Most Admired: Still Important To Ceos But Just One Metric Of Many For Ccos

(MENAFN- PRovoke) With the publication of the 2026 edition of Fortune's Most Admired Companies, we saw the familiar flurry of press releases from companies delighted with their placement on the list.

As a longtime skeptic about the methodology and the utility of the Fortune survey, I wanted to dig deeper into how it works, what it means, and the way in which it can fit into a more comprehensive approach to tracking corporate reputation-given the proliferation of alternate rankings and tools.

So I spoke to a number of reputation measurement experts about the Fortune survey, the other tools available, and what really work in reputation measurement. The following is a lengthy analysis, and if you're too busy to take it all in, here are some of the key takeaways from our experts:

• CEOs take the Fortune Most Admired seriously. There are stories of communicator bonuses-and stock options-tied to an improved placement on the ranking.
• The criteria and survey respondents established for the first survey in 1983 have changed little over the years.
• Fortune's strength derives from surveying“informed, professional observers who are close enough to organisations to assess them as operating entities.”-Sandra Macleod, Echo Research
• “The top 15 on Fortune's 2025 list lagged the S&P 500 SPX, on average, while the companies with the worst reputations significantly outperformed the market.”-Mark Hubert, financial analyst
• “The bragging rights of being recognized by other business leaders, execs and analysts sends a strong signal and validates that as an enterprise, you are doing many of the right things/”==Stephen Hahn, RepTrak
• “While I respect the longevity of this ranking, I think the approach reveals some significant limitations in how we measure corporate reputation today.”-Shahar Silbershatz, Caliber
• “Reputation is no longer shaped by isolated moments, or a single notion like admiration-it is the cumulative outcome of thousands of signals across stakeholders, media, markets, and behavior.”-Corey DuBrowa, Burson
• “The new generation of reputation methodologies... provide more strategic insight into the precise levers which help to build or destroy reputations.”- Khali Sakkas, CARMA
• “These annual rankings and sentiment-based metrics are missing a major communications opportunity: most are backward looking.”-Ray Day., Stagwell
• “Business leaders require... a real-time, multi-dimensional view of how that reputation is built, quantified, and valued in financial terms.”-DuBrowa
• “Amid today's culture wars, the enterprise must mitigate risk by measuring the interaction of reputation and brand health and acting in concert.”- John Gerzema, The Harris Poll
• The metric companies prefer” matters far less than who you're asking, what you're asking them, and why; what are you aiming to do with the results.'-Macleod

I was just starting out in public relations journalism when a friend with a research background called to talk to me about a story I had written profiling a company that had finished at the top of the Fortune Most Admired rankings that year.“Fortune,” he told me,“has devised a methodology to prove that people who admire strong financial performance above all else admire companies that deliver strong financial performance.”

I've heard variations of that critique for 40 years now, most of them focusing on the narrow dependence on a small and not necessarily representative sub-set of stakeholders (senior executives, directors, and securities analysts, according to the magazine ), and the equally questionable criteria: companies are ranked on nine factors, five of which are more obviously dependent on financial performance than the ability to build and maintain stakeholder relationships.

There's another related criticism, which is that Fortune's approach is at best neutral in terms of causality. Those of us who would urge companies to take reputation more seriously would love to see more research suggesting that enhanced reputation leads to improved performance. The Most Admired list does no such thing. Indeed, there's some evidence that a high score on the survey foreshadows a dip in performance-which would be worrying for communications professionals if the study was a true reflection of relationship management.

But there's no question that the Most Admired list is the most high-profile reputation metric in the world. Since the latest edition of the ranking was released during the World Economic Forum in Davos, my inbox has been inundated with press releases from companies trumpeting their success, from environmental services company Republic Services to TD Synnex (which“empowers IT innovators, ecosystem partners and technology talent to achieve great outcomes”) to fintech company Broadridge Financial Solutions. So it is clear that high-ranking companies are proud of their performance.

And conversations with chief communications and corporate affairs officers suggest that CEOs take the survey more seriously than other reputation rankings, perhaps precisely because it focuses primarily on what their peers think rather than on the opinions of a broader array of stakeholders. We have even heard stories of communicator bonuses-and stock options-tied to an improved placement on the ranking.

And beyond that, the Fortune survey is still largely well-regarded among reputation research experts, including some who have developed their own metrics, many of which would appear to offer broader, more robust, and more actionable insights into corporate reputation. The consensus appears to be that no professional should digest only the Fortune Most Admired survey, but that it has its place as part of a more balanced data diet.

History and Methodology

Fortune began ranking the Most Admired Corporations in the US in 1983, with IBM taking the top spot, and technology companies Hewlett Packard and Digital Equipment ranking alongside Eastman Kodak, General Electric, General Mills and Johnson & Johnson in the inaugural top 10.

The criteria established for that first survey-quality of management; quality of products or services; innovativeness; value as a long-term investment; soundness of financial position; ability to attract, develop, and retain talent; responsibility to the community and environment; and wise use of corporate asset-have changed little over the years.

Responsibility to the community became social responsibility and the magazine added“effectiveness in doing business globally” when the survey became a ranking of the World's Most Admired Companies in 1997, at which time the publication began its current partnership with consulting firm Korn Ferry.

The identity of those doing the voting has remained relatively constant also. The 2026 list was determined by the votes of senior executives, directors, and securities analysts. Participants rank peers in their own sector, and then a broader group of voters (more than 3,000 who participated in the industry surveys) vote for the 10 top companies overall.

So the criteria and methodology have been consistent over the life of the survey. And the same company, Apple, has finished in the top spot overall for the past 19 years. Amazon and Microsoft have rounded out the top three for seven consecutive years. And Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet have each been in the top 10 for more than a decade.

The“Most Admired” Is Still Admired

“The Fortune World's Most Admired Companies list provides a noteworthy annual benchmark of peer admiration, celebrating companies that have earned the respect of the business community.” says Corey DuBrowa, chief executive of Burson, which released its own Global Reputation Economy report around the same time, placing a $7 trillion value on the“reputation economy.”

“At a macro level, it's a valuable snapshot of which companies possess a strong reputation through the lens of admiration.”

Intangible assets are playing a more prominent role in the global economy than ever before, says Khali Sakkas, chief insights officer at CARMA. They now account for up to 90% of overall market value and reached an all-time high of $97.6 trillion in 2025, according to the Global Intangible Finance Tracker from Brand Finance.

“In this climate, the 'Most Admired' and other indexes which rank reputation, brand value and soft power continue to have strong appeal as we strive to quantify the intangible and understand what sets the leaders apart,” Sakkas says.“Media-driven lists and indexes continue to drive important conversations about what we value beyond financial performance. They help us identify what good looks like for leaders and organizations alike.”

Sandra Macleod, CEO of reputation research consultancy Echo Research, believes that the Fortune Most Admired survey has value in part because of the things some observers criticize-the focus on business respondents, the stability of its upper echelons, and its unchanging criteria.

“By polling and actually interviewing informed, professional observers who are close enough to organisations to assess them as operating entities,” surveys such as Fortune's-and the Britain's Most Admired Companies study that Echo conducts in partnership with the London Stock Exchange-“are more likely to reflect reputations formed through sustained exposure and informed comparison, rather than surface-level awareness,” she says.

By contrast, says Macleod,“approaches that rely heavily on general public opinion, inferred sentiment or simulated judgement can struggle to separate familiarity with a brand from a considered view of the company behind it.”

While technology has enabled a wide range of reputation metrics-and artificial intelligence promises to dig deeper into correlations and even causality-Macleod believes there is still a role for surveys like Fortune's.

“Technology gives us extraordinary reach: fast, broad and loud signals that help us track momentum in real time,” she says.“But admiration is a different kind of signal altogether. It reflects depth, not noise, where informed peers validate not just visibility, but durability. That credibility is earned over time, not generated on demand, and in a world of instant feedback, it is the rarest and most valuable currency any leader or company can hold.”

She also sees value in“long-running, consistently measured datasets like Fortune and Britain's Most Admired” especially when linked to hard financial performance.“Their longitudinal histories are a strength, not a limitation. When paired with market data, they enable us to demonstrate statistically, not sentimentally, how enduring reputational drivers translate into real enterprise value.”

“Admiration tells us who's built to last... Admiration is accrued, not engineered, and that's when reputation stops being sentiment and starts moving market cap.”

Stephen Hahn, chief reputation and strategy officer at RepTrak-which produces its own RepTrak 100 list of the world's most reputable companies-also acknowledges that the Fortune ranking is undoubtedly taken seriously by the people who matter.

"While admittedly not as important as it used to be, I think that CEOs of companies, boards, and investors still care about Fortune's Most Admired Company accolades,” he says.“The bragging rights of being recognized by other business leaders, execs and analysts as admirable sends a strong signal and validates that as an enterprise, you are doing many of the right things and are worthy of praise.”

The“Curse of the Most Admired”?

Digging into recent writings on the Most Admired Companies survey, I was interested to come across an article that referenced the "Curse of the Most Admired" in a way that suggested that this is a well-known phenomenon, much discussed by the investment cognoscenti.

The article discussed Apple's ability to top the list for 19 years and“to break a historical pattern known as the 'Curse of the Most Admired.'” It went on to assert that“Financial history is littered with companies that reached the top of reputation lists only to see their stock prices crater.”

Examples include General Electric, Cisco Systems, and IBM. But a Google search for“Curse of the Most Admired” turns up just one relevant result-the article above. The second result is a Reddit thread about the“Curse of the Mistwraith,” which suggests that the Most Admired list may not be a harbinger of impending doom.

Still, a couple of years ago, a podcast by Allsworth Financial cited a study that covered the period from 1983 all the way through 2007, which found that the average least admired company stock (at the bottom of the Fortune's list) outperformed the average most admired company stock by 2.1% on an annualized basis-although I have not been able to locate that particular study.

There is, however, a 2017 study by academics from the University of Florida, published in the Journal of Corporate Finance, which found that between 1992 and 2012, increases in a company's ranking on the Most Admired list were followed by reduced stock performance and vice versa.

And Mark Hulbert, a journalist and financial analyst, says that over the past year the 10 most admired companies in Fortune's year-ago ranking underperformed a group of companies with the worst reputations.“The top 15 on Fortune's 2025 list lagged the S&P 500 SPX, on average, while the companies with the worst reputations significantly outperformed the market,” he says.

This might, perhaps, be a financial analog to the notorious“Sports Illustrated cover jinx,” which some observers believed to be an indication that athletes who appeared on the cover of the magazine either suffered from some supernatural phenomenon or from a psychological issue such as complacency-explaining why their performance declined after featuring on the cover.

Psychology Today helpfully explained that this was more likely to be a statistical effect rather than a psychological one-athletes appeared on the cover when performing at their peak, way above the norm, and were therefore always likely to“regress to the mean” subsequently.

Still, at the very least, data gathered over the years supports the notion that Fortune's rankings are not predictive.

The Limitations of the“Most Admired” List

“While I respect the longevity of this ranking, I think the approach reveals some significant limitations in how we measure corporate reputation today,” says Shahar Silbershatz, co-founder and CEO of Caliber, which provides businesses with actionable intelligence on brand and reputation.

“The methodology is quite narrow-surveying roughly 3,000 executives, directors, and analysts who rate companies primarily within their own industries. That's a very specific stakeholder group, and arguably not even the most important one when it comes to understanding true corporate reputation.

“The question becomes: admired by whom, exactly, and why does that matter?”

Silbershatz questions whether the methodology is as relevant today as it was in the 80s, when the survey debuted and popular opinion was more of a top-down phenomenon.“Being admired by your peers used to count for a lot,” he says.“But the reality today is fundamentally different. Everyone has an opinion, everyone can share that opinion instantly, and sentiment can shift in hours rather than quarters.

“Most companies now operate with multiple stakeholder groups-employees, customers, communities, investors, regulators-yet Fortune's survey completely excludes these voices. In an era where employee activism, consumer boycotts, and community opposition can make or break corporate reputation, surveying only C-suite executives, directors, and analysts is a glaring omission.”

Macleod, similarly, believes that corporate communicators need to understand a broader range of stakeholder sentiment.“A business-facing lens is entirely valid for listed companies concerned with market capitalisation and share-price performance-and how their 'corporate brand' is being understood and ultimately is driving behaviour,” she says.

“Employee research is the right tool if you're testing the strength of an employer brand along with your overall culture, management style and resilience. Consumer surveys tell you how products and services are actually experienced and even could be improved. Mass population polling and global social listening are invaluable for understanding issues, momentum and societal context. Then you have your government, regulatory, and even community perspectives. Each does a different job-in different ways-and does it well.”

Meanwhile, at RepTrak, Hahn questions the focus on admiration, which he sees as one dimension among many.“It's important to recognize that admiration is but one small part of how reputation is assessed by stakeholders,” he says.“Admiration, coupled with things like esteem, trust, respect and overall good feelings of repute, fully rounds out the merits of what it takes to score a strong reputation.”

Silbershatz agrees.“What actually matters is whether companies build and maintain trust among the stakeholders who can impact their business,” he says.“Our research consistently shows that being trusted and genuinely liked drives the behaviors companies need-customers who buy and recommend, employees who join and stay, communities who support rather than oppose. Being admired by fellow executives doesn't correlate with these outcomes.

“Trust also functions as protective armor during difficult moments. When Marks & Spencer faced a cyber crisis last year, the goodwill they'd accumulated over years translated into patient, forgiving customers who trusted the company to make things right. That's the kind of reputational resilience that matters. The perceptions of C-suite peers simply don't provide that same buffer.”

There is widespread agreement that a more multi-dimensional approach is required to measure reputation in today's more complex environment. Says DuBrowa,“today's business environment is defined by unprecedented complexity: slower and more fragmented growth, expanding regulation, geopolitical tension, rapid AI adoption, and an always-on media ecosystem.

“In this context, reputation is no longer shaped by isolated moments, or a single notion like admiration-it is the cumulative outcome of thousands of signals across stakeholders, media, markets, and behavior.”

There are also serious questions about the nine criteria Fortune uses to measure admiration. There is a case to be made that four of them-quality of management; value as a long-term investment; soundness of financial position; and wise use of corporate asset-are essentially proxies for financial performance.

In addition, Silbershatz says, the nine criteria are not transparently weighted,“so it's unclear how these different dimensions are prioritized or balanced.”

Also, because respondents only rate companies within their own industries, there's no meaningful cross-sector comparison. A company could be "admired" simply for being the best in a weak field, or overlooked despite excellence in a highly competitive sector.

For all of these reasons, there is a feeling that the Most Admired survey is no longer-certainly not in isolation-an effective measure of corporate reputation.

“The way we measure reputation has evolved significantly and this landscape is moving rapidly,” says CARMA's Sakkas.“Traditional reputation measurement relied on stakeholder opinion surveys to score organizations across a specific range of established reputation drivers, such as performance, innovation, leadership, customer service, and culture.

“Reputation evaluation now involves the triangulation of multiple data sets designed to build a more holistic view. Methodologies now factor in audience stakeholder opinion, media reputation, social media positioning, employee satisfaction and LLM responses in order to provide a much more comprehensive view.”

So while the Fortune lists and other indexes will continue to draw attention to the importance of reputation and trust, Sakkas says“the new generation of reputation methodologies and the ability to calculate the true value of reputation speak to a deeper way to evaluate reputation amongst audience stakeholders. They also provide more strategic insight into the precise levers which help to build or destroy reputations.”

Ultimately, Silbershatz says“this is essentially a vanity metric. It doesn't tell the lauded companies why they're admired or what actionable steps they should take with that knowledge. More robust methodologies don't just provide a gauge of corporate reputation-they offer genuine insights about the drivers behind it across all stakeholder groups, allowing companies to understand and actually improve their standing where it matters most.”

And DuBrowa adds:“Clients may be disappointed not to appear on the list, yet admiration alone is a blunt instrument. It doesn't isolate attributable value, connect to shareholder returns, or map cleanly to the KPIs boards should increasingly expect of modern companies.”

What's Missing: Neither Predictive Nor Actionable

It is telling that while researchers have interesting observations about the methodology of the Fortune survey, the practitioners we interviewed-two agency professionals who were previously CCOs-were more focused on the utility of the information provided. They both questioned the absence of any predictive value in some of these metrics, and their failure to provide actionable information on how companies might meaningfully improve their reputations.

Discussing the Fortune survey and others that have risen to prominence in recent years, Stagwell's vice chair and Allison's executive chair Ray Day (previously a CCO at both Ford and IBM), says:“These annual rankings and sentiment-based metrics are missing a major communications opportunity: most are backward looking. They explain how people feel after something already has happened-not what will drive action, escalation or mitigate risk in the future.

As a result, he suggests,“Too many communications teams are still operating using a decades-old playbook. A spike in negative sentiment might signal dissatisfaction, yet it does not reveal whether an issue resonates deeply enough to trigger action.”

Day says the most common request from the C-suite to the communications team today is“help us get ahead of what's to come-help us see around corners.” As a result, predictive analytics-particularly those based on principles of risk, behavior and neuroscience-must help companies understand why audiences feel the way they do.

“The secret is to see through all the noise and pinpoint the intense emotional signals that identify risk and opportunity at the earliest stages.”

As a result, communications leaders are shifting resources from measuring reputation too often to putting in place predictive analytics, he says,“early warning systems that indicate what's coming in the headlines, employee engagement scores, regulatory scrutiny or market reaction. Today's communications leaders need a periodic multi-stakeholder, multi-market reputation study combined with always-on predictive analytics.”

DuBrowa (previously a CCO at Starbucks and Google) likewise sees a need for metrics that are more actionable:“While Fortune's Most Admired Companies remains a respected signal of peer recognition, COOs often group it with other awards-meaningful symbolically, but difficult to translate into measurable business impact.

“To move from admiration to action, business leaders require a view that goes beyond who is admired to reveal the underlying dynamics of their reputational strength, fragility, and the strategic levers that determine and help predict their future success; a real-time, multi-dimensional view of how that reputation is built, quantified, and valued in financial terms.”

And he says that Burson's Reputation Capital study does that:“In several cases, our data points to pressure on the citizenship and workplace levers-signaling rising stakeholder skepticism about societal impact, workforce treatment, or alignment between what a company says and what it does.

“In other instances, heightened public and policy scrutiny around contested issues created drag on citizenship and governance, limiting reputational resilience despite continued strength in innovation and market leadership.”

Day, meanwhile, sees an answer in moving beyond sentiment and focusing on the intensity of emption.“In an era defined by declining trust, the next evolution in reputation leadership is the shift from focusing on sentiment to emotion,” he says“Sentiment tells whether reaction is positive or negative. Emotion tells what people care about most intensely. Intensity, not tone, is what ultimately drives behavior.”

Beyond the“Most Admired”

The good news for communicators is that there has never been a wider selection of reputation metrics-with varying approaches-than we see today.

While Echo partners with the London Stock Exchange to produce its Britain's Most Admired Companies list, in 2024 it acquired Reputation Dividend, which specializes in valuing intangible reputational assets for listed companies in the US and UK. Assessing an enterprise's intangible reputation value separately from operational and financial metrics and quantifying the external factors shaping this value, Reputation Dividend says that about 30% of company value is attributable to reputation.

Burson's Global Reputation Economy report employs a different methodology and comes up with a slightly different number, suggesting that reputation drives an average 4.78% in additional shareholder returns. The study breaks reputation into eight drivers, from governance and innovation to leadership, product quality and workplace. It finds that companies with the strongest reputations outperform their peers across all of them-although unlike the Echo research, it does not rank individual companies.

The RepTrak 100 does (Lego Group was number one, ahead of Rolls-Royce, Rolex, Harley-Davidson and The Bosch Group). The ranking and corresponding reputation data are based on 211,000 survey responses collected globally across 14 major economies-“the real-life individuals who are not just aware of your company but have formed opinions about it,” the company says.

RepTrak calls these people“the informed general public” and asks about performance, products and services, innovation, workplace, conduct, citizenship and leadership. (While many of these criteria have obvious analogs on the Fortune survey, they are less weighted toward financial performance, and the stakeholder universe is much more diverse.)

Stagwell's Harris Poll also publishes a top 100 list, in partnership with Axios in the US (where Trader Joe's, Patagonia, Microsoft, Toyota and Costco were the top rated last year) using a three-step process that starts with a survey of more than 6.000 Americans“to understand the public's top-of-mind awareness of companies that either excel or falter in society.”

Respondents are asked which two companies-in their opinion-stand out as having the best reputation today and which two have the worst. This helps identify the most visible brands, at which point a second online survey of 16,000 Americans analyzes those companies further.

Criteria include trust, vision, growth, products and services, culture, ethics, citizenship, trajectory, and financial performance.

In addition, Harris recently launched Harris QuestRQ, a new“always-on” reputation system that connects live reputation metrics to more than three decades of trended proprietary corporate ranking data from the company's Reputation Quotient framework to“measure their reputation live in society, beyond their category; and against their own history.”

Reputation movements captured in the moment can be linked to more than 75 metrics of brand health, says Harris CEO“Amid today's culture wars, the enterprise must mitigate risk by measuring the interaction of reputation and brand health and acting in concert.:“Amid today's culture wars, the enterprise must mitigate risk by measuring the interaction of reputation and brand health and acting in concert. Leaders must all be listening and moving in lock step with the same information.”

Caliber, a stakeholder intelligence platform helping organizations build and protect trust, released its inaugural Stakeholder Intelligence Report last week, revealing global trends in brand, reputation, and data-driven communications. The 2026 report draws on nearly one million responses from more than 360,000 individuals across 37 countries, and focuses on stakeholder concerns such as the increased cost of living, artificial intelligence, rising energy prices and the presidency of Donald Trump.

Caliber also publishes“trust and like” scores for companies in many countries, with Amazon, Costco and UPS topping the most recent US release (in January 2025). The scores are calculated by averaging responses to two sentences:“[Company] is a company I like” and“[Company] is a company I trust.” The results are then compared to a normative scale to determine if the score is positive or negative.

CARMA, which offers media monitoring, PR measurement, and reputation consultancy services, also produces“Reputation by CARMA” reports, which are sector specific and typically feature a small selection of high-profile companies. The most recent, focusing on technology brands, was published in December.

The CARMA reports integrate news media coverage, social media conversations, and audience research-500 respondents in the UK and US. Companies are scored against six core“Reputational Pillars: products and services, performance, conduct, culture, vision, and sustainability. And the company says that over time, these surveys show how reputations evolve, which narratives drive change, and how brands can proactively manage their public image.

With such a proliferation of reputation measurement options, CCOs are often unsure what will work for them.

“People often ask which reputation metric matters most,” says Macleod.”My instinctive response is that the metric matters far less than who you're asking, what you're asking them, and why; what are you aiming to do with the results. In other words: reputation for what, among whom, for what purpose.

“What doesn't work is the idea that one measure, drawn from one audience or one single approach, can somehow explain reputation holistically. That's the myth of the magic pill. Reputation simply doesn't behave like that. I believe that reputation isn't just a score to be harvested; it's a system to be understood.

“Reputation, after all, is not created by metrics or media coverage alone. It is built up over time through actual experience of how an organisation behaves, performs and responds reinforced through professional judgment and word of mouth as much as through visibility or online engagement.”

DuBrowa agrees that reputation is too complex to be captured in a ranking-or even in multiple rankings.

“For leaders and boards, the lesson is not to chase rankings, but to understand what sustains these rankings,” he says.“Fortune's Most Admired Companies captures where admiration has landed. Reputation Capital and The Reputation Economy can explain why some companies remain anchored year after year, while others rotate out-not because they suddenly stopped performing, but because they may have lacked the ability to detect the signals to either maximize their market opportunity or minimize downside risk associated with reputation.

“In an era where reputation can be a source of resilience or a hidden liability, the companies that win will be those that manage it with the same rigor they apply to capital, risk, and growth.”

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