You Ask, I Answer: Measuring Brand Trust?

In today's episode, Stephanie asks, when it comes to building trust, how do we know what success looks like? How can we measure it? Well, trust trust is a tricky thing to measure because it's such a fundamental core emotion. Um, if you look back at psychology and how different frameworks have come up to even understand emotions, there are all these different models that you can use to try and figure out like what even an emotion is and how it relates to important things like say survival. Um trust is one of those fundamental things.

So uh this is a model uh here. This is uh Robert Plutchick's uh wheel of emotions. You can see that uh in that first uh concentric ring, trust is on there. It's uh uh you know it's expressed by admiration, it's opposed by disgust, and fundamentally trust is one of those things. It's like how do you how do you explain it?

In that same uh thesis, he proposed that each of these core emotions has a basic survival advantage, right? Um disgust is something that happens when we ingest something that doesn't taste good, right? And we spit it out, we literally because we perceive it as poisonous, right? And trust is the opposite of that. We see somebody who's a member of our group, a member of our tribe, um, they're a friend, and so our our action is literally to friend that person, to recruit them, uh, for mutual support to to help us survive.

When you consider that that particular survivalist instinct, how does that play out when it comes to something like uh a brand? Well, think about what you would expect someone to be able to say about a brand that they trust. And the gold standard here for figuring this out, for measuring this would be surveying, uh asking people at all different uh stages of the customer experience. So uh surveying for at the awareness stage, uh for trust-based questions, uh consideration, uh purchase, uh, loyalty, evangelism, and all throughout the customer experience cycle. Um, asking people questions like, do you trust this brand?

Um, do you see it as uh as a friend, as friendly to you? Do you believe that the brand will do right by you if something goes wrong, right? Um, do you believe that the brand supports you and the things that you believe in? Do you believe that there's a a mutual support relationship uh in place? There are some brands where uh people feel based on their interactions with the brand that yes, this brand will support me, this brand has supported me.

And that can be anywhere from things like donating to specific causes, uh, to just having working customer service, right? Having a customer service department that will not make you uh feel like an idiot. Um all of those would be things that you'd want to surface within surveying, and that is still the gold standard for understanding how people feel about a brand. There are other things that you can do that I would say you should treat as secondary data sources because again, the gold standard is still surveying. It's just asking people how they feel around those trust-based questions, or again, the polar opposite on that wheel of emotions, asking people about disgust-based questions, things that uh interactions they've had that were negative, how many of them have they had?

Um because as everybody knows, it really only takes one screw up uh for a brand to uh to completely ruin the relationship you have with it, one bad judgment call. Um I was talking with my uh my business partner and co-founder Katie Robert about uh one technology brand that uh at a conference hired a an absolutely awful speaker, just terrible judgment call, and that has forever corrupted her uh feelings about that brand. That brand has no chance to ever impress or to work past that uh without like serious substantial personal interaction. And that's a big part of this equation as well, is in trust, because we are taking the action of friending somebody, right, of bringing them into our group, of asking them for mutual support, um, it's not something that the brand can do easily at scale, but it is absolutely something that occurs at one-to-one interactions with the brand. So if you are spending a million dollars on this branding campaign, but you're still paying a minimum wage or less to your customer support team and they deliver an abusive experience, you're achieving no ground, right?

Because that one-to-one interaction is how this survival instinct works. Now there are other things that you can use to measure this. So you could examine, for example, branded search um for uh bigram frequencies, two word combinations around your brand. Um if the number of people searching for, you know, your company name and scam or sucks or whatever, uh comes up a lot, guess what? You've got a problem, right?

You have a a substantial uh problem, particularly if it's around uh again, customer support issues. Um looking at trust words, looking at disgust words. What are the how often do those do those co-occur in branded organic search? Assuming someone's searching for your brand at all. Looking at social interactions particularly social media um if something negative about your brand comes up who supports you and how quickly right now this is not something again this is good secondary research because you don't want to create a negative uh event just to see who who pops out of the woodwork that's not a good idea but if it's happening anyway use the data um and most important be performing sentiment analysis on interactions with your brand especially again customer service interactions you should be mining your customer service inbox and looking at uh again trust words and discussed words uh the frequencies of each the the valence or intensity of each in every single email you get in every phone call you get in your customer service center and every interactive chat log be scoring those intakes and asking people those qu the the questions if you can if not just be doing the sentiment analysis the natural language processing on those interactions to understand how much trust or disgust is there in every single interaction that is actually something that would fairly closely resemble an NPS score in some ways and just having a composite number and tracking it over time how much how many of our communications uh had an overall valence of trust particularly if you're able if you have the technology to do to break an interaction into thirds and then measure the trust in the in thirds of beginning middle and end did trust go up or down in those interactions.

But fundamentally go back to the basic surveying. And that can be surveys with a market research firm. It can be surveys at point of purchase or post purchase. It can even be surveys on your website. But be asking people consistently those questions.

Like, do you see this our you know the brand as a friend? Uh, does the do you feel supported by us? What would you what would make you feel supported by us? Um, what would increase your trust in us that we would do the right thing by you? All those are questions.

Uh work out with your your marketing team, work out with us uh your someone on staff who has psychology experience uh to better understand how to phrase those questions to get at the answers you want. Um hire a good market research firm. But that's how you measure uh measure it. And then, as with all measures, you're looking for more of what you want and less of what you don't want. So, again, going back to uh Dr.

Putrich's real wheel of emotions. Uh you want more trust, you want less disgust. Right? Um, the same is true for all the emotions on there. You want more joy and less you know anger and sadness.

Um pretty straightforward stuff. Be careful with emotion analysis, um, be thorough, and especially be looking for bias uh when you're asking these questions because it's it was super easy to go wrong on those fronts. And again, you should have somebody with psychology experience um working with you to to tune those things and someone with good market research experience to tune those things with you and make sure you're asking fair, balanced, unbiased questions that will give you um accurate diagnostics. Really good questions. There's a lot to dig into here.

You got follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data, analytics, and digital marketing problems?

Visit trustinsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.