Reputation Institute, a global reputation-based advisory firm, has published the results of its annual study—2013 Global CSR RepTrak® 100—that surveyed more than 55,000 consumers from 15 countries to find out how the leading companies are perceived in terms of their sustainability performance.

For the second year in a row the study names Microsoft the company with the best CSR reputation globally, while Disney, BMW and Google are the top performers in other reputation dimensions: citizenship, governance and workplace, respectively.

About 50% of the respondents agree that Disney performs well supporting good causes and protecting the environment; 49% of them find BMW to be a responsible, open, transparent and ethical company; 51% think of Google as one of the most desirable places to work.

In the global RepTrak study, which analyzes companies’ reputation based on other factors, not just CSR, the ranking of the most reputable brands is crowned by BMW and followed by Disney, Rolex, Google, Daimler, Sony, Microsoft, Canon, Nestle and Lego at the bottom of the chart. The Institute assessed their reputation based on the following factors:

• prudent employment policies,
• sound financial standing
• strong leadership,
• transparency and ethics,
• community feedback
• innovation and forward-thinking.

The value of the CSR RepTrak® 100 study is that it secures ROI on sustainability efforts. 73% of global consumers surveyed are more likely to recommend a brand that is perceived to be delivering on their sustainability programs. Results of the study demonstrate that when a company jumps up 5 points on the scale, consumers tend to recommend this company more (actually 9%). About 59% of consumers say that they would «go out of their way to communicate something positive» about companies they feel deliver on their CSR programs, compared to only 23% for companies perceived to fail to do so.

“Unfortunately, Corporate Responsibility is still equated to philanthropy in many organizations and hence, given short shrift when it comes to strategic formulation and implementation. Although the top 100 companies all have well developed websites detailing their CR initiatives, how many of them do rigorous research to find out how their key stakeholders view these same initiatives?” comments CB Bhattacharya, E.ON chair professor in Corporate Responsibility at European School of Management and Technology.

These findings show that it is utterly important for a company to create social value to make business prosper.

The full report on the 2013 Global CSR RepTrak as well as the Top Line Report are available here.

2013 Global CSR RepTrak ranking