Big PR firm puts the global value of business reputation at $7 trillion

Prioritizing business reputation can deliver an extra 4.78% in annual shareholder value, study finds

“Reputation, which was once a soft PR metric, has become a quantifiable asset class,” according to a new study, The Global Reputation Economy, by Burson. Burson is a global PR firm owned by WPP.

According to the study:

“Between October 2024 and October 2025, Burson assessed 66 publicly traded companies headquartered in the United States and throughout the world.”

Then they looked at several factors that drove the value of the stock price for those companies and found “unexpected” returns. Those factors, according to the report:

“cannot be explained by standard financial performance metrics alone, such as revenue, profit margins, or other typical financial data.”

The conclusion?

“We found that reputation delivered, on average, 4.78% in unexpected and additional annual shareholder returns.”

When they did the math across all publicly traded companies in the world, they came up with a value of $7.07 trillion.

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How did the study come to that number?

Burson says in the report that they took three steps:

• First, they surveyed “tens of thousands” of stakeholders on the reputation of a given company. The report characterizes respondents as “a mix of consumers, business decisionmakers, and opinion leaders.”

• Next, they sifted through “terabytes” of mentions in news and social media.

• Finally, they modeled the “tangible financial outcomes,” which isolated “the portion of stock movement that cannot be explained by broad market trends – what is known as the “unexpected return.”

The study then took the results and classified companies into three relational segments: cultivation, stagnation and deterioration. Those that ranked higher for reputation outperformed those that did not.

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The 8 factors affecting reputation

Replicating a study like this for your own employer or clients would be cost-prohibitive. However, the Burson study breaks the factors that comprise reputation into eight factors you can look at.

Those eight factors of reputation – further broken out into two categories, performance and foundation:

• Foundation factors are leadership, governance, workplace and citizenship; and

• Performance factors are products, innovation, financial and creativity.

These are all factors you can evaluate in your own organization. Some of these factors may already have data to evaluate. For example, HR likely already has data on how the workforce perceives the business’s reputation.

In other cases, the current state of a factor may be obvious. For example, you know if your company is innovative or milking an old subscription product.

Financial analysts pay close attention to reputation

You could argue that just because value isn’t directly attributable to a tangible action doesn’t necessarily mean it’s tied to reputation. On the other hand, the value of a brand already has a spot on the balance sheet called “goodwill.”

That line on the ledger tends to get a lot of attention during acquisitions, where the price paid for a company exceeds its market capitalization.

The value of a reputation has never been a soft metric in financial circles. For example, in 2023, a survey of 200 financial analysts put “brand” as the top appraisal factor in valuing companies.

The Burson study is aligned with this perspective. Acting on it is simply a function of willpower. As the study says:

“This demonstrates that a high reputation score stems from prioritizing it. Leaders strive for excellence in every part of the company, not just the parts where they are comfortable.”

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Image credits: Gemini and respective study