What builds brand trust?
What studies of brand credibility, service exchanges and complaint responses say about where brand trust comes from, and how buyers come to rely on it.
Answer to the question
What builds brand trust?
Brand trust is built by a record of delivering what was promised, goodwill shown when something goes wrong, and information a buyer can check. In Erdem and Swait's study of choice across product categories, trustworthiness affected consideration and choice more than expertise did, and the effect appeared in every category.
Key takeaways
- Erdem and Swait found that brand credibility raised the chance a brand entered the consideration set and the chance it was chosen, in every category tested, and that trustworthiness counted for more than expertise.
- Sirdeshmukh, Singh and Sabol tested trust in retail clothing and airline travel and found support for three parts to trustworthiness: operational competence, benevolence and problem-solving orientation.
- In that model trust worked on loyalty through perceived value, with frontline employees weighing more in retail and management policies more in air travel.
- In an experiment on mock-up review sites, Matzat and Snijders found that reputable shops were seen as more trustworthy and that apologies produced stronger effects on trust than denials.
- The Demand Revolution treats trust as one of four linked barriers to sustainable purchases, eased by credible information and by positive experience with the product.
A buyer can rarely test what a brand promises before paying for it, and brand trust is what stands in for the test. Research on what builds brand trust points to three sources: a record of keeping promises, goodwill that shows when something goes wrong, and information a buyer can check for themselves. Each has been studied on its own, and each does separate work in how people choose and whether they come back.
Brand trust follows delivery
Tülin Erdem and Joffre Swait defined brand credibility as trustworthiness plus expertise and tested what it does to choice across product categories that differed in uncertainty, the cost of finding information and perceived risk. Credibility raised the chance that a brand entered the consideration set, and it raised the chance of choice once the brand was in the set. The effect appeared in every category, and it was larger and ran through more routes where uncertainty was high.
In their results the trustworthiness side counted for more than the expertise side, so brands were being judged on whether they would keep their word more than on what they knew how to do. Skill is hard for a buyer to inspect, while a long run of kept promises hands the next buyer something to lean on, which is the working material of brand trust.
Deepak Sirdeshmukh, Jagdip Singh and Barry Sabol took the idea apart by testing it in two service settings, retail clothing with 264 respondents and airline travel with 113. Their results supported three parts to trustworthiness, and each answers a question a buyer can put to a brand:
- Is the basic job done reliably? That is operational competence.
- Are my interests visibly considered? That is benevolence.
- Will things be put right if they go wrong? That is problem-solving orientation.
Trust in their model did not lead straight to loyalty. It worked through the value buyers saw in the exchange, which fully carried the effect of frontline employees on loyalty in retailing and partly carried the effect of management policies and practices in airlines. Frontline staff weighed more in the clothing shops, and company policies weighed more in air travel, so the same three parts show up in different places depending on the category. The authors also found that the parts related to one another unevenly and that the pattern depended on context, which is a reason to treat any single list of trust drivers as a starting point and not a formula.
Handled problems show intent
Of the three parts, problem solving is the one a buyer only gets to see when something has gone wrong. In the Sirdeshmukh study the authors reported a strong positive effect for problem-solving orientation among frontline employees. A brand's ordinary days show competence, and its difficult days show the rest. For the buyer, that is when brand trust is either confirmed or set aside.
Uwe Matzat and Chris Snijders tested one such difficult day in an experiment on mock-up consumer review sites. Online shops received different complaints and replied in different ways, and participants judged how far they would trust the shop afterwards. Shops with a good reputation were seen as more trustworthy, and apologies produced stronger effects on trust than denials did. A good name helped brand trust, and what the shop said next still mattered.
We read a complaint as the cheapest moment a brand has to show intent: the buyer sees what the brand does when nothing is being sold, and brand trust is formed from exactly that kind of observation, though no study above tested that step directly. The same reading also explains why stating a stake openly does not automatically raise trust: the experiments summarised in Does Conflict Disclosure Build Trust found that disclosure works unevenly across the people who give advice and the people who hear it. Costly acts that a rival could not cheaply copy, a theme set out in What is costly signalling, carry the signal more reliably than words.
Checkable claims ease doubt
Andreas von der Gathen, Nicolai Broby Eckert and Caroline Kastbjerg, in The Demand Revolution, list trust among the barriers that stand between interested buyers and sustainable products, alongside affordability, accessibility and knowledge. They treat the barriers as linked. Credible information raises trust by shifting the balance of what a buyer has read, and a good experience with the product confirms what the seller claimed. Buyers weighing a sustainable purchase take a longer search journey and absorb more information along the way, and the authors present that extended search as a route by which trust in a brand builds up.
The practical reading is that a claim lands better when the buyer can check it and then live with the product, and that brand trust grows where those two steps are easy to take. The same holds for who delivers the message: whether a recommendation comes from a person or a system changes how far people lean on it, as Do people trust algorithms more than humans lays out. Showing the steps behind a result can raise the value people place on it too, which is the subject of What Showing the Work Actually Does.
Brand trust can also be measured in parts. José Luis Munuera-Alemán, Elena Delgado-Ballester and María Jesús Yagüe-Guillén noted that trust is central to strong relationships between consumers and brands and is a key asset for a brand, yet no widely accepted measure of it existed. They built a multidimensional scale from trust concepts in other fields, through a multi-step process. Their psychometric tests found the scale reliable and valid, so a brand that wants to follow trust over time can track its dimensions separately and not as one overall score, which suits the finding above that the parts of trust relate to one another unevenly.
Common questions
What builds brand trust?
A record of delivering what was promised, goodwill shown when something goes wrong, and information a buyer can check. In research, brand trustworthiness affected choice and consideration more than expertise did.
Is brand trust the same as brand credibility?
They overlap. Erdem and Swait defined credibility as trustworthiness plus expertise, so trust is one half of the concept.
Does brand trust lead to loyalty?
In Sirdeshmukh and colleagues' model, trust worked on loyalty through the value buyers perceived in the exchange, in both retail clothing and airline travel.
How should a brand respond to a complaint?
In an experiment on mock-up review sites, apologies produced stronger effects on trust than denials, and shops with a good reputation were seen as more trustworthy.
Sources
von der Gathen, A., Eckert, N. B., & Kastbjerg, C. The Demand Revolution. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Demand Revolution.
Erdem, T., & Swait, J. (2004). Brand credibility, brand consideration, and choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(1), 191-198. doi:10.1086/383434 https://doi.org/10.1086/383434
Sirdeshmukh, D., Singh, J., & Sabol, B. (2002). Consumer trust, value, and loyalty in relational exchanges. Journal of Marketing, 66(1), 15-37. doi:10.1509/jmkg.66.1.15.18449 https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.66.1.15.18449
Matzat, U., & Snijders, C. (2012). Rebuilding trust in online shops on consumer review sites: Sellers' responses to user-generated complaints. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18(1), 62-79. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01594.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01594.x
Munuera-Aleman, J. L., Delgado-Ballester, E., & Yague-Guillen, M. J. (2003). Development and validation of a brand trust scale. International Journal of Market Research, 45(1), 1-18. doi:10.1177/147078530304500103 https://doi.org/10.1177/147078530304500103