For decades, Disney has meant magic, family, trust. That's the story it tells. But the data tells a different one.

Disney ranks 43rd out of 100 brands on QRQ – HarrisQuest's 0–100 reputation score. Hulu, the streaming brand Disney bought rather than built, ranks 32nd.

Hulu is now the strongest Disney-owned brand in the field. And Disney didn't build it, it bought it.

The data: Hulu beats the brand that built it

The top of the reputation ranking is dominated by tech infrastructure and trust-anchored brands: Google and Apple share the top spot at 76.2, followed by LEGO and Costco at 75.3, then Netflix at 73.4.

Disney's own portfolio tells a more complicated story further down the list:

• Hulu, rank 32, QRQ 70.2 – the strongest Disney brand, and two points ahead of Disney corporate.
• Disney, rank 43, QRQ 68.2 – the brand Disney built, outranked by the brand it bought.
• ESPN, rank 46, QRQ 67.9 – sits below the NFL, skewing affluent Millennial rather than mass-market sports.
• Disney+, rank 48, QRQ 67.7 – the most parent-dependent brand in the field; strip Disney's lift and it ranks 64th.

Every one of those numbers comes from the same 100-brand QuestRQ field, fielded November 2025 to April 2026 among familiar A18+ respondents.

How an acquired brand can outrank its parent

Reputation isn't inherited automatically. A parent company's name carries decades of history, and not all of that history is reputation you'd choose to pass down.

Hulu isn't necessarily the better business. Its reputation just carries a narrower job – be a decent place to watch television. Disney corporate carries everything: theme parks, labor stories, box office cycles, shareholder headlines.

That narrower scope is easier to protect.

Why Disney is losing the room to lead

Trust explains part of the gap. Relevance explains more of it.

Relevance is a separate QuestRQ dimension. It measures how much a brand shapes today's cultural conversation – what people follow, share, and talk about right now, not what they remember fondly.

Disney scores 66.1 on Relevance. That puts the brand 26th out of 100 – eleven places below the cutoff for the top tier.

The top 15 on Relevance are almost entirely companies that own the platforms where culture happens: Amazon, ChatGPT, Apple, Google, YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Instagram, the NFL, Samsung, and Microsoft all rank above Disney. So does Disney's own subscriber base's next-favourite app.

That's the pattern underneath the QRQ gap. Trust is a lagging indicator – it reflects what a brand has already earned. Relevance is a leading one. It tells you whether a brand is still part of the conversation people are having today, not the one they had ten years ago.

Disney has trust. What it doesn't have is the room that trust needs to keep growing. A brand can't build new relevance from old goodwill alone – and every year Disney sits outside the top tier on Relevance, competitors that do sit there get first claim on the next generation's attention.

What this means for portfolio brands

If you manage a house of brands, this is worth sitting with. The parent name doesn't automatically lift every brand underneath it, and it can just as easily hold one back.

A sub-brand with a tighter, more defined promise can outperform the umbrella brand it sits under. That's not a weakness in the parent. It's a sign the sub-brand has room the parent doesn't.

The next question worth asking is why a gap like this opens up. For Disney, the Relevance data points to an answer: the corporate brand isn't shaping today's conversation the way the platforms it competes with for attention are – including some of the platforms its own audience uses instead of Disney's.

See the full 100-brand ranking

The Disney and Hulu numbers here are a small slice of a much larger field. Get in touch to find out where your brand sits against the same 100-brand benchmark.

About the research

QRQ data comes from QuestRQ, the reputation tracking module of HarrisQuest, built on 28 years of Reputation Quotient research from The Harris Poll. Scores reflect a 100-brand field measured November 2025 to April 2026, among A18+ respondents who report familiarity with the brand, weighted to national census targets and screened for fraud before entering the dataset.

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