Retail has come out on top of the latest Roy Morgan Net Trust survey (NTS). This landmark study on which brands Australians trust and distrust is revealing.
The survey identified our most trusted industry sectors and retail was ranked number one, followed by travel, charities and medical sectors. Among the top ten retailers to score with a positive NTS were JB Hi-Fi, Kmart, Bunnings and Aldi. And the top driver for trust is customer service with the highest aggregated drivers of trust coalescing around honesty, ethical behaviour and integrity.
Other drivers include a previous good experience with the company, reliability, transparency, social conscience, long history and customer focus. Brands with positive NTS have a strong positive sentiment base among Australian consumers, and a relatively low negative sentiment, from which to generate growth and brand value.
Among the categories scoring a negative NTS were banks, telecommunications, utilities, mining and petroleum.
According to Roy Morgan CEO, Michele Levine, the study shows that any measurement of trust is only truthful when distrust is also measured and one is subtracted from the other.
“Looking exclusively at customer satisfaction or a customer’s willingness to recommend a brand is like looking only at the shiny side of a coin. It is only when we are really unhappy with a brand that we change our behaviour, so our corporate leaders need to measure people’s distrust as well as their trust,” she said.
Significant omissions on the most trusted lists are Australia’s two big supermarket brands, our biggest telecommunications brand and the big four banks, Levine said.
A total of 2,848 respondents were interviewed over three waves from October 2017, January 2018 and February 2018.
This story was originally published by Appliance Retailer.
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