Staples tops corporate reputation survey
This item was supposed to run with Friday’s Marketing Daily PM but was left out due to a technical glitch
Staples Business Depot earned top marks from consumers in the 2008 Marketing/Leger Corporate Reputation Survey, taking the No. 1 spot for the first time.
The office supply retailer, a Canadian subsidiary of U.S.-based Staples, registered an overall reputation score of 83, with 86.2% of survey respondents indicating a favourable opinion of the company and just 3.6% professing a negative opinion.
In claiming top spot, Staples Business Depot-which ranked fourth in the 2007 survey-replaced last year’s winner, Tim Hortons.
Steve Matyas, president of Staples Business Depot, told Marketing there is no single explanation for Staples’ rapid climb up the rankings (it finished 11th two years ago). “Retail is a business of doing a thousand different things right, and it’s a cumulative process of one thing building on top of another.” But he does acknowledge the importance of the well known Easy Button campaign, which launched more than three years ago (first in the U.S. and then in Canada). “It’s nothing if not a brand icon,” he says.
Sony took second place in the survey, while Tim Hortons earned third. The rest of the top 10 are, in order, Canadian Tire, Panasonic, Shoppers Drug Mart, Subway, Kraft, Honda and Toyota (the two automakers each scored 75).
Shoppers and Honda are new entrants to the top 10. Honda moved up from 13th place in the 2007 rankings, while Shoppers charted a 15-place improvement after placing 21st last year.
Honda and Shoppers bumped Sears and HBC: The Bay/Zellers from the top 10, but the department store brands did not fall far. Sears, last year’s sixth-ranked company, is number 11 in 2008, while HBC followed up its eighth-place finish in 2007 by earning the 14th slot.
Bell Canada experienced the most significant drop of any company in the survey, falling to 96th this year from 58th in 2007. The company’s overall reputation score also fell to 12 from 42.
Complete coverage of the 2008 Marketing/Leger Corporate Reputation Survey appears in the May 26 issue of Marketing, out today.
