By Justin Pincus, Managing Director of HarrisQuest

Ask LGBTQ+ adults for the coolest brands in America and you get the same names gen pop picks: Liquid Death, Poppi, Owala, Oura. On cool, there's a national consensus. Trust is where it comes apart.‍

Which brands are coolest according to LGBTQ+ adults?

The HarrisQuest Cool Index, where 100 is an average brand. LGBTQ+ adults familiar with each brand, December 2025 through May 2026.

What makes a brand cool?

Look at the top of the list and one thing jumps out: most of these brands are new. Cool clearly favors the recently arrived. But newness alone does not explain it. A few decades-old names hold their place up there too, and most young brands never come close.

Motion beats heritage every time

"Cool runs toward whatever still feels like it is becoming." - Justin Pincus, Managing Director of HarrisQuest

We never ask people whether a brand is cool. We infer it: a brand climbs when people call it hip, bold, innovative, on the way up. And it falls when they call it corporate or old-fashioned. But one quality is consistent for those at the top of the list, and it is motion.

Heritage, scale, and a big marketing budget all sit further down the list of what matters. Apple has all three and sits near the floor. Cool runs toward whatever still feels like it is becoming.

What Vans is missing

"Hip only gets a brand halfway. Cool needs motion too."  - Justin Pincus, Managing Director of HarrisQuest

The proof sits with a brand that missed the cut. Among the names this audience knows well, the shoe and apparel brand Vans reads as one of the hippest of all, hipper than the beverages and the luxury labels at the top of the list. And it doesn't place anywhere near them. What it lacks is motion: far fewer people see Vans as a brand on the way up than see the leaders that way. Hip only gets a brand halfway. Cool needs motion too, and the names at the top of the list have both.

Liquid Death turned water into counterculture

Liquid Death shows it most plainly. It took the most boring product on the shelf, canned water, and turned it into a counterculture object: heavy-metal branding, deadpan horror humor, an aluminum can sold as a stand against plastic, and a refusal to apologize to anyone. It is also a can people want to be seen with, a non-alcoholic option that still looks the part at a bar or a festival. None of that can be rented. It has to be built, and Liquid Death built it.
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Cool looks the same across the country

And the agreement is tight. We ran the identical ranking for the general public, and the two lists line up almost perfectly, a correlation of 0.90. The same challenger beverages crown both, driven by the same sense of motion. A couple of brands break the pattern – this audience rates Prada cooler, the general public rates Apple cooler – but the order barely moves. Cool is built on momentum, and momentum looks the same from almost every seat in the country.

Where the agreement ends

So if the cool list is everyone's list, where does this audience break from it? The break comes on trust, not cool. The cultural pull the list measures, this audience shares almost exactly. Trust is where it parts company.

Some of that separation is age before it is anything else. LGBTQ+ adults skew young, and trust is the one metric where the generations have stopped agreeing.

Mayo Clinic: an 85 with Boomers, a 63 with Gen Z

Mayo Clinic, one of the most trusted names in American healthcare, scores 85 with Boomers and 63 with Gen Z, the widest generational gap of any brand HarrisQuest measures. A young-skewing audience carries some of that in with it. The rest, the part that belongs to this audience and no one else, runs on identity.

Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A: sixteen points apart

"Loyalty here runs deeper than backlash."  - Justin Pincus, Managing Director of HarrisQuest

There is one place this audience refuses to follow the generational script, and it is the set of brands the community has taken a side on. There, trust stops tracking age and starts tracking what a brand has stood for. Watch it play out at the fast-food counter. Set against the country as a whole, LGBTQ+ adults trust Taco Bell markedly more and Chick-fil-A markedly less – two counter-service chains separated by sixteen points of trust – and the distance between them is everything each has come to represent. The surprise is how mild the punishment runs: even Chick-fil-A lands only five points down, a real but shallow penalty. Loyalty here runs deeper than backlash.

Taco Bell is the one worth sitting with, because its lift is the kind the data can actually explain. Age works against the lift, in fact: in the general public, Gen Z trusts Taco Bell less than any older generation, so an audience this young should trust it less. Instead, everything rises at once, and it shows up in behavior as much as opinion: this audience eats there more, and recommends it more, than the general public does. That is affinity, a brand this audience genuinely likes and reaches for.

What years of showing up earned Taco Bell
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That affinity did not appear from nowhere. Taco Bell has spent years showing up for this audience in ways most brands reserve for one June campaign. Its employee group, Live Más Pride, launched a Drag Brunch tour that ran in cities across the country year after year, each show raising money for the ‘It Gets Better Project’.  

"A rainbow logo in June buys none of it."  - Justin Pincus, Managing Director of HarrisQuest

Set that history beside the numbers and one thing still holds: after all of it, the brand does not read as more socially conscious to the people it courted. What the years earned instead was a place in the routine, the visits and the recommendations and the warmth a community gives something it has claimed as its own.  

"The brands a community keeps are the ones that kept showing up."  - Justin Pincus, Managing Director of HarrisQuest

Taco Bell is one of several. Dove built the same equity over two decades of body-positive work, season after season. The brands a community keeps are the ones that kept showing up, and a rainbow logo in June buys none of it.

Planned Parenthood, the WNBA, and the position premium

The other lifts point the same way, with thinner proof underneath. Planned Parenthood draws one of the steepest trust premiums this audience grants any brand, and the WNBA and Ben & Jerry's rise with it. The numbers cannot say why. But the pattern is hard to read any other way: each is a brand defined by a position, and this audience is rewarding the position.  

Meta runs the opposite direction. Generation sets the order of trust for this audience. Identity rewrites it on the brands that have chosen a side.

The exposure gap belongs to everyone
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There is one more gap a cool ranking misses, and this one cuts the same way for everyone. Look again at the leaderboard: ChatGPT sits sixth, the most relevant brand this audience knows. But relevance stops short of belief. Among LGBTQ+ adults, ChatGPT's trust runs more than twenty points below its relevance, and OpenAI and Google Gemini show the same inversion. The challenger beverages carry trust that matches their relevance almost exactly. It is what HarrisQuest calls an exposure gap: cultural presence arriving well ahead of institutional credibility. The brands America most treats as the future are the ones it trusts least, and that gap belongs to everyone.

Cool tells you motion. Trust tells you the floor

"A cool ranking tells you a brand has motion. A trust reading tells you whether anything solid sits beneath it."  - Justin Pincus, Managing Director of HarrisQuest

That is the finding the cool list sits on top of. A brand's pulse, the cultural energy that lands it on a list like this one, is shared across nearly everyone. The floor underneath varies. Reputation is the floor, brand equity rides on top, and the same floor can bear completely different weight depending on who is standing on it and what the brand has stood for.  

A cool ranking tells you a brand has motion. A trust reading tells you whether anything solid sits beneath it. The brands that hold the next decade will have both.

Want to find out where your brand sits in the HarrisQuest Cool Index? Request a demo.

HarrisQuest is The Harris Poll's brand and reputation intelligence platform, measuring how the public sees about 1,600 brands every day.

Justin Pincus is the Managing Director of HarrisQuest.

Source: HarrisQuest. Cool ranking: QuestBrand imagery, LGBTQ+ and US adults familiar with each brand, at least 200 per brand, December 2025 through May 2026; the Cool Index sets 100 as an average brand. Trust and relevance: QuestRQ, familiar respondents, with LGBTQ+ figures centered against the general population to remove the audience's baseline grading difference, so a positive number reflects identity rather than overall skew. Reputation by generation: QuestRQ, US National, Q1 2026.