Brand rankings and valuations are released by management and consulting firms with clocklike regularity. They are a means to drum up business; since the evaluations come out every year, they work.
Some of the brank valuation lists have been around for years. Polling firm Morning Consult released a relatively new one, just four years old. Its list is titled “America’s Most Trusted Brands” The data was collected from March 3 to April 3. The sample size varied but reached as high as 8,434 adults.
The study makes two crucial points. The first is that the perception of brands stays mostly the same from year to year. The second is that “legacy” brands, which might be identified as older, populate the top of the list. (These are 25 brands that customers are abandoning.)
To answer the question of why Morning Consult does the study at all, the authors wrote, “We do this because trust — a deep and intangible belief in the perceived virtue of a person, business or organization — is an important metric for institutions seeking success.”
The most trusted brand in the United States is Band-Aid. It was invented in 1921 by Johnson & Johnson, another of America’s oldest brands. Band-Aid has become a global brand and is one of Johnson & Johnson’s anchor products. Johnson & Johnson describes the reason for the brand’s success: “Our products have been used by millions—even billions—of people for more than a century, giving BAND-AID Brand an iconic place in American culture.”
In second place is shipping company UPS. The tenth brand on the list is FedEx. For some reason, people think highly of shipping operations, even though they have reputations for missing delivery dates and sometimes poor treatment of their workers.
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