Always On: What Happens When Brands Lose Trust

Welcome to Always On. Each week, we’ll dig into a brand or audience trend you need to know about, tapping into Morning Consult Intelligence, our always-on insights platform powered by 15,000 daily surveys across 40+ countries. That means thousands of brands, audience deep dives, and enough fresh data to make your spreadsheets jealous. Sign-up here to get this email sent to you directly every week.

This week we want to talk about trust, one of the most important brand metrics we track. Trust is critical for maintaining relationships with consumers — it leads to repeat purchases and it can help brands weather  a crisis. Today, we’re looking at four examples of brands that have lost trust in recent years, starting with a look at what happened to Ticketmaster in 2022, when its website crashed during a Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket sale. As the chart below shows, Ticketmaster still hasn’t fully recovered. 

An effective crisis management strategy can’t function without data to help you know when and why you’re in a crisis (and amongst which audiences). Morning Consult Intelligence helps brands keep their eyes on key brand metrics with our always on survey tracking, so you’re ready when the unpredictable occurs. Want to see how your brand’s net trust has changed over time? Get in touch with us. 

Let’s Go Deeper: Recovering From a Hit to Trust

Trust is hard to earn, but it tends to be resilient (that’s a common Morning Consult proverb). Put simply: For the vast majority of brands, we don’t see big changes in trust from year to year, especially for established companies that have already won trust. 

For some brands, a dip in trust can be temporary. Take for example the fast fashion brand Shein.

You can see here that net trust amongst Gen Zers, who have the highest awareness of the brand, dipped  as Shein weathered multiple controversies around alleged child labor, poor working conditions and an influencer campaign that backfired, resulting in trust levels that hit a series low at the beginning of 2024. However, it only took a few months for trust to recover, and today it sits higher than it's ever been.

For other companies, a hit to trust can take much longer to recover from, if at all. Let’s take a look at trust for Boeing.

Net trust for Boeing fell off a cliff in March 2019 following two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that resulted in more than 300 deaths. Nearly 400 planes were grounded for 20 months by the United States’ Federal Aviation Administration. It took the brand nearly five years for net trust to recover, only for it to take another dive in January 2024 when a rear door plug was violently expelled from a plane. This time, there were no serious injuries. They are  slowly starting to recover from this, but it’s not clear if — and when — trust in Boeing will return to its previous highs.

Let’s Learn More By Asking Morning Consult AI

You can use Morning Consult’s dashboards to build your own brand trackers to understand how your brand (or a competitor’s) is changing over time. You can also quickly get a pulse check by asking our new AI Chat function. The data we’ve featured so far in this edition of Always On has been in the United States. But we don’t just survey in America — we survey consumers across the globe in more than 40 markets. So, let’s take a look at net trust for Tesla in Canada.

Trust has declined in Canada by nearly 20 points since the start of the year. And we’re not only seeing trust and favorability decline there — Tesla’s brand favorability has been on the decline in Europe, Canada and the United States since mid-2022. While many factors are potentially at play, recent dramatic shifts suggest Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration are impacting Tesla’s brand. My colleague Sonnet Frisbie explored Tesla’s brand reputation abroad more here.

Want to try Morning Consult AI Chat yourself? Get in touch here.

Extra Credit

Most Trusted Brands 2024: Last year’s definitive ranking of the brands that lead the way on consumer trust includes 14 rankings and features long-standing brands like UPS and Colgate and newer entrants such as ChatGPT and Spotify.

Why Gen Z’s Trust Is So Difficult for Brands To Come By: 95% of consumer brands tracked by Morning Consult have lower trust ratings with Gen Z compared to all U.S. adults

Trust in Boeing Continues to Dip, but It’s Not Impacting Airlines: Boeing’s reputation darkened among flyers and business travelers, but the groups’ trust in airline brands is on the upswing heading into the spring break travel season