2018 Thunderbird Opinions Most Admired Companies Survey

We Looked For Experts

Jeff Cunningham
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

Corporate reputation surveys are popular because the ‘listicles’ they generate make money for the media. For the business executive, they tend to be something looked at and tossed. Thunderbird changed the calculus to come up with better findings.

  1. Our first line of attack was to avoid sampling the general public. We love the public, but the media portrays business as the bad guy, and so changing the general public’s mind through the media is fighting a fire with a weak hose. We think companies are better off spending their energies on audience insight.
  2. To improve our understanding of what drives reputation, we looked for people business acumen to give us candid feedback.
  3. We chose global business executives for our sample and qualified them three ways: all possess graduate business degrees, expertise in the relevant sectors, and have lived or worked in the region of the company.
  4. We call this ‘Informed Admiration” because they understand the companies they are rating.
  5. We used technology through Segmanta.com, our survey tool, to tie together the questions, the demographics, and the expertise in an iPhone friendly format. It was like match.com for corporate reputation.

Happily, everyone is getting along fine.

Jeff Cunningham

Written by

Transformational leadership and crisis resolution. Professor @ASU @Thunderbird; columnist @ChiefExecGrp

Thunderbird Opinions

Thunderbird Opinions is an opinion poll and business trend researcher from the Thunderbird School of Global Management of Arizona State University. Our focus is on trends in global business and leadership.

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