Millennials are a somewhat strange market segment, often requiring tactics that would either irritate other customers or not affect them at all in order to be engaged. This segment of the market, born mostly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has been setting enough trends and showing enough market dominance to become a huge focus for most companies out there looking to maximize their customer base and exposure. Naturally, this means that when the Reputation Institute conducts their annual analysis of companies’ reputations based on user feedback and media, they would take this group of some 75.4 million buyers between the ages of 18 and 34 into account. Using a proprietary scoring system based on a range of information, they put together a list that shows who the most trustworthy brands are for this group.
It should surprise absolutely nobody that the most popular phone maker to not be tangled up in a government scuffle or scandal of some sort would come out on the top of the list. Sitting pretty at 86.8 points, Samsung topped the charts for garnering the trust of millennials. Just about everybody in that demographic owns a smartphone and uses it quite religiously, which means that they would need to explicitly trust a number of parties with their data in order to use the smartphone the way that they do, but nobody needs to be more trusted in this equation than the manufacturer; the manufacturer, after all, has the power to strip whatever data they want, determine what software a user can and can’t run and even whether they get software updates.
In order to earn that coveted top spot, Samsung placed first in five out of the seven measurements that the Reputation Institute uses to create their scores. They experienced a huge surge since last year, jumping up 9.3 points. While they are the most trustworthy brand to millennials, Rolex has them beat for the most trusted worldwide brand overall. Among millennials, however, Rolex is only number nine, sitting behind the likes of Nike, Lego and Nintendo. The results were based on an online survey of 10,000 respondents, with data from those who knew the companies fairly well or very well being the only data considered for the final rankings.