People love Wegmans.
The Rochester, New York-based grocer has unseated Amazon as the firm with the best corporate reputation among a list of 100 highly visible companies, according to an annual Nielsen poll released this week.
“To be recognized in this way is just incredible,” Danny Wegman, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “It always starts with our people, who thrill our customers every day and extend a family feeling in our stores across six states.”
In an age where social media anthropomorphizes products -- from toilet paper to body wash -- branding matters. And although Wegmans has only 85 stores, the company has built a cult following online. Fans applaud the supermarket's decent wages, wide selection of prepared foods and reasonable prices.
Amazon ranked second in the Nielsen poll, followed by Samsung, Costco, Johnson & Johnson and Kraft Foods. The company with the worst reputation on the list was Goldman Sachs.
To determine the rankings in the Harris Poll Reputation Quotient study, evaluated annually for the last 16 years, Nielsen conducted an online survey in English of 27,278 U.S. respondents between Oct. 20 and Dec. 18.