For the third year in a row, Swiss luxury watchmaker Rolex has been named as the world’s most reputable company in the 2018 RepTrak list. The annual survey, which is conducted by the Reputation Institute, is considered to be the gold standard for reputation measurement.
The RepTrak database examines 15 stakeholders in over 25 industries and more than 40 countries for more than 7,000 companies. Throughout January and February of 2018, the Reputation Institute surveyed more than 230,000 people to measure their reaction and thoughts on the world’s largest and most recognisable corporations. Companies that populate the top 100 of this list typically have revenue in excess of £35 billion and brand familiarity with at least 40% of a general population.
Speaking of Rolex’s third consecutive year at number 1, the Chief Research Officer of the Reputation Institute, Stephen Hahn-Griffiths, says: “It’s a company that has put all its effort on redefining winning.” Rolex was joined in the top 10 of the 2018 RepTrak list by the likes of LEGO, Google, and The Walt Disney Company, and it remains as the sole representative of the Swiss luxury watch industry in the top 100.
Despite retaining its title once again, Rolex’s score of 79.3 (out of 100) now means that it has lost its ‘excellent’ rating. However, the iconic watchmaker is by no means alone in this regard, as rankings dropped for 58% of companies in the top 100. “The reputation bubble has burst. Companies are down by an average of 1.4 points globally, representing the first major decline since the end of the Great Recession,” said Hahn-Griffiths. “There is a growing crisis of trust in the world especially among big companies making record profits,” he continued. “These companies are increasingly judged on aspects of their morality and ethics. Today, companies are more widely scrutinised based on their alignment with social causes, how they behave, their enterprise-wide values and the internal culture they create – they are not solely measured on what they make and how they make it.”
