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Consumer Influences on Most Trusted for PrivacyMarch 4, 2010FoxBusiness.com called the other day asking if we might be interested in talking about our annual Most Trusted Companies for Privacy study. Always eager to promote our research (the Institute, after all, produces the most interesting privacy and information security research in the land), I said yes. It’s a busy time for us – Larry was knee-deep in RSA, and I was scheduled to give a talk on privacy in online social networking – but we made arrangements for me to make a brief stop in Hartford, Connecticut where I would do a remote live shot.
The producer passed along a brief overview of the topics that hosts Chris Cotter and Tracy Byrnes wanted to discuss, so I arrived early and got myself ready in the green room, anticipating what questions might be asked and practicing pithy responses (as well as keeping my hands from their usual wild gesticulations). Wired for the interview, a producer in New York told me I was up next and the fun began.
As a privacy professional who is immersed most days in issues related to information security and data breach, I had given a lot of thought to how our findings might relate to the public’s concerns about becoming the victims of credit fraud and identity theft, but it became clear early on that Cotter and Byrnes, besides being professional journalists asking good business questions, were regular folks who had a more common interest in the subject.
Byrnes, for example, commented on the “kooky” idea of Google providing satellite imagery of her home and the abundance of information entered into that popular search engine each day. Then came the question I hadn’t considered: how did Weight Watchers end up on our list of twenty most trusted brands?
It was at that moment that it struck me that our annual Most Trusted Companies for Privacy survey is as much about American consumer culture as it is about brand trust. We are a people obsessed by weight, and in spite of study after study showing Americans to be growing heavier and heavier, we are nevertheless in search of ways to shed those pounds, to the point where a brand like Weight Watchers can achieve broad enough saturation to not only eclipse our threshold for consideration, but make the top twenty. I quip that this may say something about the growing corpulence of the American population, but there’s truth to that notion.
Each year since our benchmark 2005 study there are changes to the list that are a clear reflection of events or trends affecting consumers.
Here’s a chart of the results of our Must Trusted Companies for Privacy survey over the last five years. What conclusions can you draw? Let us know.
*Please note that publication year is always one year later than field work year because of the timing of field research.
NR denotes not ranked in the top 20 in the given year.
Posted by Mike Spinney at 8:35 pmAdd Comment (1 comments) Comments |
Hi Mike, How come in Ponemon's press release it mentions that AmEx has topped the list for 5 consecutive years, but your graph only shows 4? +++++ Good catch, Trey, but nothing sinister; just a simple mistake on the release. Mike