Dublin ranked 20th most reputable city

Dublin has been ranked the 20th most reputable city in the world by City RepTrak 2013, a significant improvement on last year’s 30th place ranking.

Dublin ranked marginally ahead of cities such as New York (21st), Paris (22nd), Barcelona (23rd) and Rome (25th).

The results of the study, announced today by Corporate Reputations and the Reputations Institute, revealed that Sydney has emerged as the city with the best reputation. The other cities ranked in the top five were Toronto, Stockholm, Vienna and Venice.

22,000 respondents from across the G8 countries took part in the research – undertaken earlier this year – which forms the basis of the annual study measuring public perceptions of 100 cities. RepTrak studies delve deep into the emotional bond between stakeholders and destinations by quantifying the degree to which people Trust, Admire, Respect and have an Affinity for a city or country.

Underlying a city’s score are three dimensions: Advanced economy, appealing environment and effective administration – the key drivers of a city’s reputation and stakeholder support – as well as the perceptions across 13 different attributes relating to business environment, infrastructure, schools, safety, beauty and emotional appeal. The capital showed particular improvement in the advanced economy scoring which focuses on, amongst other things: well respected products and services; financial stability; business environment; technology; and headquarters of leading companies.

London saw an improvement in its ranking from 13th to making a top ten entry at 9th position following its successful running of the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics, which would have been factors in the improved city ranking. Edinburgh also scored highly with a City RepTrak score of 74.44 placing the Scottish city 7th.

Key findings of the City RepTrak 2012 include:

• Dublin came 20th, with a score of 72.62 out of 100 (2012: 66.95)
• Dublin’s improvement to 20th position means that a further improvement of 1.75 points would lead to a top 10 placing based on this year’s results. Last year Dublin required a four point improvement to bridge this gap.
• Cairo, Nairobi and Karachi are among those in the bottom five positions with Tehran and Baghdad remaining rooted to the end of the league table ranked 99th and 100th respectively.

The City RepTrak study follows the recent Country RepTrak 2013 findings which placed Ireland as the 12th most reputable country in the world, improving from 15th place in 2012.

Commenting on the results, Niamh Boyle, managing director, Corporate Reputations said: “Cities are major drivers of economic activity and the success of Dublin, as a capital city, is crucial for Ireland’s overall economy. Therefore, having a strong reputation for a city is critical as it helps with attracting FDI, tourism and foreign knowledge and talent and with exporting our products and  services – all of which further drive economic activity. It’s encouraging that Dublin has improved its ranking but we must do more to improve our reputation. As our capital city, Dublin is the engine of the Irish economy accounting for four out of every ten jobs, almost half of all goods and services produced and nearly half of Ireland’s tax revenue.”

The publication of the City RepTrak rankings comes ahead of next Thursday’s (October 24th) launch of the Ireland RepTrak 2014 study to be conducted in January and February 2014. The Ireland RepTrak study measures the reputations of the top 100 companies in Ireland. The company with the best reputation in Ireland 2013 was BMW.