US Postal Service Is America’s Most Trusted Brand

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 25, 8:15AM EST

The besieged U.S. Postal Service (USPS), which has lost billions of dollars and is dogged by competition from UPS and FedEx, is the most trusted brand in America. Morning Consult reported that the results are based on a poll run by Brand Intelligence, which interviewed 16,700 people per brand and covered almost 2,000 brands in total.

The core question of the study was “How much do you trust each brand to do what is right?” The options for answers were “a lot, some, not much, not at all, or don’t know.” Those with the highest percentage of “a lot” made up the top of the list.

Among the 25 most trusted brands, the USPS led with 42.0%. It was followed by Amazon at 38.8%. Ironically, Amazon’s huge e-commerce shipping business makes it among the USPS’s largest customers.

Following Amazon were two other tech companies. Google was third with 37.9%. PayPal was fourth with 37.5%. No other tech brand made the top 25 on the list.

Shipping companies did well in general. UPS made the top 25 list with 36.1% saying they trusted it to do right a lot. FedEx scored 33.4%.

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Most brands on the list were consumer products. These included Hershey (36.1%), Cheerios (35.9%). M&Ms (34.9%), Dove (34.1%), Tide (34.1%), Ziploc (33.8%), Clorox (33.6%), Tylenol (33.0%), Colgate (33.0%), Crest (32.9%), Heinz Ketchup (32.7%) and Campbell Soup (32.7%). Notably, these are all decades-old brands. Campbell was founded in 1869, the same year as Heinz. Hershey was founded in 1894. The original Clorox brand was launched in 1913.

Two huge retailers made the list. Home Depot scored 32.6% and Walmart scored 32.5%.

One fast-food chain made the list. Chick-fil-A scored 36.2%. Interestingly, the company has been criticized for its contributions to groups described as anti-LGBTQ. The firm says it has ceased those donations.

Why do consumer goods dominate the list? There is no simple answer. Perhaps it is because they have delivered products that have been largely unchanged during the lifetimes of most respondents. This is even true for the U.S. Postal Service, which, after its founding in 1775, could be in the sunset of its existence.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.