If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. That’s pretty much the relationship that most users have with Facebook and Google in the 21st century, because there’s really no one to live in the modern world without them.
But even though we spend hours of our lives every week scrolling through our News Feeds and checking our Gmail accounts, it doesn’t mean we trust the brands behind the products.
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In a recent survey conducted by marketing consultancy Prophet, 10,000 consumers were polled regarding 400 brands in order to determine brand relevance, and both Google and Facebook failed to crack the top 50, coming in at 55 and 98, respectively. As Prophet explains, these two exceedingly popular companies both ranked highly in certain categories, but collapse when it comes to user trust.
“These platforms are so enjoyable—Facebook is in the top 20 to 30 brands in making people happy, and it meets an important need,” Jesse Purewal, associate partner at Prophet, told Adweek. “But being able to depend on it? It’s not a brand people trust.”
When participants were asked to rate Facebook as “a brand I can depend on,” the social media platform garnered a relatively unimpressive ranking of 133. When asked if it was “a brand I can trust,” Facebook tumbled down to 200.
“In a category where innovation is rampant and there are emerging and available substitutes, not to be trusted is a very ominous condition to be in,” Purewal said. “A brand like Facebook could have the fate of an AOL or a MySpace if they don’t maintain the trust of users.”
You can see the full results of the brand relevance survey on Prophet’s website.
