BENGALURU: TRA’s Most Trusted Brands Report, India Study, 2019 (BTR 2019) was unveiled in Bengaluru Today. The ninth edition of the report came up with a few upsets in brand rankings as compared to the previous years’ reports. A change in methodology has sprung a number of surprises in BTR 2019. The foremost among the changes is that respondents were additionally asked to name the category while naming 183 brands each. This helped remove even the slightest human interpretation subjectivity that could have crept in during analysis says TRA. The improved methodology helped create 65 new categories with new category leaders informs TRA.
Computer brand Dell jumped up to first place as the most trusted brand in India from a survey of sample size 2,315 ‘consumer influencers’ across the country. Another major eyebrow raiser, that begs to question the validity of the report is brand ‘Jeep’ at second place, followed by Indian Insurance giant LIC at third rank. Amazon came in at rank four followed by Apple iPhone at fifth place.
Among the top 10 brands in the 2019 report are three Indian brands, whilst among the top 20, were seven Indian brands. Besides LIC, the other Indian brands among the top 20 most trusted brands were Maruti Suzuki (overall rank #9), State bank of India (overall rank #10), Airtel (overall rank #11), Tanishq (overall rank #14), Amul (overall rank #16) and Reliance Jio (overall rank #17).
In the category of media brands, - Newspaper – English (Media-Print) Times of India (overall rank #142), Hindustan Times, (overall rank #292) The Hindu (overall rank #474), DNA (overall rank #796) and Hitavada (overall rank #840) were the most trusted brands, with TOI the leader in the category.
In the Hindi GEC (Media-TV) Star Plus was the most trusted brand (overall rank #375) followed by Zee TV (overall rank #677) followed by Colors (overall rank #809).
In the Hindi News (Media-TV) category, Aaj Tak was ranked first (overall rank #183), followed by ABP News (overall rank #199), India TV (overall rank #271), NDTV India (overall rank #296) and Zee News (overall rank #402) in that order.
The DTH category was led by Tata Sky (overall rank #236) followed by Dish TV (overall rank #537), Videocon d2h (overall rank #933) and Airtel DTH (overall rank #953) in that order.
Besides a section that ranks 1,000 brands, there is a section in the report that shows the ranking of brands category-wise under 37 super categories, which have been further divided into categories and sub-categories. Since a number of brands have many other brands within their umbrella, BTR 2019 has a new section – ‘Group Brand portfolios’. A case in point is brand Tata which has 23 brands under it that include Tanishq Jewellery, Tata Motors and its sub brand Tata Indica. However, conspicuous by their absence in the Group Brand portfolios were HUL and its associated companies brands and the diverse brands under ITC.
“We were also surprised at the results that the survey threw up, we cross checked the listings, including Jeep,” said TRA’s Research Director Sachin Bhosle.
TRA avers in its media release that the Brand Trust Report 2019 is the result of a comprehensive primary research conducted on the proprietary 61-Attribute Brand Trust Matrix of TRA. This year’s study involved 15,000 hours of fieldwork, and generated 5 million data points and 9,000 unique brands, from which the top 1000 brands have been listed in this year’s report. The study covered 2,315 consumer-influencers across 16 cities in India. Indian Statistical Institute is TRA’s statistical partner for the research methodology.
TRA Research provides Buying Propensity Reports mined from more than 30 million data points on brand intangibles of 9,000 brands and also provides bespoke studies based on the same matrices. TRA Research is also the publisher of TRA’s Brand Trust Report and of India's Most Attractive Brands.
