Brand Trust

Brand Trust

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

Brand trust is a buyer's confidence that a brand will do what it says. Marketing research studies it beside brand affect, the warm feeling a brand produces, as one of the routes from a brand to loyalty and to performance in the market.

What it is

A 2001 study in the Journal of Marketing by Arjun Chaudhuri and Morris Holbrook set out the route. It treated trust and affect as two inputs and two kinds of loyalty as the links to performance: purchase loyalty, which is buying the brand again, and attitudinal loyalty, which is commitment to the brand. Performance was measured as market share and relative price.

The study used an aggregate dataset of 107 brands built from three surveys of consumers and brand managers, and it controlled for hedonic and utilitarian value, brand differentiation and share of voice.

In effect

The study found that trust and affect together shaped both kinds of loyalty. Purchase loyalty went with greater market share, and attitudinal loyalty went with a higher relative price. Trust, in this view, is not a soft extra. It is part of how a brand earns repeat buying and room on price.

The Why We Project article on branding in the age of AI uses brand trust to explain why a record kept over years matters more when polished output becomes cheap to produce: a buyer who cannot tell good work from fast work leans on what the brand has done before.

What it does not say

Brand trust does not mean that any single message builds confidence. The 2001 study used survey data across brands at one level of analysis, so it describes associations rather than a tested cause in a single brand. It does not measure trust in AI output.

Sources

  1. Chaudhuri, A., & Holbrook, M. B. (2001). The chain of effects from brand trust and brand affect to brand performance: The role of brand loyalty. Journal of Marketing, 65(2). https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.65.2.81.18255