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The Brand Trust Report, India Study 2014, a comparison of the trust held in brands, shows that Samsung is India's most trusted brand this year. Sony has been ranked second and Tata third. In 2013, these three brands were ranked second, third and fifth, respectively.
This year, LG ranks fourth, followed by the three year leader, Nokia, at the fifth position. Hewlett Packard (HP) move up fourteen ranks over last year to become India’s sixth most trusted brand and Hero leaps seventy-nine ranks to bag the seventh position. Honda ranked eighth followed by Reliance at number nine . Mahindra betters its last year rank by sixty-nine places to stand in the tenth most trusted brand.
N Chandramouli, CEO, TRA said, “Samsung has grown steadily in trust ranks over the last four years – fifth in 2011, fourth in 2012, second in 2013. When a brand focuses on its trust with intensity, apart from trust the brand gains in market-share, product premium and acceptance of new products as an automatic by-product. Samsung’s strategy of focusing on the core intangibles of its brand is evident from its climb to leadership in BTR 2014.”
The Report, fourth in its series, is a result of a primary research conducted on the proprietary 61-Attribute Trust Matrix of TRA (formerly known as Trust Research Advisory). This year’s study involved 15,000 hours of fieldwork covering 2,500 consumer-influencers across 16 cities in India. It generated 5 million data points and 20,000 brands from which the top 1,200 brands have been listed in this year’s report. These brands have been classified into 284 different categories as against 213 categories in 2013.
“Among the top 100 most trusted brands, 75 were net gainers while 25 took a fall. The gainers gained an average of 86.23 ranks, while those that fell took a dip of 27.16 ranks on average, showing that the average gain among the top hundred beats the average loss in ranks by 317%. A connected surmise could be drawn that in the year that was slow for many, brands took the opportunity to focus more on their trust intangibles, scoring points in the process. For long term sustainability and success, it is important that brands have a long term investment in trust”, Chandramouli added.
