Trust in companies highest in China, lowest in France

Consumers in China and South Korea have the highest inclination towards trusting companies, while Canadian and French shoppers have the lowest scores on this measure, a study by research firm Morning Consult has found.

Why it matters

Consumers who naturally lean towards trusting a company will generally do so unless it does “something bad” to undermine that belief, Morning Consult’s study noted. For people who default to a more cynical view, by contrast, an enterprise must “earn” that status, which is a higher bar to cross.

Takeaways

• Sixty-four percent of Chinese respondents “tend to trust companies”, whereas only 13% gravitated towards the opposite position, and the remaining 24% did not know or offered no opinion.
• The trust figure stood at 53% in both South Korea and India, where between 35% and 34% of interviewees respectively were in the more doubtful camp.
• By contrast, fully 44% of French consumers were naturally mistrustful of companies, nine points more than for the trusting group.
• For Canada, the mistrust versus trust scores stood at 42% and 40% respectively. In Germany, the same totals hit 43% and 41% in turn.
• Japan was somewhat of an outlier, as 44% of participants did not know or had no opinion. Forty percent were usually trusting, while only 16% were in the sceptical camp.

Local brands thrive

• In six of the ten markets assessed, the most-trusted brand was established in the same country.
• Healthcare brand Band-Aid, for example, topped the charts in the United States, while payments service Alipay did so in China.
• Fast-food chain Tim Hortons claimed top spot in Canada, as did automaker Toyota in Japan and electronics giant Samsung in South Korea.
• Three foreign brands leading the pack in different nations were all from the US: payments brand PayPal in Germany, messaging app WhatsApp in Italy and search titan Google in India.
• Lidl, the German-based retailer, was the exception, as it was the top performer in France.

About the study

• Morning Consult surveyed 2,200 US adults, 1,299 respondents in South Korea, and 1,000 participants in each of Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan and the UK.
• The data collection period ran from 8–14 April, 2022.
• Also featured in the analysis was responses from representative samples of between 4,614 and 6,401 for each of the featured countries collected from March 3, 2022 to April 3, 2022.

Sourced from Morning Consult