Trust is the most precious asset that any institution can possess. It’s the basis of goodwill; it underpins our industry’s balance sheets, drives customer loyalty and defines our potential for growth.

Over the last decade, our industry has made an enormous investment in Corporate Responsibility through environmental initiatives, charitable campaigns and ethical sourcing. Although this was never designed to deliver a simple commercial payback, we ought to be reaping some benefit through steadily rising public trust.

So does the evidence bear this out? We conducted some in-depth consumer research on trust over the summer and looked back through our archives to find a comparison.

We found that a third of consumers currently trust our industry to do the right thing ‘always’ or ‘almost always’, slightly more than a third trust us more often than not, a quarter have low trust and the rest have no opinion.

By comparison, ten years ago IGD found that a third of consumers were very positive about our industry, a third mainly passive, a quarter sceptical and the remainder had mixed feelings.
 

Consumer trust 1999 v 2009

Source: IGD Research

Although these aren’t completely comparable surveys, the uncanny similarity in results suggests the industry has made no real headway in building trust over the last decade. There are probably two main reasons for this.

First, we’re swimming against a tide. As companies have grown, they’ve faced more and more scrutiny.

Day by day the public receives a drip feed of anti big-business sentiment. Big companies are usually depicted as faceless corporations. In works of fiction these days, they are almost always portrayed as a sinister force.

In the media, profit is routinely used as a dirty word. The apparent assumption is that profit benefits just a privileged few, instead of funding investment, driving innovation, feeding pension schemes and keeping people employed.

So we’ve been swimming hard to stand still and also contending recently with a second factor: the declining economy.

	Environmental campaigns reap benefits through  rising public trust

The PR company Edelman compiles a Trust Barometer across 20 countries. It found that 62% of people worldwide had a lower level of trust in business at the end of 2008 than at the start.

Our sector has also suffered from a particular problem: food inflation, coupled with non-food deflation. That’s come as a shock for shoppers after decades of food deflation in real terms and only 22% are currently convinced that grocery companies are keeping prices to a minimum.

Given these difficult conditions, perhaps we should celebrate success in managing to maintain public trust at levels similar to those at the millennium.

There are other reasons to be cheerful. Looking at a consumer survey for the Reputation Institute, five of the top seven most admired UK companies are IGD members and ten of the top twenty.

In their global survey, the best ranking sector was consumer products. So, many of our actions and messages have resonated with consumers and we’re better placed than almost every other industry.

We have some strong pillars on which to build, but then again, who could be fully satisfied at merely maintaining our ratings? Especially in the current climate of rapid change, we would all like to see trust heading upwards. So how could that be achieved?

In focus groups many felt that companies do just enough to show they’re responsible but no more than they have to. If we want to gain real credit, we’ll have to outpace expectations, overcome scepticism and surprise people by demonstrating the extent of our commitment to positive action.

When we dug deeper into trust, we found that consumers were asking our industry for three things in particular:

1. Keep raising our standards of traceability and transparency.
2. Raise ethical standards further.
3. Communicate progress with a personal touch.

None of these requests will come as a big surprise to companies, but as usual, the main challenges are in the execution.

Key questions include: How can we accelerate progress on traceability, and do this affordably? Which technologies will help? What are the risks in opening up ourselves and our chains to even further scrutiny? How high can we set our ethical standards and how do we balance this with price? How do we communicate more engagingly and adapt to a media world that is transforming itself almost by the day? And what is the right mix of competition and co-operation?

The last of these questions is vital. When companies compete, unleashing all their energy and ingenuity, change happens quickly and considerably.

However, sometimes we need to combine our efforts to achieve a greater whole and going it alone has so far failed to make a breakthrough in public opinion.

The portents are positive. Our industry already has lots of good examples of ethical initiatives to relate and thanks to our previous investment; these are growing by the day. Because companies have been reticent to claim too much too soon, we’re probably only just now beginning to reap the benefits from years of hard work.

We also have an audience eager to hear more. For example, 54% of consumers told us they would like to know more about the pay and conditions of workers making our products in poorer countries. Plus an additional 19% would like more information on this made available so that others can scrutinise it.

With schemes like Fairtrade and the Rainforest Alliance fast becoming mainstream, this is a chance to show how profit, when re-invested, can enhance people’s lives. We can also demonstrate that big business consists of people too – just more of them – and is capable of delivering change on a dramatic scale.

Each company can work on this individually and some will gain a competitive edge. However, if we also accumulate the evidence, we could multiply the impact and transform attitudes towards our industry.

This is a priority for our customers, shareholders and employees. We’ve entered a period of enormous transformation that will test loyalties to the limit. It will be vitally important to track, nurture and if necessary rebuild consumer trust at every stage of the journey.
 

More information:

	Social Sustainability – The New Competitive Frontier
	Our recent consumer research provides a benchmark for any company interested in its social reputation or planning a social sustainability initiative, covering areas including sourcing policy, fair trade, pay & working conditions, child labour, trade union policy and urban regeneration.

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Jon Woolven is IGD's Strategy and Innovation Director. His broad experience, background in economics and interest in the forces of change helps him to lead strategic research at IGD and assist our industry in identifying and tackling the challenges of the future. You can find out more about Jon and invite him to speak at your event here.