Bangalore Brands Dell, Fastrack, Tanishq, Arrow Lead in Most Trust Brands 2018 Across India

The 8^th in its series, The Brand Trust Report 2018, India’s most comprehensive study on Brand Trust, has been released by TRA Research. Bangalore-based brands have made a strong showing with city brands leading 5 of the 38 Super Categories in the report. These leaders repeated from last year are Dell (Personal Technology), Fastrack (Branded Fashion), Tanishq (Jewellery). New Category trust leaders are Arrow (Apparel) and AO Smith (Water Heaters). Significant is that the Bangalore list of Most Trusted Brands turns the All-India list topsy-turvy with its unique culture that mixes the large migrant population with low participation of working women, molding the city’s mind. LG (All-India 3^rd) leads Bangalore’s Most Trusted list followed by in second position by Hewlett Packard (All-India 9^th) and the city’s affinity for spending time in traffic brings BMW (All-India 15^th) to third trusted rank in the city. LIC (All-India 24^th) is at fourth position and GE (All-India 88^th) makes it to fifth Most Trusted from the city. Not surprisingly, city preferences push some brands up on the national list as well. Some of these are – IBM at 6^th (All-India – 45^th), E-Bay at 10^th (All-India 84^th), Intel at 17^th (All-India 71^st), HCL at 18^th (All-India – 64^th).

The All-India Most Trust list is as follows: Samsung leads the second year in a row to become India’s Most Trusted Brand. Sony and LG follow to retain pole positions as India’s second and third Most Trusted Brands in an encore of 2017. The fourth Most Trusted Brand is India’s leading multinational conglomerate, Tata, and is followed by the Cupertino based technology company, Apple, slipping a rank from last year. Also maintaining its position among the top 10 Most Trusted and rising two ranks to attain the 6^th position in 2018 is Dell. Honda is at rank 7. This is followed by Nike which has shown a substantial steadily climbed over the years (rank 49 in 2015, rank 48 in 2016 and rank 37 in 2017) to rank 8 in 2018. Hewlett Packard has a two rank jump over last year to rank 9, while Maruti Suzuki fell by three ranks from 2017 to rank 10 in India’s Most Trusted Brand list.  BTR 2018, the eighth in the series, is launched annually by TRA Research, a brand intelligence and data insights Company. TRA Research is a part of the Comniscient Group.

N. Chandramouli, CEO, TRA Research, said on the occasion of the report’s launch, “In a changing India, Bangalore shows the most significant change – and represents true internationalization with a blend of localization, because of exposure to brands which might be unknown elsewhere in India, making it to India’s 20 Most Trusted Brands.  Fox Entertainment, KMF (Karnataka Milk Federation), CVS Pharmacy inclusions in the national list are largely due to Bangalore’s audiences trusting these brands”.

Among India’s 1000 Most Trusted brands in BTR 18, 38 Super-Categories and 335 Categories were listed. The categories with the maximum brands were F&B and FMCG contributing to 25.6% of the total brands in the listings. When compared to last year, 320 new brands made it to the list, 368 brands fell in rank, 307 brands rose in rank, and 5 brands retained their ranks. Some of the important category leaders in Brand Trust are State Bank of India (All-India rank 21) from BFSI, Arrow (All-India rank 43) from Formalwear, Pepsi (All-India rank 44) from F&B, Amazon (All-India rank 53) from Online Retailer - Diversified, American Express (All-India rank 167) from Credit/Debit card, Muthoot Finance (All-India rank 171) from Financial Services, Tanishq (All-India rank 258) from Jewellery, Aviva Life Insurance (All-India rank 459) from Insurance-Private, and Kangaroo Kids (All-India rank 640) leading in Pre-School. Brands that witnessed a falling trend were Bajaj (fallen from rank 6 in 2015 to rank 16 in 2018) and Godrej (fallen from rank 9 in 2015 to rank 17 in 2018).

The Brand Trust Report 2018, the eighth in its series, is the result of a comprehensive primary research conducted on the proprietary 61-Attribute Trust Matrix of TRA. This year’s study involved 15,000 hours of fieldwork, covering 2,488 consumer-influencers across 16 cities in India; it generated 5 million datapoints and 9,000 unique brands, from which the top 1000 brands have been listed in this year’s report. The 200-page, hardbound report is available for Rs. 14,000.