Background to the Trust Accelerator

Wherever you look in the media today trust seems to receive a battering. We just need to mention the names and you will know the details – Horse meat, LIBOR, Jimmy Saville, data protection at NOTW, Starbucks tax issues.

People, brands and authorities at one time trusted and held in regard, have their reputations under the microscope. The political arena has always been susceptible to scepticism, the sense now is that this pervades many areas of society. It is now much easier than ever before to pick up an opinion, pass it on and voice our own opinions in a wide, publicforum. Stakeholders feel more empowered to give their views. With more transparency comes more questions. With more questions comes more suspicion. More suspicion leads to lower trust. If we encounter it in one area of our lives then it can quickly create suspicion in others too.

With consumers demanding more from organisations and an increase in availability of new experiences and products both on and offline, those crucial elements of corporate trust and recommendation become paramount and yet are more tentative than perhaps ever before.

 Taking trust as our inspiration, Chime Insight & Engagement has been working to understand what trust means to today’s consumer, and how they value it using a unique metric called The Trust Accelerator - a tool designed to help organisations identify and measure the strength of trust in their business, what the key drivers are and how to benchmark that data against competitors and other industries.