Our 2015 Edelman TRUST BAROMETER study found that countries with higher trust levels overall also show a greater willingness to trust new business innovations.

Building trust is essential to successfully bringing new products and services to market, and building trust in new business innovations requires that companies demonstrate clear personal and societal benefits, behave with integrity and engage with customers and stakeholders throughout the process.

Trust is a forward-facing metric of stakeholder expectation. It is an asset that institutions must understand and properly build in order to be successful in today’s complex world. We look at trust around the world, trust across industries and how to build trust.

Trust is also an important factor in driving market acceptance of new business innovations. The 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that more than half of the global informed public believe that the pace of development and change in business today is too fast, that business innovation is driven by greed and money rather than a desire to improve people’s lives and that there is not enough government regulation of many industry sectors.

Toward Trusted Innovation

Countries with higher trust levels overall also show a greater willingness to trust new business innovations. Building trust is essential to successfully bringing new products and services to market, and building trust in new business innovations requires that companies demonstrate clear personal and societal benefits, behave with integrity and engage with customers and stakeholders throughout the process.

This year’s Trust Barometer offers key insights into the factors that increase and decrease trust, and defines a new formula for building trusted innovation.

 

For companies looking to build or restore trust in themselves and in their innovations, the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer offers actionable insights on the attributes and behaviors that shape trust.

Trust is built through specific attributes, which can be organized into five performance clusters: integrity, engagement, products and services, purpose and operations.

Of these clusters, the Trust Barometer reveals that integrity is most important, followed closely by engagement. As in years past, areas such as excellence in operations or products and services, while important, are simply what is expected.

The trust-building opportunity for business, therefore, lies squarely in the area of integrity and engagement. These areas encompass actions such as having ethical business functions, taking responsibility to address issues or crises, having transparent and open business practices, listening to customer needs and feedback, treating employees well, placing customers ahead of profit and communicating frequently on the state of the business — the very qualities also evidenced to build trust in innovation.