyota, brokerage firms and oil companies are all subject to public opinion backlash.

BP is, of course, a magnet for negative opinions. Almost half of Americans hold very negative opinions of BP (1 or 2 on a six point scale.) In addition, BP is the company most frequently described as idiots, arrogant and secretive. When it comes to greedy, however, Exxon Mobil is essentially tied with BP.

Americans’ assessment of BP exceeds by at least 16 percentage points negative opinions of Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Toyota – the most beleaguered companies in the recent (pre Gulf oil spill) months.

About ReputationPlus

Each of the 54 companies in the ReputationPlus™ survey was evaluated by 800 Americans, from a total of 10,800, drawn from Vision Critical’s proprietary online Springboard America panel with key demographic breakouts. US census balanced sample aged 21+. Future studies will be based on 1000 Americans per company.

The Overall Reputation Ranking is a based on an index scored from 0 to 100 that represents the average associations given to a company based on 15 attributes and 8 personality traits. Negatively worded attributes and personality traits have been reversed such that a perfect “good” score would be 100 and a perfectly “bad” score is 0. The attributes and personality traits have been weighted in their contribution to this Overall Reputation Index based on their relative importance to driving overall feeling towards companies (based on a regression analysis across 54 companies examined).

The Key Driver Analysis is based on a Shapley Value Regression and quantifies the overall contribution of individual aspects of consumer associations for corporations on their feelings toward those corporations overall.