10 Brands With Huge Credibility Issues In 2013

2st Century21st Century's parent company, AIG, needs to clean up its tarnished image this year, which will be no small feat.It's no secret that brands like Coca-Cola, Apple, and Google had a great 2012 and are poised for an even greater 2013. Not all companies are held in such high regard going into the new year, though.

We talked to CoreBrand, which measures the familiarity and favorability of 1,000 corporate brands across 54 industries in the U.S., to see which companies will have an especially tough year.

CoreBrand conducts 10,000 phone surveys of business leaders every year, asking them about corporate reputations based on favorability, overall reputation, perception of management, and investment potential. It then assigns them a score out of 100 and combines the scores for measured familiarity and favorability.

Some companies it flagged for credibility issues, like insurance giant AIG, did not surprise us. But a few other companies hadn't initially crossed our minds as candidates.

Jim Gregory, founder and CEO of CoreBrand, laid out the 10 brands he and his company see as the ones who will face the most credibility issues in 2013, and the reasons why each of them will have a challenging year. He declined to call them "troubled," but given the marketing challenges they face, we're confident that each of them has their fair share of obstacles ahead of them this year.

The companies are ranked according to the BrandPower ranking CoreBrand has calculated for the brands. BrandPower measures size (familiarity) and quality (favorability). Familiarity is a weighted percentage of survey respondents who know more about a brand than just the company's name. Those familiar with a corporation are then asked about the brand's favorability dimensions.