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What makes customers trust a brand?
Breakthrough unstructured data-analysis tech firm Signoi has the answers…

Skyscraper building with window open
October 28, 2019by Clare Warren

Millennials – the children of the Internet age – have the opportunity to brand-hop more than any other generation that’s gone before. With that wealth of choice spread out online before them, what does a brand have to do to win their loyalty?

At Signoi, we wanted to discover what makes people really trust a brand. So, we:

  • Carried out qualitative research at scale – using the power and speed of our cutting-edge AI – to understand how people discuss the concept of ‘trust’.
  • Used that knowledge to gather and crunch a massive 297,000 publicly available data points about brand trust. This unstructured data was drawn from social media; social forums; and reviews. Going forward, we’ll ingest the websites of the top 500 companies in the US, the UK and Australia, plus challenger brands, and incorporate a trawl of newsflow.
  • Deployed our unique form of data analysis – quantitative semiotics – to reveal the patterns of information within that data and to surface clear insights and foresights about what’s vital for brand trust today.

An intriguing finding.

One of the unexpected insights surfaced by The Trust Cultural Weather Report is that there is a new – and important marker of brand trust emerging in the US and the UK. Prevalent amongst younger people, this is the need for two-way transparency.

Younger people trust brands that engage in public dialogue. We’re not talking about brands who invest heavily in advertising or marketing communications. We’re talking about brands who talk with their customers in public.

So, here are the questions that your brand should be asking:

  • Are we happy to have public interactions on open channels or do we try to keep our customer interactions private?
  • Do we respond to the comments that our customers make on open channels (and that our potential customers may read)?
  • Do we publicly acknowledge our mistakes and take steps to put them right?
  • Do our public exchanges demonstrate that we are a brand that can be trusted by its customers?

Younger people value transparency and the opinion of their peers. To win their loyalty you have to be out in the open, engaging – in a productive, one-to-one, customer-orientated way – with the people you want to develop a relationship – your customers.

To find out more, look out for the other articles in the series, available here

And reserve your free copy of Signoi’s Cultural Weather Trust report click here.

Our platform performs all traditional forms of data analysis and much more. Our innovative new approach – quantitative semiotics – is a ground-breaking way of analysing unstructured data at pace and at scale. It’s different to anything else that’s out there. And we’re happy to talk about it publicly!

Get in touch to find out more about what Signoi can do for you .