“Do we have enough trust with customers?” is a fundamental question for brand owners. Without enough trust, customers won’t try your brand, won’t stay loyal to your brand, and won’t recommend your brand. Trust is directly linked to market share so, a PR executive, if you’re not building trust in your client’s brand, what are you doing?
Our research measures customer trust in some of the leading UK and US retail brands each quarter since January 2016 to predict like-for-like market share growth. We measure trust using Mettle’s ABC model: Ability trust (does the brand work for me?), Beliefs trust (do I care about the brand?) and Consistency trust (does the brand work for me over time?). Each trust type is made up of individual topics of conversation and these establish what builds, or damages, customer trust in a brand.
Our latest research findings from Q1 2017 suggest customers currently find Aldi and Ikea the most trustworthy retail brands. They have a net trust score above 25%, with engaged customers who are early adopters of new products and technologies. Higher-trust brands are particularly strong in Ability trust (i.e. the brand works for me).
Medium-trust brands with scores between -20% and +20% like Sainsburys, Amazon, Home Depot, Target, and Walmart have a longer purchase cycle time and have to earn enough trust for customers to engage before they will proceed to purchase. These brands have an imbalance between Ability, Beliefs trust and Consistency trust.
Lower-trust brands with scores under -20% like Morrisons, Tesco, and John Lewis have the longest purchase cycle time, a lower sales conversion rate, and gain no competitive advantage from their customer experience. These brands tend to have poor Beliefs trust, highlighting a problem in customers sharing empathy with the brand.
So what should PRs do to help brands build trust? Aldi, for example, has become the fastest growing UK supermarket by establishing a brand trust profile which is most closely aligned to what customers find important. Aldi customers talk about Ability trust drivers twice as much as they talk about Beliefs trust drivers, and about Consistency trust drives the least. In Q1 2017, the two main Ability trust drivers for Aldi customers were quality of fresh produce and some very sought after candles. Trust was also gained from the announcement of a pay rise for its employees. This drove up its Beliefs trust score to the second highest in the sector, surpassing several more noisily virtuous brands.
There are three lessons here for brands. Ability trust is the most important set of trust drivers for retail sector customers. Customers expect end-to-end service and brands lose trust when outsourced delivery agents fail (John Lewis, Morrisons). Some brands have a core set of advocates who produce content around service efficiency (Amazon, Ikea). All brands should cultivate a similar core set of advocates.
Beliefs trust is the second most important set of trust drivers for retail customers. Here brands built trust through their own efforts around living wage (Aldi), sustainable supply chains (Sainsburys), and opposing President Trump (Amazon) while others lost trust through conversations around #StopFundingHate (John Lewis, Aldi), paying their drivers poorly (Ikea), putting Union Jack flags on products (Morrisons), and staff insulting customers (Tesco). These conversations support or undermine a brand’s licence to operate and often escalate quickly in the absence of a convincing reply.
As customers become less loyal, Consistency trust has recently become the least important set of trust drivers for retail customers. Despite this, poor customer service is a recurring conversation that affects most brands at some point. However, the brands with the highest level of customer service complaints (Morrisons, John Lewis) are also the brands with the lowest trust scores.
The research is based on relevant publicly available digital conversations about the brand from traditional (national newspapers, trade press, local press) and social (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, blogs, forums) media during the period 1 January 2016 to 31 March 2017. This comprises more than 1.5 million brand-specific relevant conversations. A net trust score is calculated, correlated against Kantar Worldpanel data, and benchmarked to the sector average to give an indication of direction and likelihood of sales growth per quarter.