The Post Office and Fujitsu among the UK’s most improved brands – but is the Mr. Bates effect still lingering?

YouGov’s annual Best Brand Rankings track changes in Index score (an average of several metrics that paints a picture of overall brand health) over a calendar year. While our main rankings highlight the best of the best, we also follow the top improvers: those which have risen up the table. This could be due to a particularly resonant ad campaign, brand refresh, product launch, or a recovery from a bout of adverse publicity.

This year’s list of most improved brands has ample representation from the latter category; in fact, they make up our top three brands. The first and third-ranked brands – Post Office and Fujitsu – tell a story about the Horizon scandal, in which both organisations were implicated in the wrongful convictions of more than 900 subpostmasters.

The Post Office’s score of 13.4 represents an improvement of 8.9 points on its previous score of 4.5, which was an improvement on the lows of the year before.

While the Horizon scandal has been reported on for more than ten years, YouGov BrandIndex shows that the turning point for the institution’s public image was the broadcast of ITV’s Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office in January 2024. Between 1 January 2024 (the airdate of the first episode) and 5 February 2024, the Post Office’s Index scores fell from 22.6 to a low of -10.8: a drop of -33.4 points. Its recent improvements still leave it 9.6 points away from its pre-Bates heights (22.6) and some 30.9 points away from its five-year high of 44.6 (30 Apr 2020).

Fujitsu, whose Horizon accounting system was central to the story, is getting closer to normalcy despite a smaller overall improvement Its 2026 score of 2.9 is a +3.9 improvement on its 2025 score of -1.0, which means the brand is now back in positive territory. When Bates aired, the Japanese tech giant’s UK scores were at 6.7, plummeting to a low of -16.0 by 7 February 2024.

The presence of both brands in our top improvers list may say something about the salience of the Horizon story to the public, the impact of their respective efforts to counteract the negative fallout of the scandal, or some combination thereof.

Still, the Post Office’s recent improvements leave it 9.6 points away from its pre-Bates heights (22.6) and some 30.9 points away from its five-year high of 44.6 (30 Apr 2020). Fujitsu’s recovery still leaves it a few points shy of where it was before the ITV drama was broadcast (6.7); its brand image plunged to a lower ebb with UK consumers than the Post Office, but its climb back to public esteem may be easier (partially, perhaps, because it fell from a lower height). In any case, if both brands are on the mend, they are yet to reach their full strength.

BrandIndex methodology: YouGov BrandIndex collects data on thousands of brands every day. Index score is an average of Impression, Value, Quality, Satisfaction, and Recommend scores. Index score is reported as net scores from –100 to +100, based on daily surveys of U.K. adults.