Fall From Grace

While brands fall off and new ones come on the RepTrak Global 100 each year, Disney’s reputational collapse is extraordinary.

After reaching number two in 2020, it moved down a few notches to number eight in 2021, hovered in the thirties from 2022 through 2024, then plunged to number 75 in 2025 and fell off entirely in 2026.

Some of its drop reflects the rise of other brands—overall brand reputations are near an all-time high—but much of the damage has been self-inflicted.

Reptrak’s reputation score is based upon surveys conducted by Dynata in 14 major economies, capturing the views of more than 200,000 individuals who are not only aware of the brand but have formed an opinion about it. The resulting score on a 100-point scale reflects three components—Feel, Think and Do—that together measure the overall strength of the company’s reputation.

Feel measures the emotional connection with the brand—people’s level of trust, admiration, esteem and respect. Think is a more rational and objective assessment across seven drivers of corporate reputation that explain why people feel the way they do. Do is the behavioral dimension measuring the actions people are willing to take to engage with and support the company, such as to buy, recommend and give it the benefit of the doubt. The Do factor translates corporate reputation into its commercial value.

In essence, Feel anchors the emotional connection, Think is the rational justification for the feelings and Do is the payoff in business terms. Strong Feel scores translate into strong Do behaviors. Weak Feel scores drag the Do dimension down.

Feel is the critical driver for a brand like Disney, which has long claimed to be both “the happiest” and “most magical” place on earth. Disney’s emotional connection with stakeholders matters more than it does for other brands and based on RepTrak’s data, its emotional connection has eroded.

“Disney still has a strong reputation globally, but it has clearly fallen. It needs to recapture that raw emotional feeling that made Disney great in the first place,” Hahn shared. “It needs to remind people of the childlike joy and innocence and the sense of ‘wishing up a star’ that transports them into the realm of hope and possibility. It’s all still there, but people need to be reminded of it.”

The good news is D’Amaro comes for the parks division where the ultimate magic of Disney comes to life—“He is the chief ‘Mouseketeer,’” Hahn noted. On the other hand, the latest round of marketing layoffs could kneecap the brand’s ability to shape public perception and reignite passion for the brand quickly.

Bringing Products, Services And Leadership Back

Since 2017, Disney’s scores within the seven factors in the Think dimension—Products & Services, Innovation, Workplace, Conduct, Citizenship, Leadership and Performance—have fallen hardest across Products & Services and Leadership, two areas that powered Disney’s historically strong reputation.

Products & Services assesses quality and value, meeting customer needs and whether it stands behind those offerings. Of note: Disney ranks lowest in “good value products and services” in North America, a reflection of the growing perception that Disney has become unaffordable and for many families, unattainable. That perception is weighing on the company’s business flywheel which hinges on the Disney park experiences.

Disney’s product content drives demand for the park’s experiences and powers merchandise sales, creating a virtuous circle during Disney’s glory days or a downward spiral when the perceived value slides. As Forbes senior contributor Caroline Reid explained, “Contrary to popular belief, Disney’s business model is driven by theme parks, not movies,” where the films spark the emotional connection that leads families to book visits to the parks and buy products.

However, Disney is slipping here. U.S. park attendance dropped 1% in 2025 and since 2017, Disney has closed about 100 stores, leaving only 21 free-standing Disney stores in the U.S., with a limited number of Disney shop-in-shops hosted by Target.

Leadership measures the obvious—having a strong and appealing leader—plus the quality of the management ranks and clarity of the company’s future. After the turbulence of Bob Igers’ two-term tenure—interrupted by the widely criticized leadership of Bob Chapek from 2020-2022—it’s no surprise Disney has weakened on this score.

D’Amaro has the opportunity to lift this metric immediately. “Disney has long been known and associated with a strong leader,” Hahn said, pointing to legendary founder Walt Disney and those who followed him. “It’s for Josh D’Amaro to become another legendary leader by bringing in new ideas, new perspectives and sprinkling some of that ‘pixie dust.’”

With 28 years of Disney experience and a track record of continued success, D’Amaro is uniquely qualified to lead the company forward. He understands the emotional core of the brand and what it will take to win back consumers’ passion.

“At its best, Disney creates stories, characters, and experiences that people connect with deeply and carry with them for a lifetime,” he wrote in his first memo to staff. “Great storytelling and creative excellence will remain our North Star.”

Disney Scores Lowest In Workplace And Conduct

However, D’Amaro inherits a deeper internal problem: Disney scores lowest in Reptrak’s Workplace and Conduct dimensions that reflect how a company treats employees and how transparently it behaves.

Workplace measures employee well-being, equal opportunity and rewarding employees fairly. Conduct relates to ethical behavior, fairness and openness.

“Workplace and Conduct are not typically the primary drivers of reputation,” Hahn noted, adding, “But in Disney’s case, given its recent track record, these issues have become amplified and central to rebuilding its reputation.”

Among the Workplace and Conduct issues that have long festered include a widely publicized Economic Roundtable report, conducted by Occidental College among 5,000 Disneyland union employees in 2017, which found Disneyland “cast members”—its park employees—face severe financial hardship.

The report helped support a 2019 class-action lawsuit alleging wage theft under Anaheim’s “Living Wage” law. Initially, the court ruled Disney was exempt from the law, but that was overturned. In September 2025, Disney reached a $233 million settlement, with average payments of $3,000 to some 50,000 current and former employees—an amount the plaintiff’s lead attorney called the largest wage-class action settlement in California history.

Layered on top of that is a pattern of large-scale workforce reductions. Disney cut 28,000+ parks and consumer-products employees in 2020 during the pandemic, followed by a 7,000+ layoff in early 2023. While the latest round of job cuts is smaller by comparison, it still creates a feeling of job insecurity among current employees and a broader negative perception of Disney as an employer.

Hahn advises that this is where D’Amaro has the most control to rebuild Disney’s reputation, using an inside-out strategy, starting with the people who deliver the magic every day.

“If an employee is not in a happy place, it’s hard to transmit that sense of enjoyment to the customers,” he stated. “Disney employees need to feel energized—to feel the happiness first—so they can share it with customers and other shareholders they serve.”

This inside-out strategy is most critical to its reputation in the U.S. where roughly 70% of the company’s 213,000 employees live. While Disney’s global reputation stands at a still strong 72.7 points, it is only in the average range at 60.7 points in the U.S. and dangerously close to falling in the weak range between 40 and 59.

Four-Point Plan For Reputational Recovery

RepTrak’s Hahn, after a decade advising companies on reputation management, outlines a four-part plan for Disney’s reputational recovery:

1. Recreate the magic and restore the “raw emotional connection” to the Disney brand—D’Amaro will get an assist from newly promoted Disney president and chief creative officer Dana Walden, whose creative leadership will be central to reigniting the brand’s emotional core.
2. Recalibrate the value equation—That means addressing the price and affordability issues that have weighed on consumer sentiment and eroded the Disney value proposition.
3. Prioritize employee engagement—“Win back the hearts and minds of people who are part of the Disney family,” he said. This is a critical factor in the inside-out strategy, where renewed cast-member energy and enthusiasm will carry over into the customer experience.
4. Position Josh D’Amaro as an inspiring, beloved leader—“Creating his own personal brand is going to be very important both inside and outside the company across all stakeholders.”

Hahn concludes:

“From the very beginning, Disney was for everybody, not just the elite. Inclusivity is a core value of the brand. Disney needs to remind the world about what made it great in the first place—a place where everyone could wish upon a star. It needs to revive that magic and foster the spirit of possibility and imagination that has always been true to Disney.

“It’s got to recapture that raw emotion—that it lost a little bit along the way—and get back to what made Disney great in the first place. That will reset its reputation going forward.”

Frankly, I’m excited to see how it all plays out. I was part of the original Disney TV- generation in the 1950s, raised my children on Disney and now am enjoying the next generation—my grandchildren—discovering the wonderful Disney stories. Few brands have that kind of generational reach. Now is the time for Disney to draw on its heritage of extraordinary storytelling and strong leadership to rekindle the child-like wonder that still lives in each of us.

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