Annual Harris reputation poll of corporate brands says Amazon retained the top spot, Apple dropped from 5th to 29th, while Google dropped from 8th to 28th
(Reuters) - Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google corporate brands dropped in an annual survey while Amazon.com Inc maintained the top spot …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Harris poll has form here: a year earlier it recorded Samsung falling from #3 to #49 after the Note7 fiasco while Amazon topped the list for a second straight year — so the 2018 edition extends an Amazon streak and adds two more big-name collapses. What makes Apple's 5th-to-29th slide notable is that, unlike Samsung, no single product disaster explains it.
The subsequent record sharpens the picture: Facebook's fall to 94th in the 2018 Axios/Harris survey showed scandal-driven drops were becoming routine for consumer-facing tech brands, while later management-quality rankings had Microsoft first and Apple second by 2023 — suggesting these reputation swings are volatile rather than permanent.
First-order effects
- Apple and Google enter 2018 with a large consumer-goodwill gap versus Amazon, which now owns the top spot outright, forcing both to defend brand equity they had long treated as structural.
Second-order effects
- Reputation erosion bleeds into employer brand: within two years Google dropped out of Glassdoor's top-10 US best-places-to-work list while Microsoft was the only tech giant climbing — the same perception shift hitting recruiting pipelines.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across Samsung, Facebook, Apple, and Google points to Big Tech consumer reputation becoming event-driven and fast-decaying, with sustained leadership (Amazon, later Microsoft in the Drucker ranking) requiring active management rather than product halo alone.
The trend: Big Tech brand reputation is fragmenting into a stable leader (Amazon) and volatile challengers whose standings swing with each news cycle, making annual polls a leading indicator of consumer and talent sentiment.