The Four Factors of Trust

CHAPTER 4The Most Trusted Organizations

In this chapter:

• Trust and performance
• The most trusted
  • Humanity Leaders
  • Competence Leaders
  • Trust Winners

We were pumped our pilot with The Wall Street Journal proved that an organization could convert our trust measurement from prediction to action and ultimately to meaningful outcomes. But now we were curious about new questions: What brands are the most trusted? And what can we learn from them?

Trust and Performance

The most trusted brands in our research have one thing in common: Trust Winners get all Four Factors right. They excel in both intent (humanity and transparency) and competence (capability and reliability). In fact, Trust Winners have an average HX TrustID score two times that of the average organization in our dataset.

Figure 4.1 shows how high trust scores result from both high competence and high intent scores—a linear correlation that you would expect. Looking a little closer, you can see that the spread between intent and competence is larger for the most trusted brands than it is for the least trusted. This means that highly trusted brands have greater variability in their Four Factors, suggesting that there are multiple paths to earning trust and becoming one of the most trusted brands. One organization might gain trust by being incredibly competent (such as a luxury auto brand) with somewhat less humanity. Another excelling in humanity (such as a healthcare organization) might have slightly lower reliability ...