Trust in Companies, Government, Media Has Dropped: What Do You Do?

It is tougher than ever to maintain a brand's equity these days. Overall levels of consumer trust seem to have dropped, and the velocity of change has increased, mostly because online word of mouth is so prevalent.

"Young & Rubicam’s BrandAsset Valuator indicates that the percentage of brands that consumers deem trustworthy fell from more than 50 percent to 20 percent between 1997 and 2008," says Chris Stutzman, Forrester Research analyst.

In some ways, those numbers are not surprising. A new study by Edelman suggests there has been a dramatic drop in consumer trust levels in government, business and media since 2008 as well.

The study by Edelman of 5,075 people in 23 countries of people 25 to 64 in the top 25 percent of household incomes in each country suggests U.S. citizens and consumers have less trust in their institutions.

Just 27 percent believe "you can trust the media to do what is right," a dip of 11 percentage points from 2010 levels.

About 40 percent of U.S. respondents believe "you can trust the government to do what is right," down six percent from 2010.

Only 46 percent believe "you can trust business to do what is right," a drop of eight percentage points from 2010. See this.

Given that climate, it is not surprising that brands overall face more skepticism. But one problem these days is that market share numbers do not entirely reflect brand respect or brand trust, in the short term.

Nor do "brand awareness" measures help as much as they might. Consumers might be aware of brands, and have negative opinions. The new challenge for brands is that news travels faster these days. It is tweeted, blogged and posted in real time, all day long.

In the past, it might have been sufficient to measure trial volumes, purchase volumes, repeat purchase behavior, referral volune or churn. In the past, it might have been useful to rly on "perception" measures such as interest, relevance, reputation, quality or value metrics, satisfaction scores or awareness.

These days, brands also have to contend with a tidal wave of ratings and reviews, formal and informal, generated across a huge range of channels, all day long, across huge and growing numbes of web channels.



In a June 8, 2009 article from Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics SES magazine Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards and Xavier Lanier argue that "25 percent of search results for the world’s Top 20 brands link to user generated content." See this.

"In 2010, more than 87 percent of the U.S. adult online population used social media to offer more than 256 billion influence impressions of products and services," says Stutzman.

Nor is volume the only issue. It is the velocity of potential word of mouth effects that also is a challenge. Opinions can move abruptly across the web. For that reason, Unilever uses YouGov's Brand Index to monitor eight measures of brand equity on a daily basis.

For marketers more accustomed to national or quarterly measurement, that will come as a bit of a shock. But Unilever's approach makes sense in a world where consumer sentiment, measured by tweet streams, for example, can suddenly go negative or highly positive, fluctuating relatively wildly between quarterly or annual measurements.

The practical implications are that an annual or quarterly measurement frequency cannot react to suddenly-negative or suddenly-positive consumer sentiment. In either case, a brand wants to be able to respond.

Consider a sudden news event, such as a major product recall. If the product being recalled is a popular automobile, many consumers will assume the supplier will want to offer incentives for people to buy, in the wake of the negative news. They will want to "buy on the dip," in other words.

But a brand has to move quickly to sense the sentiment, in order to act, either to counteract negative sentiment and sales trends, or to reinforce positive sentiment.

Twitter is only part of a content marketing program, but a monitoring effort sometimes can lead to more effective content being produced.