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January 21, 2025 | 9 min read
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The Edelman Trust Barometer aims to illustrate the role comms play in building consumer trust for big businesses. Coinciding with the report’s launch, Lee Edwards, a professor at LSE, urges marketers not to take for granted the vital institutions that help build support for their brands.
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For PR and advertising clients, Davos sets the tone for the coming year. One persistent theme is the need for business to be trusted and to make a social contribution. The Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global survey through which trust has gained an increasingly higher profile among businesses, now in its 25th year, launches at Davos, driving much of the conversation around trust.
Trust is frequently cited as essential for a positive reputation – a common and highly desirable goal when communicating legitimacy to stakeholders. But while the Barometer is regarded by many as an authority on the topic, too few questions are asked about exactly how the survey constructs the idea of trust itself – and, therefore, what kind of trust it is promoting.
The narrative of society that the Barometer pushes is one where pretty much all institutions other than business consistently fail to deliver high levels of trust.
Business, on the other hand, is the most trusted institution, and is therefore justified in having a stronger leadership role to drive positive change. In 2024, for example, the Barometer report announced that business was most trusted to introduce innovation; in 2021, it was the only trusted institution following the pandemic outbreak; in 2018, business was expected to lead on social change in a world where misinformation was reducing trust in (online) media and government. The implicit message is that we should trust in business, in part because no other institution is capable of delivering the social cohesion we need.
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For businesses, this is surely welcome news. Trust is widely accepted as a cornerstone of a strong reputation, bringing a range of benefits, including a more robust social licence to operate and more persistent customer loyalty.
If business is more trusted than government, media, and NGOs – the other institutions included in The Barometer – then business ambitions to shape society in a way that supports its objectives are likely to be less controversial and more easily pursued.
However, people’s experience of business varies widely, and as many corporate scandals in history attest to, it is not always positive. In a context where reality clashes with aspiration, advertising and public relations practitioners and their clients who buy blindly into the Barometer’s trust narrative may achieve exactly the opposite of their reputational goals. They may receive a nasty shock from increasingly knowledgeable and vocal audiences, who point out when businesses are being duplicitous – for example, making promises that they cannot (or will not) keep, abusing workers in their supply chain, or saying they support social causes while lobbying governments to work against societal interests.
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These vulnerabilities may undermine trust in business, but they are inescapable in a world where the walled gardens of business operations are more porous than ever before. Thanks to social media and digital technologies, it is possible both for more actors to hold business to account, and for the results of such accounting to be more visible.
These kinds of events teach us a valuable lesson that the Barometer overlooks, even as it encourages business to play a larger role in society. If business is to claim status as a genuine contributor to our wellbeing, then its interdependence with other institutions has to be recognized and fostered, not ignored or treated as a challenge to be overcome. It is precisely because business is held to account by the media, NGOs, and government that we can trust business: these institutions create the legal foundations and social expectations that ensure business operations are trustworthy. If they are not, these institutions allow us to find out why and how business is failing us.
When it highlights opportunities for business to partner with other institutions on specific issues (such as innovation, in 2024), the Barometer hints at this interdependence. But it needs to go much further, and explain that businesses need to treat whatever trust they enjoy with care. Without this caveat, it simply offers a platform for businesses to use trust as a means for selfishly pursuing their own interests, thereby potentially perpetuating its negative environmental and social outcomes.
Perhaps this should not be a surprise: in 2000, the results of the inaugural Barometer showed NGOs were more trusted than all other institutions. After the 1999 WTO ‘Battle of Seattle’, business was in crisis response mode, and Edelman’s advice was to ‘fight back’ by borrowing from the NGO communications playbook – not to change business practices.
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In fact, the Barometer makes the most sense as a vehicle for the self-promotion of the public relations industry because it positions communication as a vital mechanism for developing trust. But to define this complex phenomenon as if it can be separated into different pillars, to effectively ‘grade’ institutions through their survey results is unproductive – particularly when our collective survival can only be achieved through compromise and cooperation.
In practice, the findings offer businesses numerous opportunities to build on the trust by:
Examining what regulators and NGOs are saying about the risks posed by their sector and thinking about how they might act to minimize those risks would be a valuable first step.
Establishing trust by taking audience perspectives as a starting point for dialogue, rather than prioritizing their own interests.
Following the NGO playbook, not in terms of communication but in terms of prioritizing societal interests over organizational imperatives.
Clients might benefit more if reminded that business success depends on the work that other institutions do to foster trust. Recognizing that work rather than impeding it – even if, like business, they do not always get it right – is both more in tune with reality and more honest for the stakeholders that businesses care about.
Lee Edwards is a professor of strategic communications at LSE. Continue the conversation with Lee on LinkedIn.
Read more opinion on The Drum
Can media rebuild trust in age of grievance? Insights from Edelman Trust Barometer launch
Why distrust might be a sign of a healthy society
Marketing can change the world.
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