 |
Tesla’s corporate reputation has slid further over the past five years than any other company in the Axios Harris Poll 100, according to the newly released 2025 edition of the report.
Hitting its top ranking (#8) in 2021 after two years of solid gains, the company slid to #12 in 2022, #62 in 2023 and #63 in 2024, before cratering to hit #95 this year.
Conducted by Axios and The Harris Poll, the study looks at nine dimensions of reputation (including “character, trust and citizenship”) to determine the rank of each brand.
While Elon Musk’s X performed even less well than Tesla, its poor ranking far precedes his 2022 acquisition of the platform. Since 2019, the platform has never ranked higher than #89.
Musk serves as a prominent example of what the study’s authors say is a prime danger that brands face in maintaining their reputation. “The reputations of companies that stumbled into politics or the culture wars have been hit hardest since 2019,” they write. “Most of the biggest decliners have consistently made headlines for polarizing acts.”
 |
Those hit by the culture-wars effect include Anheuser-Busch (which slid from #57 in 2023 to #87 this year) and Hobby Lobby (which dropped from #43 last year to #52 in 2025).
Operational failures also played a big reputational role, as evidenced by Boeing's reputational score seeing a 13-point drop since 2019, landing at #88 this year. The study places much of the blame for UnitedHealth Group’s drop from #59 in 2020 to #92 this year on concerns about the company's practices.
The top brands include #1 Trader Joe’s (up from #13 last year), #2 Patagonia (#8 last year as well as #1 in 2023) and #3 Microsoft (up 15 spots from 2024).
The study notes that a fall in the rankings is not necessarily a danger sign for a company, adding that Amazon (down three spots) and Procter & Gamble (also down three spots) still have reputation scores that place them in the "very good" category.
However, the “very good” description does not apply to one of the poll’s worst performers: The Trump Organization. Even its #99 position (and “very poor” score) this year is a move up from the past two years, when it ranked last.
CEOs are increasingly being expected to serve as the face of their organization, but the strategies used to implement that increased visibility vary, according to a new report from V2 Communications.
While AI may have made the basics of generating content easier and more efficient, it has also made it more difficult for a brand to stand out from an ever-growing crowd of voices and platforms, according to a report from Public Relations Global Network and Greenough Communications.
Only 15 percent of the CEOs polled in a new survey from Boathouse think that their CMO merits an “A” for job performance, as opposed to the 53 percent who rank their CMO as “average."
A growing sense of fragmentation when it comes to health issues is leading to greater distrust of both the healthcare industry and the media that reports on it, according to the newly released 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer.
