March 15, 2018

Which Company Do Americans Love Best?

Things are a little slow today, so let’s take a look at the 2018 Corporate Reputation Poll from Harris. First, here’s their complete list:

There are a few interesting things to note:

  • Americans really love their supermarkets. They’re all in the top 25.
  • Americans really hate their cable companies. They’re all in the bottom 25.
  • Americans really love Amazon. And Wegmans. I have some friends who were bereft when their Wegmans closed down. What’s the deal with that?
  • The Trump Organization managed to avoid the last spot. They were beat out by (a) the airbag company, (b) the sexual harassment company, (c) the clueless credit reporting company that lost everyone’s personal data to hackers, and (d) the ripoff banking company. However, they scored worse than (a) the GMO seed company, (b) the oil spill company, (c) the other clueless credit reporting company, and (d) the vampire squid company.
  • The marcom folks who created this graphic used slightly larger fonts in the first two lists, which is why all four aren’t the same size. This is poor graphic design.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at a few specific sectors. First up, car companies:

Tesla is on top, but that’s not going to last long if they can’t figure out how to manufacture the Model 3 properly. Also note that Fiat Chrysler has an even worse reputation than Volkswagen, which has been fined billions of dollars for the enormous con it pulled on its diesel cars. Nice work, Fiat! Next up is high-tech companies:

Are you surprised that Microsoft is #1? They may be boring, but apparently people think highly of them. (Amazon would be #1 if I counted them as a high-tech company, but I’m not really sure what sector they belong in these days.) Facebook, on the other hand, makes people pretty suspicious—and rightfully so.

Finally, here’s the sector where reputation is truly the coin of the realm: consumer packaged goods.

I don’t really have an explanation for any of this. Why is Kraft #1? Why is Pepsi the lowest? Do most people even know what Unilever is?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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