Anyone who keeps up with the financial news of the world knows that we are in a major credit crunch and recession. Those factors and others have lead to a distinct lack of trust in the financial services sector. London design agencies, a brand consultancy, has been tracking some of the major factors that play into that mistrust and what it means to individual financial services brands. To put it simply, we need trust. The more risk that financial companies take on, the more important gaining that trust becomes, and holding onto that trust becomes not just a priority, but a necessity.
At the global level, London design agencies brand consultancy has been looking at the Edelman annual Trust Barometer, which annually surveys trust in 23 different countries. In 2011 a mere 50% of those questioned placed banks, insurers, and other financial services within the positive range of a 9 point trust scale, where 9 represented ‘I trust them a great deal’ and 1 was a rating of ‘I do not trust them at all’. So half the population does not greatly trust the financial services industry, which is an astonishing figure, but not altogether unexpected since the 2008 economic crash.
As brand consultancy has taken a multi-year perspective to this issue, the Edelman study has shown that the overall levels of trust in business vary greatly from one country to the next, with emerging economies experiencing greater levels of trust than other more developed nations, due mostly to a ‘feel-good factor’ that accounts for these variations. The results confer that trust varies along the ups and downs of the economic cycle, going along the roller-coaster ride and experiencing the same booms and busts.
Insurance companies have a much more difficult problem, in that the lack of trust goes back a lot longer. In a study5 that took place back in 2007, in other words before the current credit fiasco, 24-hundred insurance customers in six European countries were polled by the IBM Institute for Business and Switzerland’s University of St. Gallen to find that only 42 percent of those who responded felt that ‘insurance companies can be completely trusted. You can be assured that under the current fiscal concerns those numbers have gone down.
So how can you turn those trends around and generate trust among your clients and customers? Well, it generally depends a great deal on personal and local factors. People have a tendency to discriminate between their local providers and the industry as a whole, because of the difference of simple human interaction. Surveys have shown that personalised trust in financial services is much higher than generalised trust. Face to face time is crucial to developing trust, along with walking the walk. You have to make sure that your promises are kept in order to maintain trust in your institution. The great philosopher Socrates once put it in these words: “The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavour to be what you desire to appear.”
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