Which Behaviours Lead to Trust?

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Every business is either directly or indirectly trying to influence customer brand perceptions. We discuss how these images are created by customer experiences and any associated behaviours, such as “word of mouth”. We illustrate our approach using an airline reputational risk and trustworthiness case study.


Tracking consumer brand perceptions is one challenge. Changing them is another. For the average brand a typical consumer experiences 300 touch points each year. They might read a negative story, receive a letter trying to cross-sell them something, or encounter poor customer service. In turn, these events may engender reinforcing customer behaviours, such as discussing the event with a friend. So what influence do these interactions have on perceptions and how can businesses use that knowledge to improve or defend their brand image?

By concurrently measuring people’s brand perceptions and identifying which touch points they’ve experienced, or what behaviours they’ve exhibited, we can statistically infer the standalone effect of each event. For an airline, 50p on-board toilets or a vegetarian meal containing donkey will ruin a reputation. Resolving some numpty’s missed flight or inventing new ways of streamlining check-in will do the opposite. Essentially these are all tests of organisational competence and the sincerity of its commitment to passenger well-being.

Managing Airline Trust Events

Which Behaviours Lead to Trust

Combining such events with their respective encounter frequencies, it’s possible to accurately reconstruct each passenger’s perception of each airline. For example, the figure shows the perceived honesty of a major airline. Essentially, you can learn more from asking customers to rehearse their recent brand experiences than you can by asking them to introspect about the brand. If behavioural science teaches us anything, it’s that you can’t ask people to introspect.

So on a scale of 0 to 100, people give this particular airline a trust rating of 49, behind a key competitor rated 53. Their trust image can be reconstructed by starting at 43 (the score of an airline with no touch points), then adding and subtracting good and bad events. For example, good media, such as TV ads and positive news stories, increase this carrier’s image by +5. But bad media, mainly negative coverage, trims trust by -1. Taken together, all these events yield the airline’s overall rating.

Faced with a task of closing the trust gap with the competitor, this carrier needs to move up four notches. There are various available strategies. For example, many competitors achieve +6, rather than +4, from “usage”, which would halve the gap. And the underlying events identified by this study can be used to specify the changes which would deliver that shift, such as increasing on-time performance from 81% to 86%. Conversely, some competitors drop three points on “media” so flying Alec Baldwin, Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell may well not be worth the risk.

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