How Walmart is extending its brand advantage in the U.S. retail landscape

Walmart ranks as the largest company globally by annual revenue. In early 2026, the firm also crossed a market capitalization of roughly $1 trillion for the first time – becoming the first offline-first retail company to hit the mark. But what’s driving Walmart’s commercial success? YouGov BrandIndex data can help us understand the strengths of the brand, especially compared to the wider retail industry in the U.S.

To better capture Walmart’s competitive standing, we benchmark it against a custom reference retail sector. This group includes U.S. retail chains with $30B+ in revenue, a national footprint across 35+ states, at least 20% grocery exposure, and 80%+ Awareness on YouGov BrandIndex. This approach provides a more meaningful comparison than the full retail universe, which also includes specialty retailers like CVS or Home Depot as well as smaller players with low awareness rates. The custom sector is composed of Aldi, Costco, Dollar General, Kroger, and Target.

Tracking Walmart’s performance: Index gains against retail peers

The Index score – which aggregates Impression, Quality, Value, Satisfaction, Recommend and Reputation – shows clear forward momentum for Walmart over the past five years. Five years ago, Walmart’s Index score was in the early-20s. As of February 19, 2026, it stands at 28.6, marking a steady uplift over time.

By contrast, the custom retail sector has seen modest downward movement over the same period and currently sits at 23.7. This means Walmart has turned a deficit into a five-point lead over the industry.

Key insight: Walmart continues to demonstrate strong Value for money scores while narrowing the gap in Quality scores

Value remains Walmart’s clearest strength. Today, it posts a Value score of 39.8, compared with 26.8 for the custom retail sector — a gap of roughly 13 points. Five years ago, that lead was slightly narrower. While both Walmart and the sector have seen movement over time, Walmart’s Value perceptions have remained consistently elevated and have edged up in recent years, allowing it to maintain, and slightly extend, its advantage versus the benchmark.

Quality presents a more complex picture. Walmart’s current Quality score stands at 20.1, just below the custom sector’s 21.2. However, compared with five years ago, Walmart’s Quality score has improved, while the sector has seen more limited growth. As a result, the gap between Walmart and the custom sector on Quality has narrowed over time, even if Walmart has not yet overtaken the benchmark.

Key insight: Rising Satisfaction widens Walmart’s advantage

Satisfaction score, which is a net measure of whether consumers are satisfied customers of a brand or dissatisfied, has also ticked meaningfully higher – from mid-30s five years ago to 42.3.

The custom retail sector, by comparison, has experienced a 1.9-point decline and currently registers 28.0 – handing Walmart another decisive win.

Conclusion

In the retail industry, with its tense competition and slim margins, even just maintaining brand health can be counted as success. But Walmart has been able to steadily grow in key brand performance measures over time, particularly in Index and Satisfaction scores relative to the sector benchmark. This has also reflected in the brand’s Consideration metric – Walmart has risen more than eight points to 63.8 over the past five years, which is especially impressive against the modest 2.4-point uptick to 36.0 for the reference retail sector.

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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.S. adults. Data is weighted using a propensity scoring methodology with targets from the American Community Survey (ACS) to ensure representation by age, gender, race, education, and region. Scores are shown as a 12-week moving average with an average daily sample size of 7,074 U.S. adults for Walmart and 37,953 U.S. adults for the custom sector. The observation period in this analysis is from Feb 20, 2021 to Feb 19, 2026.