National Grid

National Grid matters to people who need the power network to keep moving, not to customers choosing a phone plan or a shopping app. By our assessment, its real value is in running and maintaining the electricity and gas grids, the unglamorous infrastructure that has to work all the time and is usually noticed only when it fails. The downside is that this kind of company is remote and heavily regulated, so it does not feel like a consumer brand at all. National Grid is the kind of utility that sits behind the wall sockets and pipelines, where reliability matters more than personality.