When a CEO says, “we need to build trust”, what does that mean in practice?
Trust might mean confidence that a product will do its job, reliably and consistently. It might mean the belief that an organisation will act responsibly. Or, as we often hear in market research interviews, it could refer to the feeling that a brand understands people like you and innovates to meet your needs.
Yet these different meanings are often compressed into one number. The score may rise or fall, but it rarely explains why. That makes trust visible without making it useful.
The Research Agency (TRA) has conducted new research in Australia and New Zealand that offers a more diagnostic view. The Trust Stack separates trust into three components: brand signals, delivery, and corporate social responsibility (CSR).
In both markets, brand makes the largest contribution to overall trust, followed by delivery and CSR. But the action an organisation should take depends on how it performs within each component and whose trust it needs to earn.
Trust is an umbrella term. When people assess an organisation, they draw on its reputation, what it represents, whether it does what it promises and how responsibly it behaves. They also bring their own starting disposition: some people are more inclined to trust commercial organisations, some are more open to public institutions, and some begin with a higher bar across both.
Generic questions conceal these distinctions. They can also invite people to offer a view when they know little about the organisation. In that case, an answer may reflect a category impression or a person’s default level of trust more than the organisation itself.
TRA’s study anchored questions to named organisations, first establishing whether respondents felt informed enough to give a view. The resulting Trust Stack is not simply another headline score. It shows the relative contribution of three components and how organisations perform against the specific signals within them.
What is the Trust Stack? The Trust Stack is TRA’s framework for measuring trust through three components: what an organisation represents, whether it delivers on its core promise and how responsibly it behaves.
Three key shifts have made the mechanisms of trust more important.
Uncertainty puts people on high alert and can therefore be cognitively demanding. When people feel uncertain, they look for cues that reduce effort and risk, such as:
While this doesn’t mean organisations must eliminate uncertainty, it does mean they shouldn’t add avoidable uncertainty through inconsistent service, unclear processes or promises that don’t match reality.
Advertising once gave brands much greater control over the profile people encountered. Now, customers, employees and observers can publish counter-evidence at scale. Reviews, comments, Reddit threads and social posts sit alongside what the organisation says about itself.
As one participant put it: “The world's more transparent than it used to be… Can't really hide behind anything now. Someone can easily leak information if they work at a business and put something on TikTok or Instagram and it goes out to millions of people straight away. And there's no amount of damage control that can fight a video of a rusty piece of equipment or whatever.”
The issue is not simply that criticism travels faster. Social media didn’t make brands less trustworthy, but it did make the gap between what brands say and what people experience harder to hide.
As if trust wasn’t complex enough, along comes another interpreter – one where neither the brand nor the customer has total control.
AI tools are increasingly mediating search, summaries and recommendations, so brands need to make it easier for both people and automated systems to find consistent, verifiable evidence of what they do.
At the same time, AI-generated content is making authenticity harder to judge. One participant told us: “I see videos [and] photos, and I think they're so real and they're not, and it's really hard to know 100% whether something is real or not.”
The result is greater emphasis on evidence that can be checked: clear claims, corroborating sources and behaviour that holds together across channels.
Even a well-defined measure can mislead when it’s read only as an average. TRA’s MindSets research shows that people start with different levels of trust in commercial and public organisations and respond to different trust signals.
Why does that matter? If you see a trust score dropping, the movement may be concentrated more on one MindSet than another. The strategy to course-correct will differ depending on the MindSet. If you know who you need to address, you can use their specific trust signals to shape your response.
Age also comes into play and requires more consideration than a simple old-versus-young conclusion. For example, in Australia, trust was highest among younger men and lowest among women aged 55 and over. What was consistent across both markets was that CSR made up a larger share of the Trust Stack among younger people, making it a viable lever for brands seeking to engage a younger target audience.
An average can show you something changed, but not which people changed or why. See how TRA MindSets make trust measurement more diagnostic.
The research surveyed more than 2,000 people across Australia and New Zealand, alongside in-depth qualitative interviews.
Respondents were asked about named organisations in various industries, including supermarkets, retail, banks, telecommunications, government, automotive and sport. People were only asked for a view when they felt informed enough to give one.
The research explored three dimensions of trust: Brand, Delivery and CSR. Respondents’ evaluations across these dimensions were used to understand the relative contribution each makes to overall trust.
The same hierarchy appeared in both markets. Brand is where trust peaks and where values become believable. Delivery is the foundation that makes it credible, and CSR comes in third.
The brand component covers four signals – whether an organisation:
The strongest items were relational. “Passionate about what they do” scored 42% in Australia and 43% in New Zealand. “For people like me” scored 41% in both. These are judgements about motive and belonging: does the brand care, and does it understand people like me? This reinforces the idea that trust is a word, not a number. People trust brands the way they trust people – through sincerity and fit.
By comparison, “really stands for something” scored 36% in both markets, while “really on the way up” was the weakest brand signal at 26% in Australia and 25% in New Zealand.
This is why brand is more than just one component competing with the others. It is where what an organisation does, what it stands for and where it’s heading come together in people’s minds. People can’t inspect everything an organisation does, so its brand acts as a shortcut for what they expect to happen next.
The four signals of the delivery component are:
A strong reputation can give people enough confidence to try an organisation. Lasting trust comes from what happens next.
One participant described buying a BMW because of “the reputation of the engineering”. Experience then confirmed the expectation. Another was more explicit about the limit of reputation: “If everyone else says that they’re the best, but I never had any experience, their trust level would not automatically transfer on me.”
Consistency was the strongest delivery association, scoring 43% in Australia and 39% in New Zealand. Dependability followed at 39% and 36%. People don’t expect perfection, but they do pay attention to patterns. As one participant put it, “I don’t think a company needs to be perfect to be trustworthy.” Another drew the line at repetition: “If they keep doing the wrong things again and again, definitely that strike on the trust level straight away.”
What happens when things go wrong matters too. Acknowledgement, honesty and visible action can preserve trust when something goes wrong. “I am quite open to giving other chances,” one participant said, “as long as… they’ve acknowledged that it’s been a poor experience and… there are next steps.”
Expertise also builds trust when people can see it being used on their side. A participant recalled a plumber who could have exaggerated a problem and increased the bill, but instead advised against unnecessary work: “He could have easily upsold the problem and made it bigger than what it was, but he didn’t.”
Brand creates expectations. Delivery is what proves it.
The third component of the stack, CSR, cover four signals:
In Australia, CSR accounts for a higher percentage of people’s overall trust score than in New Zealand (23% vs 19%), but makes the smallest contribution to the stack in both countries. It also had the lowest performance: 25% in Australia and 18% in New Zealand. Environmental responsibility and workplace culture were the weakest associations in both markets.
CSR is not always front of mind in everyday decisions. But when people encounter credible evidence of behaviour that conflicts with their values, it can rapidly reshape their view of the brand and, in some cases, become a reason to avoid them altogether.
CSR may play a smaller role in everyday decision-making, but that doesn't make it irrelevant. When an issue matters to people, its impact can be significant. The downside risk is also greater: getting it wrong can damage trust more than getting it right can build it.
Two questions matter if you want to build trust for your brand:
At a total-market level, the same four opportunities appeared in Australia and New Zealand:
Consider these starting points rather than universal prescriptions. Category, brand performance and audience still matter. The stronger signals also need protection – passion and consistency performed comparatively well, but they are not finished jobs. They are part of the pattern people use to decide whether an organisation remains worthy of trust.
One of the most striking findings in our interviews with Australians and New Zealanders was how small the moments that build trust could be: being told not to buy something they didn’t need, being given a better option, or having someone take a little extra care.
These were often emotional moments, where people felt understood, looked after, reassured or respected, which helps explain why they were the moments people remembered.
Yet these are also the moments least likely to show up on a dashboard. They sit in the spaces around the transaction: small but deeply human interactions that are hard to quantify, but often create the conditions in which trust is actually built.
That matters as organisations optimise for efficiency. If you protect only what you can measure, you risk removing the interactions that are building trust in the first place.
The challenge is not simply to measure whether people trust you. It is to understand what that trust is built on, whose trust is changing, and how to protect the conditions that enable trust to grow.
See how TRA measures trust through brand tracking.
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