Brad Barrish

Plenty of companies provide useless, throwaway goods. Others corporate identities are so tainted that you can’t feel good tying your name and dollars to them. But an increasing group of companies is striving—intentionally or not—to focus on improving lives. It’s these companies that rose to the top of Havas Media’s second annual Meaningful Brands Index, which was released today and features Google in first place, followed by Samsung, Microsoft, Nestle, and Sony. And it’s working: And index of Havas’s Meaningful Brands would have outperformed the stock market by 120% last year.