Forbes...The World's Most Reputable Pharmaceutical Companies In 2016 (I)

Like in most industries, players in the pharmaceutical world get a boost when customers the world over feel that they are innovators, act responsibly and are, generally speaking, a force for good. Recently a survey was published scoring exactly how good people in developed countries all over the world feel about big pharma. 

The ranking is the product of Reputation Institute (RI), a reputation management consulting firm based in Boston that launched in 1997. Since its founding the firm has offered corporate clients strategies and insights into how they might gauge and improve their reputation among customers in various markets around the globe. We took the RI data and created a gallery of the 12 Most Reputable Pharmaceutical Companies. 

In putting together its annual list of the world’s most reputable companies, RI assigns each company a score – The RepTrak Pulse – ascertained by taking into account the esteem, trust, admiration and feelings the general public has for each company in seven categories: products & services, innovation, workplace, governance, citizenship, leadership and performance. 

Ratings are based on online polls of more than 23,000 ratings in the first quarter of this year from respondents in 15 countries, including China, the U.S. Brazil, Germany, India and others. 

This year’s list-topper is Bayer, which earned an RI RepTrak Pulse score of 70.6. The Germany-based company received the highest scores in the Leadership, Performance, Workplace and Products/Services dimensions. 

In the other three categories – Citizenship, Governance and Innovation – Denmark-based Novo Nordisk was rated highest. 

Ranking second, Chicago’s Abbott Laboratories, did not rate highest in any one dimension but scored high enough to beat out Novo Nordisk overall. 

RI noticed several trends in putting together its study. One of which is that respondents with higher incomes tended to look more favorably on players in the pharmaceutical industry overall. Low-income respondents gave list-companies an average score of 63.2, middle income ones scored them 68.0 while higher income respondents doled out an average score of 71.4. The overall average score for 2016 was 67.6, a small jump over last year’s 65.7.

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