Trust Is An Issue For Brands
I don’t put much stock in the annual 100 Best Global Brands report from BusinessWeek for two reasons: the valuations by Interbrand never seem to have any relevance and the list is too U.S. centric to truly be called a global brand ranking.
Nevertheless, there is one interesting and pertinent point made in the BusinessWeek article accompanying this annual listing. This concerns the element of trust, or what the article’s two writers refer to as “the most perishable of assets.”
According to the article, recent polling (in the USA) shows that distrust amongst consumers for business as a whole is growing. Citing a phone survey by public relations firm Edelman, only 44% of Americans say they trusted business, a significant decline from the 58% level recorded two years ago.
This point got me to dust off a posting from The Reputation Garage Blog from October 2008 that I had filed.
In that post, a reprint from an article that appeared in HR Leaders magazine, trust is called “one of the defining issues of the emerging century.”
Public trust in big business, governments, and even non-profit organizations has been declining throughout the 21st century. Here are some “fun” statistics that I gleaned from The Reputation Garage Blog:
* As few as 13% of all Americans place their trust in big business (and it’s not much higher for other mature consumer societies!).
* Only 39% of employees in a Watson Wyatt survey said they trusted senior leadership.
* Some three-quarters of US consumers feel that companies don’t tell the truth in advertising.
* Three-quarters of employees in big companies observed violations of the law or company standards in a 12-month period.
As economies start to rebound, marketers and organizational leaders have an important task in front of them: re-establishing their torn and tattered brands and re-building trust with all constituencies.
Failure to do so is not an option. Unless you want the tombstone for your organization’s brand to read “died of trust-related causes.”
Tags: articles on branding, Brand Reputation, Brand Trust, Branding, Business Trust, corporate branding, corporate branding strategies, Corporate Image, global brands, Marketing, Steven Howard
Branding, Corporate Image, Marketing | Steven Howard | 
November 11, 2009 10:18 pm
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