In the not-too-distant past, brand trust was one of many factors that shaped how consumers choose a brand’s product or service over another company’s. In today’s tough market conditions, however, it can prompt a consumer to postpone or walk away from a purchase.
Knowing how trusted your brand is, and why it is trusted or not is vital to growing your business, and maintaining your brand visibility and reputation during tight market conditions.
Brand trust is the confidence customers have in a brand’s ability to deliver on the promises it makes. It covers way more than the quality of products or services, or the cost-quality ratio. More than ever, consumers purchase based on a broader set of values-based factors.
These days, trustworthy brands earn their reputation based on how they treat their customers and employees, how they engage with political, environmental, and philanthropic issues; and how well they protect customer information. With the purse strings of the economy tightening on businesses and individuals alike, consumers are less likely to risk spending on untrustworthy brands and services.
This is why knowing how trusted your brand is and why it is trusted or not is vital to growing your business, and maintaining your brand reputation.
Fortunately, there is an abundance of authentic consumer information about trustworthy and untrustworthy brands out there. For better or worse, consumers don’t shy away from sharing both the positive and negative experiences that impact their trust in a brand on social media. This means that data on consumer trust – both on your brand, and on your competitors’ – is available for you to see, and act on!
Related: Use cases showing how to use social listening to build your brand
Social listening solutions like our platform, Infegy Starscape, exist to analyze these consumer conversations – full of opinions, feelings, interests, ideas, and desires – and convert them into measurable, quantitative data and metrics…including brand trust.
You can also learn about and take lessons from brands who are trusted leaders in their respective spaces. This is why we analyzed social media conversations and created an interactive tool that allows you to learn more about trustworthy brands.
For last year’s Most Trusted Brands dashboard, we analyzed social media conversations to provide measurable trust and sentiment data on the top 100 brands named by Interbrand. This year, we’ve made some changes to expand our research and our dashboard.
This year’s Infegy's Most Trusted Brands dashboard starts with a list from the Forbes 2000, the two thousand largest companies by market capitalization, profits, and revenue in the world. Using the new Infegy Starscape API, review those two thousand brands over the last rolling 365 days and filtered records by positive trust. We analyze one year’s worth of posts, tweets, blogs, news articles from real consumers discussing each brand – and then rank them by their Infegy Trust score. For more information on how we made this dashboard, check out this blog.
This article lists the top 10 most trusted brands ranked by Infegy’s Trust Score.
You can also access full exclusive analysis and interactive dashboard for free, and learn more about the ranking trustworthy brands of 2022 (Figure 1).
Figure 1: A glimpse at Infegy's Most Trusted Brands (2024) dashboard
When people post online, they intentionally or unintentionally express how they feel about the subject they discuss. Picking up on the emotions in online conversations requires a process called linguistic analysis. Using proprietary AI and natural language processing, Infegy Atlas can accurately identify 10 emotions within online posts, regardless of language.
For the purposes of this interactive dashboard, the Trust Score is the total number of positive posts that express the emotion of trust. The dataset for this year’s dashboard is limited to conversations occurring Jan. 1, 2023 - Dec. 31, 2023.
| Rank | Brand | Trust Score | Positive Sentiment | Negative Sentiment |
| 1 | Amazon | 2,680,399 | 79.92% | 20.08% |
| 2 | Netflix | 2,458,256 | 72.28% | 27.72% |
| 3 | Nintendo | 2,216,791 | 83% | 17% |
| 4 | PayPal | 2,198,408 | 79.53% | 20.47% |
| 5 | Intel | 1,143,721 | 70.32% | 29.68% |
| 6 | Microsoft | 1,135,357 | 64.44% | 35.56% |
| 7 | Samsung | 1,092,983 | 68.06% | 31.94% |
| 8 | Sony | 976,682 | 78.03% | 21.97% |
| 9 | Honda | 840,054 | 77.16% | 22.84% |
| 10 | BMW | 728,368 | 78.93%% | 21.07% |
Figure 2: Bar chart showing the top ten brands ranked by number of trust documents which had trust (January 2023 through December 2023); Infegy data.
Figure 3: Distributional bar chart showing the net sentiment attributed to our top ten brands, or the overall percentage of positive vs. negative conversation about each brand(January 2023 through December 2023); Infegy data.
Infegy Trust score is a powerful way to see how audiences express trust in your brand but, we’ve included a few other relevant metrics when we discuss Trust:
To dig into the most trusted brands deeper, check out our interactive dashboard which allows you to click into each of our brands ranked with the highest degree of positive trust, and view a brand close-up.
Figure 4: Brand close-up on Nintendo in the Most Trusted Brands dashboard.
Net sentiment and post volume are presented in graphs that allow you to track how the data story for the brand unfolded through 2024.
Within the dashboard, we’ve given you the Top Topics in the conversation around each brand. A capability of Infegy’s powerful linguistic analysis. Top Topics identifies frequently occurring phrases that social media users mention when discussing a particular brand. We’ve colorized this by sentiment – the greener topics are discussed with greater positive sentiment than the red topics. Top Topics in the conversation can help you understand why a brand is trustworthy (Figure 4).
Figure 5: Brand close-up on Nintendo in the Most Trusted Brands - 2024 dashboard displays Top Topics mentioned when consumers discuss Nintendo.
Top topics in the conversation around Nintendo, which ranked #3 in our most Trusted Brands dashboard shows that users are very positive about their headline characters like Mario and Zelda. We also highlight our language analysis ability with a high prevalence of Japanese Kanji characters.
Whether you want to track consumer trust in your brand, or learn about the leaders (or competitors) in your space, data on brand trust can literally be at your fingertips today! Check out the free dashboard on the top 20 trustworthy companies and trusted brands.
Or, if you want to examine the emotions and sentiment surrounding a particular brand, reach out for a custom demo today!