Every reputation crisis feels urgent from the inside. A regulatory filing lands. A story breaks. Legal loops in comms, comms loops in the CEO's office, sales teams anticipate the worst and everyone reaches for the same instinct: respond fast, respond big.
Yet the damage varies wildly when it comes to the general public. Some crises knock 20 points off a company's reputation score in a single year. Others, just as serious on paper, barely move Main Street.
So what makes the difference? Two questions, mostly. And one risk most brands underrate.
The Harris Poll has measured corporate reputation since 1999. Today, that framework powers the Axios Harris Poll 100, which rates the reputations of the 100 most visible companies in America every year. Since 2015, we've classified every significant decline in the ranking by who feels the event and what kind of event it is. The pattern is consistent enough to plan around.
Two questions decide how hard a crisis lands
1. Who feels it? A crisis is consumer-facing when people experience it in their own lives: a recall, a data breach, an outage, a price hike. It's complex or institutional when it plays out in courtrooms, regulatory filings, and earnings calls, far from anyone's daily routine.
2. What kind of event is it? We track ten categories, from data privacy and product safety to labor practices and political backlash.
Put the two answers together and you get an early read on how far the damage will travel beyond the business press. Think of it as the kitchen-table test. Can an ordinary consumer explain what went wrong? Does it touch their life?
“We've measured corporate reputation for more than 25 years, and the clearest predictor of lasting damage is whether people feel a crisis in their own lives. If your customers can explain what went wrong over dinner, you have a reputation problem. If only your lawyers can, the risk sits with your regulators, investors, and board, and it needs a very different response.” - Wendy Salomon, Head of Reputation, HarrisQuest
Consumer-facing crises do the deepest damage
Take ten of the steepest declines in our data since 2015. Nine were consumer-facing:
- Wells Fargo, down 20.6 points (2016 to 2017): the fake-accounts scandal and CEO resignation
- Volkswagen, down 20.5 points (2015 to 2016): the ‘dieselgate’ emissions-cheating scandal
- Juul, down 17.5 points (2019 to 2020): the teen-vaping backlash and FDA crackdown
- Facebook (Meta), down 16.0 points (2018 to 2019): the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal
- Boeing, down 14.8 points (2019 to 2020): the 737 MAX crashes and worldwide grounding
- Monsanto, down 11.8 points (2018 to 2019): the Roundup cancer verdicts
- Tesla, down 11.2 points (2024 to 2025): political backlash tied to Elon Musk, plus a sales slump
- McDonald's, down 8.7 points (2018 to 2019): harassment complaints and worker strikes against a backdrop of prioritizing healthfulness
- SpaceX, down 7.4 points (2024 to 2025): spillover from the Musk backlash, plus test failures
The tenth was WeWork, down 10.1 points (2019 to 2020) after its failed IPO and valuation collapse. Technically, that's a governance story. But it still passed the kitchen-table test. A celebrity founder and a company unraveling weeks before going public – millions of people followed along.
Institutional scandals barely dent public opinion
Now look at a serious institutional scandal.
In October 2020, Goldman Sachs' Malaysia unit pleaded guilty in the 1MDB sovereign-fund bribery scheme. Goldman paid a record $2.9 billion settlement, amid US hearings and heavy press coverage. Its reputation score fell 3.2 points. By the following wave, it had climbed above pre-plea levels.
The story dominated the business press. It moved public opinion by only a few points. Sovereign-fund bribery is a dense, abstract subject. However serious it is, most people never find a hook that connects it to their own lives.
Wells Fargo shows the other extreme. Its scandal happened inside customers' own bank accounts. A decade later, its score is still 3.7 points below where it stood before the story broke.
The lesson for marketing leaders? Every crisis has more than one audience. Our data tracks the general public. With that audience, consumer-facing crises do the deepest and longest damage. Institutional crises hit other stakeholders instead. They can bring tougher regulatory scrutiny, strained supplier relationships, investor pressure, or harder hiring. Little of that shows up in a public reputation score. Your board will still feel it. So before you commit to a response, map who each crisis really touches. Then size your response for each audience.
The size of a crisis in your boardroom and its size in your customers' minds are two different numbers. Work out which one you're managing before you commit to a response.
Most brands bounce back fast – few get all the way
Our data follows each brand from four years before a crisis to ten years after. Most regain ground within a year or two. Very few return to where they started.
Volkswagen is the only brand in the group back at its pre-crisis peak – 0.3 points above it, a decade after ‘dieselgate’. When forced-labor allegations tied to a plant in Xinjiang surfaced in 2024, its score dipped again. It recovered within two waves.
McDonald's rebounded 7.0 points the year after its workplace crisis registered, helped by visible workplace and community action during the pandemic. It has never closed the remaining gap.
Meta fell 16.0 points after Cambridge Analytica. Seven years on, it's still almost 10 points short of its pre-crisis score.
Boeing had climbed back to within 3.6 points of its pre-crisis peak by year three. Then the 2024 door-plug incident – a second safety failure – wiped out that progress.
The recurrence trap
Boeing's story holds the sharpest lesson for any brand in recovery.
Its second drop (about 10 points) was smaller than its first (almost 15). Yet it has done more lasting harm. After the first crisis, Boeing recovered most of its lost ground in three years. After the second, it has regained only about 2 points.
Why? A repeat confirms what customers already half-suspected. It turns an incident into a pattern. That makes a second, similar failure one of the biggest threats to a full recovery – whatever the size of the first hit.
“The public forgives a mistake far more readily than a pattern. After a first crisis, people are still deciding what kind of company you are. A second, similar failure settles that question for them, and that verdict is very hard to reverse.” - Wendy Salomon, Head of Reputation, HarrisQuest
The steps to take in a crisis
Here's what more than a decade of reputation data suggests you build into your own crisis response.
- Classify before you respond. Ask who will feel this, and what type of event it is, before you size your response. A consumer-facing hit needs a fast answer customers can see. An institutional or overseas story may hit investor confidence or draw regulatory scrutiny instead, and that calls for a more surgical response.
- Close the cause at the source. Volkswagen's 2024 dip reversed within two waves once it removed the problem itself. Defending an issue keeps the story alive.
- Treat a repeat as your biggest risk. After any crisis, audit where the same failure could happen again. As Boeing found, a second similar incident can undo years of recovery and make the road ahead even more challenging.
- Track reputation between crises. A score you check once a quarter tells you what has already happened. By then, the recovery clock is running.
Track your reputation before the next crisis hits
“The companies that recover fastest already know where they stand with each audience before anything goes wrong. That lets them see which relationships a crisis is really touching. Then they can fix the cause rather than manage the coverage.” - Wendy Salomon, Head of Reputation, HarrisQuest
Most teams look closely at reputation only after something breaks. By then, they're measuring damage they could have spotted earlier.
Trust, Ethics, and the other dimensions of reputation shift for real reasons, and sometimes fast. HarrisQuest's QuestRQ tracks all six dimensions on the same panel as your brand health metrics, refreshed daily.
See how QuestRQ tracks your reputation every day – and find out how your brand would classify against more than a decade of crisis data, before you need to.
Reputation crisis FAQs
What is the Axios Harris Poll 100? An annual ranking of the reputation of the most visible companies in America, run by The Harris Poll. It uses a framework in place since 1999. First, Americans nominate the companies with the best and worst reputations. Then a second group rates the 100 most visible companies across six dimensions of reputation.
How does The Harris Poll classify a reputation crisis? By two things: who experiences the event (consumer-facing, or complex and institutional) and which of ten crisis categories drove it. Together, they give an early signal of how hard a crisis will hit public perception, as well as the headlines.
Does every reputation crisis cause lasting damage? No. Consumer-facing events that people experience directly tend to cause the deepest declines. Complex or institutional events often move a reputation score by only a few points, even when they dominate the business press for months.
Can a brand fully recover from a reputation crisis? Yes, but it's rare. Of the brands we tracked for up to a decade after a major crisis, only Volkswagen returned to its pre-crisis peak. A second, similar incident is one of the biggest barriers to a full recovery.
How can marketing leaders track reputation before a crisis hits? Reputation moves on a different timeline from the news cycle, so it needs watching all the time. HarrisQuest's QuestRQ tracks Trust, Ethics, Quality, Vision, Relevance, and Workplace Culture on the same panel as brand health metrics, refreshed daily.
About the research
The Axios Harris Poll 100 is The Harris Poll's annual study of corporate reputation, using the Reputation Quotient (RQ®) framework in place since 1999. The 2026 wave interviewed 18,523 Americans between Feb. 13 and March 3, 2026, with a minimum of 325 responses per company. Crisis classifications, declines, and recovery trends in this article draw on the 2015–2026 waves.
