Swipe a credit card at a Bridgestone retail store, and you might be requested to donate money to Boys and Girls Clubs of America, to which the company has donated over 30 million dollars and bought 96 new vans.
Install the My Firestone/Tires Plus app (Bridgestone Americas controls both brands), and the company will plant a tree in the Mississippi River Delta in its collaboration with the Nature Conservancy, among 85,000 others it has already planted.
These attempts are due to the first days of the company that were 100 years ago, when the Vagabonds took annual camping trips, a group of friends who included Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and naturalist John Burroughs. They helped influence the company in its beliefs in travel and recreation, which has stayed, as it is good business according to the executives.
It also contributed to making Bridgestone move to the 20th position on the fourth-annual Forbes list of the Best Brands based on Social Impact. The data insights company, HundredX, which collaborated with Forbes on the list, has surveyed over 205,000 customers to obtain their views regarding the values, social positions, sustainability, and community help of brands. Respondents gave 4.5 million ratings on 5500 brands. The top 300 made the list.
Topping the list are grocery chain H-E-B, REI and Subaru (who retained their No. 1, 2 and 3 positions respectively), but there are also constant improvers (Costco, at No. 4, was No. 13 last year, and USAA, the USAA has dropped to No. 5) and those who jumped up the list (Bridgestone, at No. 91, was No. 91 last year).
Marketing campaigns that educated customers about the effort of Bridgestone, as well as its improved attitude toward the reliability and durability of its tyres, started in 2024 and began to drastically raise its place on the list. The mere fact that the company celebrated 10 years of its collaboration with the Nature Conservancy alone generated 550 million views through social and traditional media last June; incorporating the tree incentive into the app resulted in a 5.9 per cent growth in downloads between 2024 and 2025.
Bridgestone Americas Chief Marketing Officer Sara Correa, who is on the board of the United Way of Greater Nashville (another Bridgestone partner), states that “what is good in business is what is good in society,” and has founded the Department of Corporate Philanthropy and Social Impact in the company. “Our retail clients are voting with their fingers, whether they round off at the cashier or use an application, that this is important to them.”
According to Rob Pace, HundredX CEO, social impact is equal to real revenue.
Pace reports that “when a brand cuts through on this subject matter, a customer is 10 per cent more likely to report that he/she is going to purchase more of them in future. Quite the contrary, when they name them out as, I don’t like their social impact, it will hit 30 per cent. The delta is a 40 per cent spread, therefore, and that is always one of the largest predictors that we can observe in a thousand variables.”
One of the most beneficial steps that the brands can take is investing in educating the customers on the social impact efforts, according to Pace.
He says that “there remains so much space in which brands can differentiate. Someone only discusses this subject with us three times in 10; thus, seven times out of 10, the brand is not penetrating at this level. It’s such a big opportunity.”
Discussion with customers about social impact initiatives served to send Bridgestone flying up the ranking. It may be even more difficult to make it to the top 10, which Disney Cruise Line (14th in 2015, 7th in 2016) can testify to. Its products appealed to the HundredX customers, who hailed it because of its safe and entertaining experiences, which form a community, especially among the youngsters.
One of the happy moms told us that she had booked another cruise before she even got off the ship and that she was planning to do the same when they arrived at their next cruise. The children’s club is excellent, as well as the security!
The Disney Cruise Line gained a higher position mainly due to the fact that, in the opinion of customers, the company was doing well in terms of sustainability, according to HundredX data. DCL claims that its new Wish-class vessels (large ships that feature character-based activities) produce 20 per cent less emissions and consume close to 1,800 gallons of liquefied natural gas fuel per ship annually. Every vessel recycles 400 tons of material and produces all the freshwater it uses on board, also purifying its own wastewater.
The ships evaporate air conditioning condensation, which is partly powered by excess heat from the ships’ engines, to supply water to their laundries, saving each ship 10 million gallons of water per year. And the company has almost gone single-use plastic on board and at the vacation destinations it owns.
Beth Thibodaux, the Director of External Affairs at Disney Signature Experiences, such as the Disney Cruise Line, argues that at Disney, a corporate emphasis on three fronts, namely, happiness, nature and youth, proves profitable.
“We are such a big company, and we can be dragged in all directions,” she says. “However, in the real sense, something leaning towards those is very well with our port communities in the world. We were attempting to be very conscious of serving those port communities that we are calling home. It is not simply about our ship coming, and we work.”
Disney ports in the Bahamas were the models of other programs in Alaska, San Diego, Galveston and Florida, as Thibodault puts it. According to Joseph Gaskins, the regional public affairs director of DCL in the Bahamas and the Caribbean, the company was
concerned with environmental activities and promoting the true local culture in the area, both locally through local events and globally through a program with Junior Achievement.
In the Bahamas, as an example, DCL takes part in the annual community carnivals of Junkanoo on Boxing Day and New Year’s morning, spending its Imagineers with the young members of the community who are developing costumes and performances.
“Children make costumes, they do make-up, and they choreograph dances. At the heart of it is a parade. And who doesn’t like Disney parades?” Gaskins asks. “That is where the exchange of cultures comes in. These youths are teaching our imagineers the history and the culture of the Bahamas.”
Methodology
Best Brands for Social Impact was developed in collaboration with the customer-insights firm HundredX based on an extensive online survey, executed between January 2025 and December 2025, where the firm had to survey over 200,000 consumers rating brands and products across 12 different categories, such as quality, value, customer service and so on.
This social impact list had four categories, namely overall brand values and trust, social stances, sustainability and community support. The total number of ratings obtained during the survey amounted to over 4.5 million, and almost 5,500 different brands were reviewed. The top 300 brands made the list.
Brands that were used and desired to be reviewed were freely nominated by the respondents and, as such, were those that they had genuine feelings towards. Only U.S.-based (like Ford) or those that conduct significant business in the U.S. (like LEGO) brands were qualified.
