The Edelman Trust Barometer

What it measures

Respondents across roughly 28 countries are asked how much they trust each of the four institutions to do what is right. Results are reported as a trust index, split by country, and by what Edelman calls the informed public against the mass population.

The split is one of the more useful features. The gap between what better-educated, higher-income, media-consuming respondents believe and what everybody else believes has been one of the more durable findings in the series.

The finding that matters for business

Across the series, business has generally scored as the most trusted of the four institutions, and in recent years it has often been the only one scoring as trusted at all. Employers specifically score higher than business in general: people trust the company they work for more than they trust companies.

That has a commercial consequence worth sitting with. If business is the institution people still extend trust to, then a company’s conduct carries more weight than it used to, and the expectation attached to it is higher. Edelman’s own framing has moved over the years from measuring trust toward arguing that business is now expected to act where government has not.

Treat that framing with the appropriate caution. See below.

How to read it honestly

Three things to hold.

It is published by a communications firm. Edelman sells communications advisory, and the Barometer is both a genuine research instrument and the largest piece of marketing that firm produces. The data collection is serious. The interpretation layered on top is written by a company that benefits if executives conclude they need help with trust.

That does not make it wrong. It makes it a source with an interest, and you should read the charts rather than the conclusions.

It measures stated trust, not behaviour. What people say about trusting institutions in a survey and what they do when buying are different things, and the gap between attitude and behaviour is one of the most reliable findings in social psychology. A rising trust score does not mean anybody bought anything.

Year-on-year comparisons are the valuable part. A single year’s number for a single country tells you very little. The direction over a decade is where the instrument earns its keep.

Why it is in a marketing reference

Because it gets quoted constantly, usually second hand, usually as a single dramatic percentage with no year, no country and no question wording attached.

If you are going to cite it, cite the year and the market. The Barometer is a real, long-running, publicly available dataset. The version of it that circulates in slide decks is not.

What to do with it

1. Read the actual report for your market rather than the global headline. The country-level variation is large.
2. Cite year and country every time. A Barometer figure without both is unusable.
3. Use the direction, not the level. A single year’s score is noise.
4. Treat Edelman’s interpretive framing separately from Edelman’s data.
5. Do not substitute it for research on your own buyers. It measures trust in institutions in general, not trust in you.

If you run the company rather than the marketing

The Barometer is useful to you mainly as a corrective to a particular kind of argument.

When someone proposes a trust campaign, the Barometer is usually the slide that justifies it. A big number about declining trust, no year attached, followed by a proposal. The honest reading of the data points the other way: business is the institution that has held trust best, and employers are trusted more than business in general, which suggests trust is produced by proximity and conduct rather than by campaigns.

So the question to ask is not how do we improve trust. It is where does a buyer of ours encounter evidence of how we behave, and is that evidence good.

For most B2B companies the honest answer is that the strongest trust signal they have is a reference call with an existing client, and nobody owns it, nobody prepares it, and nobody knows what gets said on it.