A company's reputation can make or break it. No matter how good the product, a poor perception of the brand can negatively impact it. Sony, for example, is still recovering from its numerous blunders, such as installing rootkits on Windows machines and having its PlayStation network hacked. The company was not particularly open about both situations at first, leading many people -- myself included -- to be hesitant to trust it.

Samsung, however, seems to be the darling of the tech sector lately. Its smartphones and tablets are wildly popular, despite pundits constantly looking for it to fail. Guess what? According to a new study, the company is more reputable than Google, Microsoft and Apple. The study looked at "social responsibility, innovation, product and services excellence, and creating a great workplace environment".

"The Reputation Institute's RepTrak model is the gold standard for reputation measurement, providing a one-of-a-kind measurement of how the public views the world's best-known companies. The study examines perceptions of companies by the US general public based on over 50,000 interviews. The RepTrak database is normative, examining 15 stakeholder groups in more than 25 industries and more than 50 countries for more than 7,000 companies", says Samsung.

Brad Hecht, chief research officer at Reputation Institute explains, "technology companies with strong reputations recognize that their reputations are dependent on more than just the products and services they provide. The second most important driver of reputation in the technology industry is governance, or whether a company is responsibly run, fair and transparent".

Believe it or not, Apple ranks number 21. This was initially very surprising to me, as Apple fans seem to blindly trust the company. With that said, the majority of consumers do not select its products -- Android trumps iOS in smartphone market share, while Windows beats OS X on the desktop. Maybe the Tim Cook-led company should focus on its reputation as a way to increase market share.

Rounding out 11-25 are the following companies.

11 salesforce.com 73.02

12 Xerox 72.87

13 Dell 72.69

14 Siemens 72.23

15 Cisco Systems 72.21

16 Vmware 71.88

17 Seagate Technology 71.84

18 Intuit 71.81

19 Oracle 71.81

20 IBM 71.62

21 Apple 71.51

22 Lenovo Group 70.37

23 LG Corporation 70.20

24 Polycom 70.04

25 Avaya 69.82

Do you agree with the list? Tell me in the comments.

Photo credit: Anton Watman / Shutterstock.com