Navigating brand trust in 2025: What insights professionals need to know

Editor’s note: Monika Rogers is VP growth strategy at research firm CMB, Boston.

The start of 2025 has been flooded with a series of news stories about eroding brand trust. OpenAI sparked the news of a potential data breach, Meta advertisers raised concerns about their new content moderation approach and several financial services firms were accused of discrimination against customers based on political affiliation. Of course, none of us missed the story of UnitedHealthcare CEO and consumer distrust in the health insurance sector.    

Impact of brand trust

CMB recently conducted a brand trust study among 1,400 consumers. Building trust is foundational, and it can help you win in the good times and rebound faster in the bad times. In our research, Nvidia scored as one of the most trusted brands, but when the news of DeepSeek hit, its stock dropped 14% in one day. The next day, the CEO responded and people believed his response that Nvidia is still relevant. Rather than continuing to slip, stocks rebounded 8%. That’s what strong brand trust gets you. 

One respondent summed up their definition of brand trust:

“In my opinion, trusting a brand means that I trust what they stand for. I trust their actions. I trust their communications and their marketing. When they tell me whatever their service or their product is great, then I trust that it is.” 

Factors of brand trust

Most companies measure brand trust as a single question. But what really creates brand trust? If you want to improve your trust, what should you focus on? 

In our research, we saw a high correlation between trust, purchase consideration and satisfaction. Brands with high trust scores were also brands that had high consideration and were satisfied with their purchase. Whereas brands with low trust scores were significantly less likely to be considered or repurchased. We uncovered six factors that drive brand trust: dependability, transparency, integrity, customer-first, responsive and relevance. In addition to identifying the factors, we asked consumers to share their experiences with their most and least trusted brands. Figure 1 provides examples of what consumers articulated about each trust factor. 

Importance of brand trust factors

In addition to identifying the six trust factors most important to brands, we also measured how important each of these factors is in determining overall trust. Dependability, transparency and integrity were the three most important factors overall, as shown in Figure 2. Importance varied significantly within and across categories. For example, in financial services the fintech sector was driven largely by dependability, while the traditional card and banking sector was largely driven by integrity. Not surprisingly, news companies were driven by transparency and ticketing companies by customer-first. 

AI’s impact on brand trust

A hypothesis we had prior to conducting the research was that brand trust was eventually going to be impacted by AI. In a previous study we conducted on AI adoption, fear was the strongest emotion that was attributed to AI. Fear wasn’t just about losing jobs, it was also about a company’s application of AI. We included a question about the responsible use of AI in the new brand trust study. AI grouped into the “relevance” factor, along with customers’ feelings that brand values align with theirs and that they have an emotional attachment to the company.

The results gave us two insights into this hypothesis. First, relevance overall had seemingly low importance relative to other factors in driving trust. Second, there were specific categories and brands that were impacted by relevance. This is likely due to AI often being behind the scenes at companies, rather than consumer facing, such as ChatGPT. Two examples where relevance showed increased importance were ticketed events and social media. Both experiences have gotten significant media exposure around potential consumer impact related to AI. In the case of ticketed events the biggest concerns appear to be about AI and security. For social media, there have been AI and bias concerns, and while relevance didn’t play a significant role in the tech industry overall, ChatGPT had low brand trust scores relative to diversified tech brands. 

Steps to positively impact brand trust 

Given these insights, what can you do to help your organization positively impact brand trust? 

  • Determine your brand trust score and which factors will work hardest to improve your brand trust. To maximize actionability, we measure brand trust and identifies the specific path to improve trust by addressing areas within each factor. We also utilize AI prompted open ends to get specific examples of actions brands took that impacted perceptions of trust. This allows companies to uncover potential opportunities for messaging strategy, customer experience or product shifts that have the most potential impact. 
  • Conduct a strategic brand assessment to map your current strategies against these opportunities, help prioritize current activities and identify gaps. 

Finally, we will help you to supplement your current brand measurement programs with a more robust brand trust monitoring program. This could include new custom research, supplements to existing tracking programs or utilizing social data or other unstructured data (see Figure 4). 

One of the most important things we can do as insights professionals is to be proactive in bringing new thinking to leadership on ways to grow our business and insulate against profit-killing instability. Brand trust is a great place to start. You can download the research report (registration required).