Gen Z and millennials have very different ideas about what makes a brand ‘trustworthy’
TikTok, Band-Aid, and . . . Philip Morris? Here’s how brand trust stacks up along generational lines.
Which brands are most trustworthy? It depends on the generation you ask.
A new Most Trusted Brands survey from Morning Consult Intelligence found that across generations, a few brands reign supreme when it comes to trust—Band-Aid, UPS, and Google, for example—but there’s plenty of generational variance outside of those big names.
The survey, which asked participants, “How much do you trust this brand to do what is right?” broke down brand trust along generational lines; but more revealingly, it also looked at which brands are the most trusted by each generation relative to U.S. adults overall.
The results are both telling and perplexing.
No surprise here, but Gen Zers are especially big fans of social media companies. Members of Gen Z who are 18 and older tend to trust social media companies far more than the average adult, with TikTok leading the way. The short-form video app has a 20.5 net trust score among Gen Z, which is higher than the app’s minus-3.3 net trust score among all adults surveyed.
For comparison’s sake, Gen Z’s most trusted brand overall, Band-Aid, has a 47.2 net trust score, more than double the Gen Z net trust score for TikTok, showing that while the app is trusted more by young people than older generations, it’s far from the most trusted Gen Z brand.
TikTok is followed on the list of Gen Z’s most trusted brand’s relative to all U.S. adults by Snapchat, Spotify, Twitch, Discord, and Instagram. Instagram’s parent company, Meta, which was broken out separately in the survey, didn’t make the list.
Other generations’ lists are similarly revealing, and at least where millennials are concerned, might have you wondering whether all is well with the 28- to 43-year-olds in this country.
TikTok is most trusted by millennials, followed by Bitcoin, Meta, World Wrestling Entertainment, Red Bull, and, perhaps most surprising of all, Philip Morris. Though the maker of Marlboro cigarettes gets only a 3.1 net trust score among millennials, that’s higher than the company’s minus-8.8 score among U.S. adults overall.
For Gen X, the brands with the highest trust scores relative to U.S. adults overall are food- or home-related, led by Bush’s Beans, Palmolive, General Mills, Ore-Ida, and Cottonelle. Baby boomers favor Procter & Gamble, Nabisco, Vlasic Pickles, Newman’s Own, and Ore-Ida.
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