Trust or bust. Where does your brand stand?
Banks may be rated best when it comes to trusted businesses and brands, but what about the rest?
When it comes to sharing personal data online, we all differ in our level of trust, as we discovered in the third part of our series on McCann Worldgroup’s recent study, The Truth About Privacy. But what about who we trust? The global study produced interesting results that are valuable to advertisers when it comes to developing and understanding the relationships between our clients’ brands and their customers. The global study shows that the most trusted companies are within the banking, credit card, medical and pharmaceutical sectors, which all have a sense of responsibility and emotion attached to them. Taking into consideration the fact that consumers are sensitive about their financial information, the results show a strong level of confidence. Sliding lower on the scale of trust are electronic, technology, grocery and automotive insurance brands. Our sense of responsibility and emotion starts to become more detached from these, and in turn, so does the level of trust.
So who is at the lowest end of the scale, falling under “trust them somewhat”? In descending order: clothing, automotive, sports then beauty brands, followed lastly by dating websites, whose level of trust drops dramatically. What these brands have in common is that their products and services aren’t essential for our health, security or financial stability. They are wants rather than needs and, for the most part, luxuries rather than necessities.
“It’s not surprising that financial institutions have as much consumer confidence as they do. They were the first, nearly 30 years ago, to commission an interactive network of electronic transactions that has demonstrated its ability to maintain the security of the information exchanged. Trust has always been and will remain a question of reliability,” says Roch Berniquez, Vice-President, Digital Platforms, at Marketel. The advice given at the end of the study is that if brands want to build and retain their customers’ trust, they need to think like a bank by offering control over what happens to personal data, a choice of what to share and what not to share, commitment to unwavering security and privacy, and compensation in that customers should have a sense of what’s in it for them if they choose to share personal information.
When it comes to sharing personal data online, we all differ in our level of trust, as we discovered in the third part of our series on McCann Worldgroup’s recent study, The Truth About Privacy. But what about who we trust? The global study produced interesting results that are valuable to advertisers when it comes to developing and understanding the relationships between our clients’ brands and their customers. The global study shows that the most trusted companies are within the banking, credit card, medical and pharmaceutical sectors, which all have a sense of responsibility and emotion attached to them. Taking into consideration the fact that consumers are sensitive about their financial information, the results show a strong level of confidence. Sliding lower on the scale of trust are electronic, technology, grocery and automotive insurance brands. Our sense of responsibility and emotion starts to become more detached from these, and in turn, so does the level of trust.
So who is at the lowest end of the scale, falling under “trust them somewhat”? In descending order: clothing, automotive, sports then beauty brands, followed lastly by dating websites, whose level of trust drops dramatically. What these brands have in common is that their products and services aren’t essential for our health, security or financial stability. They are wants rather than needs and, for the most part, luxuries rather than necessities.
“It’s not surprising that financial institutions have as much consumer confidence as they do. They were the first, nearly 30 years ago, to commission an interactive network of electronic transactions that has demonstrated its ability to maintain the security of the information exchanged. Trust has always been and will remain a question of reliability,” says Roch Berniquez, Vice-President, Digital Platforms, at Marketel. The advice given at the end of the study is that if brands want to build and retain their customers’ trust, they need to think like a bank by offering control over what happens to personal data, a choice of what to share and what not to share, commitment to unwavering security and privacy, and compensation in that customers should have a sense of what’s in it for them if they choose to share personal information.
