Posts Tagged ‘RQ’

I was taking a look at the new Harris Poll RQ study that was released this week. Reputations of U.S. companies are always important to review in order to see how companies or sectors are improving while others are declining. The survey has some reptuational nuggets worth sharing here.

This year, 16% of the U.S. public said that the reputation of corporate America was improving, an increase of 7% over one year earlier. That is positive news despite the fact that 49% of consumers say it is declining. That is not a surprise because trust in business has reached its lowest depths over the past few years of economic decline. But it is a good sign that reputations are making somewhat of a comeback.

But what really has left me thinking twice is not the finding that Amazon.com is the most highly reputable company in America this year, a notch above Apple. What has me in a state of awesome disbelief is that Amazon earned nearly 100% positive ratings on all measures related to Trust and that among Americans who have discussed Amazon with their family and friends, nearly 100% of these conversations were positive about the online retailer. I have rarely, if ever, seen a company ever get that close to 100%. I’ve been conducting research for a long long time and this is an amazing feat. 100% satisfaction! A rarity.

The Harris Poll also found that more than 60% of consumers say that they now “proactively try to learn more about how a company conducts itself”  before they consider buying that company’s products and services. Again, the world of reputation is seriously changing when people care this much about a company’s treatment of employees, customers and communities. Values are increasingly playing a greater role in reputational perceptions and this market force is only going to continue. Mark my words.

Harris Interactive just released their annual RQ (reputation quotient) survey among the U.S. public.  This is year 12 for the Harris RQ – that’s a long time and underscores the value that this kind of research brings.  Harris conducts the survey among  consumers on what they call the most visible companies in the US along with others that represent major industries. The study starts by asking people to nominate or name the companies that stand out as having the best and worst reputations overall.  The most nominated companies form the core group asked about. For this reason, one usually finds that those companies that have been in the headlines for reputational scandals are measured.  Besides the usual ranking of who’s on first and who’s struck out, Harris identifies several trends: 

• Among their “elite” reputation winners (i.e. most highly regarded), two reputation drivers stand out – “looks like a company that has high ethical standards” and “tends to outperform its competitors.” Again, this underscores the importance of speaking up and being an industry leader.
• How companies communicate also drives reputation according to Harris – communicating Sincerely, Accurately and Consistently correlates highly with positive reputation. Transparency and empathy count.
• An additional theme that Harris highlights is that those companies that “support the infrastrucuture” of Americans’ lives at work and at home also drives positive corporate perceptions.  This means that companies that help people get their jobs done easily at home and at work tend to be esteemed.  Interesting notion.
• All the major industry sectors saw year over year reputation improvements — particularly automotive.

Of course, there are always clouds and rays of light in any silver lining. And here it is….66% say that the reputation of corporate America is not good but there’s hope for improvement. This figure has not moved much from the 65% who said the same thing last year. So I’d say a solid thumbs down with cautious optimism. However, 22% say the reputation of corporate America is good with room for improvement (up four percentage points from last year).  Not so terrible. A miniscule 1% says corporate America’s reputation is great and can’t get any better (same as last year).  I sure would like to find out more about them to see what they are thinking or or if they are living in the clouds! Thankfully only 12% of the American public say corporate America’s reputation is terrible and there is little that can be done about it.  That’s pretty definitive. So all in all, hope is alive for corporate America and for those of us in the reputation management arena, it is in our hands.