In 2024, 90% of business executives think consumers trust their business while only 30% of consumers actually do. This gap also seems to be growing year over year, with an increase of 3 percentage points from 2022 to 2023.
A gap that large is staggering, but it gets even more interesting when you consider the fact that 94% of business leaders say trust is an important component to their organization’s performance and 91% say trust improves their bottom line.
Marketing will always involve some calculated guessing. But why are so many executives so incredibly off when it comes to trust? Where does this enormous disconnect between how trustworthy executives think their businesses are and how everyday consumers perceive them to be even come from?
Part of the challenge here is that trust can be hard to measure and even harder to manage. And because of these challenges, it can also be difficult to make the business case for putting significant investments into trust. This makes it challenging for marketers to close this gap between their businesses and consumers.
There are many factors leading to declining brand trust, but some of the biggest offenders are an abundance of misinformation online, regular unethical data use by businesses, and rapidly emerging technologies that can blur the lines between what’s real and what’s not.
With data collection methods by businesses evolving more quickly than the average consumer can understand — and unethical data use by businesses regularly making headlines — it’s understandable that consumers have put up a lot more guards when it comes to putting their trust in businesses. They understand that information has the potential to be distorted easily and misused by businesses for their own gains. All of this actually represents a huge opportunity for businesses to invest in trust, bridge their own trust gaps, and create excellent businesses that consumers can trust.
Trust as an objective measure
There are many ways that businesses can improve trust in their brand, but letting the world know how your customers feel about your business is one of the best ways to build trust. Instead of trying to build credibility for what you’re saying about yourself, you’re able to connect them with an audience — their fellow consumers — who already have credibility in their eyes and are a lot less biased than you.
And fortunately, with Trustpilot, trust isn’t a subjective measure anymore. Your TrustScore is your main quantifiable business metric for trust. Not only does it help you measure how much your customers trust you, it’s also public facing to immediately begin building trust for any consumer that’s considering shopping with you and the more you can highlight it, the more you’ll build trust with consumers by showing you have nothing to hide.
Trustpilot also has deeper insights available to help you improve your business and see exactly where your trust could use a little focus. If there is an area or two where your customers are feeling misled — think shipping terms or a return policy that weren’t clear enough — our insights tools will quickly point out those issues so you can fix them and build more trust with your customers in the future.
Product Reviews and Review Tagging function the same way, helping you get deeper into which products or aspects of your business your customers are liking and which ones they’re not, so you can continually improve your business. This means more happy customers, a stronger TrustScore for consumers to see, and a brand people feel more confident trusting.
These insights tools help you get to the source of improving your business, but we also offer a lot of different ways to better include your customer reviews and TrustScore at key points in your customer journey, so that you can rely less on marketing messaging and more on using the real feedback from your customers to help drive conversions and build trust with consumers.
Where you collect your customer reviews has a big impact on how effective they will be. It’s important to use an open platform (where anyone can leave a review) so that consumers understand you haven’t only invited your happiest customers to review your business. It’s also important for it to be a third party review platform, so that they can click back to a third party site where they can view all of your reviews, not just the ones you’re showing them. As information online feels harder and harder for consumers to trust, the easier you can make it on them to trust your brand the more success your business will have.
