What Stakeholders Are Telling Us in 2026

Reputation research has a reputation problem. Too much of it looks backward, measuring sentiment that's already calcified into conventional wisdom. What communicators need is data that tells them where trust is built, what moves it, and what to do next.

That's what our inaugural Stakeholder Intelligence Report was designed to deliver: not just a snapshot of how business is perceived, but a map of the attributes that drive trust and the levers communicators can pull. Here are three key insights from the report.

Corporate brand is the hidden engine of stakeholder trust

Reputation gets you in the room; brand keeps you there. That’s the conclusion of our analysis of 11 attributes we track and their proportional impact on Trust & Like Scores, our chief metric of corporate reputation.

Globally, brand attributes dominate: Differentiation, Authenticity, Inspiration, and Relevance take 4 of the top 5 spots. "Offering compelling products and services" ranks 3rd: important, but essentially table stakes. In other words, once a company clears this credibility bar, the attributes that create real competitive distance are attitudinal.

In 2026, the most impactful investments will be those geared towards making your company appear interesting, authentic, and relatable, with compelling products or services — one that does what it says and that stands out from its rivals.

In the US, products — and ethics — open doors

The picture is more nuanced at the market level. In France, "being relatable" is the leading driver of trust; in the Netherlands, it's being interesting; in Denmark, authenticity.

Offering takes top spot in the US: products and services matter more to American stakeholders than their European counterparts. But ranking 2nd through 5th are the same four brand attributes that dominate elsewhere, meaning the strategic imperative is the same: clear the credibility bar on products, then win on brand.

A parallel driver analysis — focused on employer attractiveness rather than overall trust — surfaces another distinctly American finding. While Inspiration and Relevance take the top two spots, Governance ranks third: job seekers in the US weigh ethical conduct more heavily than differentiation, authenticity, or a company's impact on people and planet. This pattern holds in Japan, where Governance also ranks fourth among employer attractiveness drivers — but in Brazil it falls to tenth; in China, eleventh.

In other words, in the US specifically, a market shaped by high-profile corporate controversies and growing employee activism, companies with genuinely strong ethical records have an asset that speaks directly to what talent evaluates when choosing where to work.

Familiarity breeds contentment

One of the most actionable findings in our report concerns the relationship between familiarity and trust. Our hypothesis was intuitive — the more familiar someone is with a company, on a 7-point scale, the higher its Trust & Like Score — and the data confirmed it.

For a Fortune 30 company, converting a stakeholder from being "somewhat familiar" to "very familiar" would increase its Trust & Like Score by 32 points. More practically, moving each tier of stakeholders up just one level would create a 6-point rise — from 68 to 74.

This isn’t a marginal effect. Companies that invest in sustained, meaningful engagement — rather than episodic campaign bursts — build a compounding trust advantage that lower-familiarity peers cannot easily close.

Old principles, new data

Taken together, these insights mirror three Page principles with precision: Listen to stakeholders to understand what they want and how they're likely to behave. Manage for tomorrow by building a brand that earns trust and loyalty before you need it. And prove it with action: because sustained engagement builds the kind of familiarity that compounds into trust no campaign can manufacture.

For the full story, read the complete report here.