Focus Money and the Institute for Management and Economic Research have recognised the high reputation of Stadtwerke Gießen. This is the result of a study in which the two partners analysed 5,000 German companies from all sectors.
How good is the reputation of various companies, which factors are relevant for this and which German companies enjoy a high reputation? These questions were investigated by experts from the Institute for Management and Economic Research (IMWF) in cooperation with Focus Money. A pleasing result of the recently published study for Stadtwerke Gießen (SWG): SWG was ranked fourth in the energy sector, clearly outperforming all industry giants.
What was included in the assessment?
A good reputation is based on many factors. For their study, the researchers identified five criteria that they analysed in more detail: management performance, commitment to sustainability, quality of products and services, economic performance and what the company offers as an employer. Because all of these criteria are interlinked, it is not enough to excel in one area. But of course the individual factors are included with different weightings - commitment to sustainability, for example, with 22 per cent. The criteria of products and services and profitability each account for 21 per cent. The impact of the management and employer factors is slightly lower at 18 per cent each.
In order to obtain sufficient data, the researchers used so-called crawlers. They scoured the internet for relevant entries on the companies and collected information from a total of 438 million online sources - such as news sites, blogs, press releases, forums and social media channels. In the second step, artificial intelligence was used. The computers analysed the texts by breaking them down into fragments and examining them according to three questions: Which company is mentioned, which topic is discussed and what is the tonality of the text fragment? After this analysis, 15.7 million mentions could be assigned to the 5,000 companies. Finally, the algorithms determined how positively or negatively each individual company scored. The result was a score between 0 and 100 points.
Still room for improvement
"The fact that we were able to achieve 88.9 points and thus 4th place makes us a little proud," says Jens Schmidt, Commercial Director of SWG, commenting on the result. After all, it shows that the public's perception of SWG's work is predominantly positive. For Matthias Funk, SWG's Technical Director, however, this great success is no reason to simply carry on as before: "Our aim is to become even better. We are currently working on many different solutions for the energy supply of the future and want to play our part in gradually reducing CO2 emissions in the region." This strategy not only pays off in terms of sustainability, but also brings forward all other criteria that stand for a continued high reputation. "The development, testing and ultimately the use of new technologies in combination with our rock-solid business model make us a top employer that will offer many innovative products and useful services in the coming years," promises Jens Schmidt.