Brand trust in Switzerland - an even stronger currency than the franc

Trust is an omnipresent and ubiquitous construct. Whether self-confidence, trust in other people or in basic processes, for example in a professional context: without trust, our everyday lives would be impossible. Trust is also essential in purchasing situations, which often go hand in hand with a decision for or against a brand. "The only relevant emotion in relation to a brand is the trust of its customers," says German brand sociologist Dr. Arnd Zschiesche in his book "Trust - the hardest currency in the world".

Every form of marketing communication therefore has the sole purpose of reaffirming this trust again and again. Campaigns that do not take this principle into account and decouple themselves from the performance of a brand can therefore be counterproductive. Especially in marketing communication, any deviation from the familiar image learned by the viewer confuses customers and their trust, especially when it comes to a beloved brand.

How well a brand succeeds in strengthening a positive preconception of its own performance is shown by the level of trust that people have in it.

Transa: Comparatively little known, but enjoys a lot of trust

225 brands are permanently held up to this mirror in a measurement by the market research company Link. These brands, measured in the Swiss Brand Observer, represent a large proportion of the most relevant brands in the Swiss brand landscape, but are not exhaustive, as a total of over 500,000 brands were active in Switzerland at the end of 2022.

For the analysis, the self-reported brand perception of the population from the first ten months from the beginning of January to the end of October 2023 was taken into account. Most brands have a data basis of around 11,000 interviews - for a minority of brands, however, the particular trustworthiness and other key figures have only been measured since their inclusion in brand tracking in June 2023. In these cases, slightly fewer than half of the people were interviewed. As part of the interviews, people who recognize a brand based on its name and logo were asked whether they consider a brand to be particularly trustworthy (yes vs. no).

Just as there are differences in the individual perception of brands - especially in the case of polarizing brands - there are certain tendencies and therefore exciting differences between different population groups. The relative trust scores were calculated for the trust values shown here. The trustworthiness of a brand was assessed in relation to its awareness. Less well-known brands can therefore perform better, even if they are considered trustworthy by fewer people in Switzerland in absolute terms, as they are (still) less well known. For example, the outdoor brand Transa is only known to 39% of the population, which means that only 17% of the Swiss population consider it to be particularly trustworthy. However, in relation to familiarity - the 39% mentioned above - these 17% have a relative trust score of 42%, which puts Transa in 20th place out of 225 in the ranking of particular trustworthiness.

French-speaking Swiss and motorists place particular trust in the TCS

One of the brands that particularly stands out in the ranking is the Touring Club Switzerland (TCS). TCS is headquartered in Vernier, Geneva, and proximity creates familiarity - a prerequisite for building trust. It is therefore not surprising that TCS came second out of 225 brands in the trust ranking (relative to brand awareness) in French-speaking Switzerland, where it is rated as more trustworthy than in German-speaking Switzerland. In both German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland, supported awareness is around 92%, but more than one in two people in French-speaking Switzerland consider the brand to be particularly trustworthy, while only one in three people in German-speaking Switzerland think so (27th place). Overall, a difference can also be observed between car owners and people without a car: People who own a car trust the TCS significantly more often than people who do not own a car. This applies both in French-speaking Switzerland (at a higher level) and in German-speaking Switzerland. Unfortunately, there is no data available on how many of these people are also members of TCS.

In addition to TCS, Cailler is another brand in the top 5 (51%) in French-speaking Switzerland that has significantly lower relative trust ratings on the eastern side of the Röstigraben (only one in three people). The Nestlé chocolate brand also has significantly higher ratings among the over-60s than among 15 to 29-year-olds (44% vs. 32%). In French-speaking Switzerland, there is also another brand that unexpectedly appears in the top 10: Outdoor specialist Bächli Bergsport, which only has a branch in Conthey and Lausanne in the French-speaking half of the country. However, the still rather small number of connoisseurs (16 percent) in French-speaking Switzerland have a strong trust in the brand, and the sports outfitter also achieved a good result in Switzerland as a whole, coming in 24th place. Alongside competitor Transa and the still young Lenzburg brand Nikin, Bächli Bergsport is the only brand with a supported awareness of less than 40 percent that is particularly trusted by at least 2 out of 5 people.

Young women only trust Migros more than Nikin

The young Nikin brand is particularly noteworthy; only founded in 2016 - and therefore still very young - the brand is already familiar to 30% of the Swiss population, and even every second person under the age of 30. Two out of three young women aged 15-29 are at least slightly familiar with the brand, and around half of them consider the brand, which plants a tree for every product purchased, to be particularly trustworthy. In addition to the "big players" Migros (1st place) and Coop (3rd place), SBB and Twint are also in the top 5 for trustworthiness among 15 to 29-year-old women. Two other brands from the Migros universe appear among young men: Galaxus and Digitec.ch, which are particularly trusted by one in two in this socio-demographic group. Nikin does not rank quite as high here, but is also in the top 15.

At the other end of the scale, young people - regardless of gender - are familiar with brands such as Credit Now, AliExpress, Wish and Teleboy. These brands are also familiar to around half or more of those surveyed, but hardly any of them are associated with any particular trustworthiness. Across Switzerland as a whole, the brands Uber and Uber Eats, furniture retailer XXXLutz and the relatively new insurance brand Smile also share the fate of being known by at least one in two people, but only trusted by a fraction (maximum 4 percent of those in the know).

These brands are united by the fact that they have either not existed for very long (in Switzerland) and/or are not typical Swiss brands or are not perceived as such. This is because the higher the perceived Swissness of a brand, the higher its trustworthiness. The following scatter diagram clearly shows this correlation between relative trustworthiness and relative Swissness - i.e. in relation to brand awareness - but makes no claim to causality. For the keyword "Swissness", the AI software Neuroflash finds the associations "mountains", "chocolate", "watches", "punctuality", "banks" and "neutrality", among others. Typical prejudices that should come as no surprise to anyone - and a prejudice is harder to split than an atom, as physicist and Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein once noted.

A brand would therefore do well to confirm its positive preconceptions with its (potential) target group again and again - boring, but effective. But: If Swissness is not associated with the brand (i.e. does not represent a positive preconception of the brand) or is not part of its brand essence, you should think carefully about whether communication should be geared towards it. After all, a (positive) preconception is not only harder to split than an atom, it is also hard work to build one.

The methodology of the Swiss Brand Observer

• Study: Swiss Brand Observer - continuous brand tracking (365 days per year)
• Population: Swiss resident population aged 15 to 79 years
• Sample size January - October total: approx. n = 10,500
• Confidence interval for total sample: max. +/- 1%
• Research method: online interviews
• Quotation/weighting: interlocked by age, gender and language region
• Random samples from the Link Online Panel actively recruited at 100% through representative telephone surveys, reaching more than 97% of the relevant population; survey participants are excluded from follow-up surveys for at least three months at a time
• Survey period: 01.01.2023 to 22.10.2023
• Further sources: Brand-trust.de; Zschiesche, A. (2021). Trust - the hardest currency in the world. Gabal publishing house
• Contact person Link Zurich; Matthias Biedermann, Research Consultant