Read our updated 2022 edition here.

Many of you may wonder: “is my company trusted?” In fact, it’s a question that leads many of our client partners to look into our social listening platform to find out.

It’s a critical question because if people trust your brand, they will buy it. But not just that. They will buy it again. They may even become brand advocates or super fans. But, if you lose their trust, they may purposefully avoid you.

Luckily, brand trust is something that can be measured. Thanks to our social listening platform's intuitive emotions analysis metrics, which measure how consumers express trust in a brand, we have pinpointed the most trusted brands. 

In this article, we rank the top 25 most trusted brands in 2021, and we’ll also give you instant access to the full list of the 100 most trusted brands.

Most Trusted Brands in 2021

We crunched the numbers. We’ve got the data on the world’s most trusted brands you won’t find anywhere else (see the chart below 🙌).

Infegy’s Trust data is based on social listening analysis of a year's worth of online conversational data with our platform Infegy Atlas. (We analyzed the previous year to get the most trusted brands 2021, but you could easily plug in dates going back to 2007 to see who is most trusted over a decade of time).

With that, here are the top 25 most trusted brands:

How We Ranked the Brands

Using the social listening and text analytics metrics available, we created the Infegy Trust Index. It combines our social metrics of Trust, positive sentiment and post volume to create an aggregate of the most reliable ranking of the most trusted brands. The highest Trust Index scores were Acer (80) and Weight Watchers (72). The lowest score on our list of 100 trusted brands was 57 - still strong.

The “Trust” emotion metric in our social listening tool measures the percentage of online conversations expressing trust when they discuss the brand. The analysis is filtered only to include positive posts expressing Trust. Typically, we see around 5-10% of brand mentions from audiences expressing trust in an online post. So, the above numbers are impressive.

Our Trust metric is a powerful way to see how audiences express trust in your brand. But in the interest of comparing brands and brand trust, we need additional insights to help indicate the most trustworthy brands. So, we included in our trust index two additional metrics: positive sentiment and post volume (number of mentions).

The most trusted brands should have a high degree of popularity. To account for increased consumer volume, the analysis considers the relative amount of Trust conversation to positive conversation about the brand and overall volume. 

Lastly, we weighted the scores to make the trust percentage more weight than the positive sentiment or volume (Trust is the most important metric here).

Let’s go over how brands can establish and track consumer trust.

How the Trusted Brands Stay That Way

Developing and nurturing consumer trust is an ongoing process with ebbs and flows, but you can keep track of how consumers invest trust in you or your competitors with data.

Building and maintaining trust in this always-on world requires establishing personal, one-to-one connections with consumers. Then, you have to listen to what consumers say so you can understand and address their wants and needs.

The most trusted brands on this list have mastered the art of developing and nurturing these types of at-scale relationships, which has helped them earn consumers' trust and stand out in a crowded world. 

People are vigilant in their choices and the path they take to purchase. And they genuinely care about a company’s openness, accessibility, integrity, stance on issues, honesty, and how they run their business.

This means that transparency is undeniably crucial to whether or not people will trust a brand.

The most trusted brands on earth constantly monitor how audiences perceive them, look for trends, and pinpoint why that data shakes out.

Finally, highly trusted brands are innovative and forward-thinking in how they build strong connections with their customers and fans. Here are 5 ways they do that:

1. Transparency

People increasingly want to know who companies are and what they’re about. Especially young consumers like Gen Z, who buy based on what brands stand for. Let customers in on who you are as a company, what your purpose is, what your plans are, and most importantly on who the humans are who make the company go.

2. Be Personal

People want products and messages to be personalized to them. Nurture one-to-one relationships with the people. This requires you to be more nimble and omnipresent to reach people on a more personal level with your brand.

3. Accessibility

Your brand needs to be reachable at all touchpoints. Have a presence in a variety of different locations and channels. Be reliable. People trust those they can get a hold of quickly.

4. Data-Driven Strategies

Analyze your audience and marketing performance and take that data seriously. Consistency is key. Keep providing value to the right people, and you’ll garner trust from those who matter to you.

5. Listen to Your Audience

If the audience doesn’t show you love, listen to them and change. Use social listening tools like Infegy Atlas to constantly track and analyze conversations about your brand and industry all over the web. In an age where brands are now a tweet away from their customers, you need to monitor and listen to the online community, engage them and take action your audiences want.

Now that we’ve seen the top most trusted brands list of 2021, explored how to establish trust and track audiences’ trust and maintain that trust, you see the updated data for 2022.