You trust General Mills but not Halliburton

General Mills

General Mills is well-known for brands including Cheerios, Yoplait, Betty Crocker, Haagen-Dazs and Progresso. The company added two new varieties of Cheerios this year.

By Eve Tahmincioglu

The company with the best reputation among U.S. consumers is General Mills, and the one with the worst is Halliburton.

Among the 150 biggest corporations in the United States, ?Americans have the strongest amount of trust, admiration, respect and good feeling for General Mills,? according to an annual study released Wednesday by Reputation Institute, a consulting firm that surveyed more than 10,000 consumers in January and February.

Kraft Foods, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg?s and Amazon joined General Mills -- which knocked Amazon out of the No. 1 spot this year -- on the top five most reputable list.

And the domestic corporate giants with ?the smallest amount of trust, admiration, respect and good feeling for? joining Halliburton included Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were also in the five-worst reputation line up in 2011, the study found.

?Over the past three to four years, the marketplace has evolved into ?The Reputation Economy,?? said Anthony Johndrow, managing partner of Reputation Institute North America,? ?reflecting the dynamic that purchase consideration, recommendation and loyalty are driven more by perceptions of who is behind the products and services we buy than it is by perceptions of the what alone.?

But what does a good or bad reputation really mean in terms of dollars and cents?

The company at the top of Reputation Institute?s list, General Mills, makers of Cheerios and Yoplait, reported in March that it experienced a decline in U.S. sales because of higher prices. While energy services company Halliburton announced in January the firm set sales records for 2011.

Clearly these are two very different companies with very different customers, but what does a great rep get you?

?We value our corporate reputation tremendously, and work hard every day to foster and honor the trust of our stakeholders,? said Ken Powell, General Mills chairman and CEO in a statement.

Putting a value on a good rep, however, is easier said than done.

??There are some cases in which the brand has a great reputation, but market forces drive them into meat grinder,? said Rob Frankel, a branding expert and author of ?The Revenge of Brand X: How to Build A Big Time Brand - on the Web or Anywhere Else.?

?Sometimes media hype overtakes reality to the point where end users are taken in by campaigns designed to generate a brand's reputation, but market realities eventually catch up,? he continued. ?An example of that is Groupon, which predictably has gone from digital darling to a dumpster of denial, trading today at its all-time low as reality belies its media-driven ?reputation.? ?

Here are some other key findings from the Reputation Institute study:

* Consumer products remains the highest ranked industry, while tobacco is still the weakest industry.

* AIG, General Mills, ExxonMobil and Abbott Labs saw the biggest jumps this year on the reputation meter.

* The corporations with the biggest drops in reputation included Time Warner, Bank of America and United Airlines.?

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