Australia’s Most Trusted and Distrusted Brands + Reputation 

Overview

This quarterly update from Roy Morgan Risk Labs examines Australia’s most trusted and distrusted brands and explores why traditional reputation measurement alone is insufficient for identifying emerging business risks. The presentation argues that distrust is a separate and more powerful warning signal because it reveals anger, frustration, and future commercial threats before they appear in sales, churn, or market share data.

Main Points

Australia’s Trust and Distrust Landscape

The presentation begins with the latest Risk Watch findings, highlighting that Optus became Australia’s most distrusted brand in both the month of March and the 12 months to March 2026. This followed the fatal triple zero outage in September 2025, demonstrating how quickly a major service failure can transform into a national distrust event. The speaker explains that trust is an earned expectation that a brand will meet expectations, while distrust is an active negative reaction when customers feel a company has failed them. Distrust creates stronger consequences because dissatisfied customers become less forgiving, more likely to complain, and more likely to switch to competitors.

The speaker emphasizes that trust functions as social glue and a measure of fairness in society. Australians are described as active judges of whether companies behave fairly, particularly during situations where reliability and responsibility matter. A trusted brand may receive patience when problems occur, but a distrusted brand faces a much harsher response because every future mistake can reinforce existing negative beliefs.

Why Traditional Metrics Miss Brand Risk

A major argument in the presentation is that many businesses are looking at the wrong signals. Standard measurements such as brand tracking, customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and even traditional trust tracking can provide reassurance while failing to identify people who are actively becoming hostile toward a brand. By the time distrust appears through declining sales, customer losses, or reduced market share, the damage may already be significant.

The speaker uses Optus and Coles as examples of brands where public risk became visible after major events. The key message is that companies need measurements that identify emerging frustration before it becomes a business crisis. Distrust monitoring acts as an early-warning system because it captures negative emotions and perceptions before they translate into measurable commercial outcomes.

Australia’s Broader Distrust Environment

The presentation explains that Australia remains a more distrusting than trusting society, with distrust increasing after COVID and during the cost-of-living crisis. Rising prices and financial pressure have made consumers more sensitive to issues of fairness, value, and whether companies prioritize profits over customers. However, trusted brands can still maintain strong positions even within a high-distrust environment.

The industry analysis shows significant differences between sectors. Retail, consumer products, and banking perform relatively strongly on trust measures, while telecommunications, social media, and mining experience higher distrust levels. The speaker argues that industries carry reputational baggage, but individual brands must still be evaluated based on how consumers personally perceive and experience them.

Australia’s Most Trusted Brands

Roy Morgan’s trust rankings show Bunnings maintaining its position as Australia’s most trusted brand, followed by Aldi, Kmart, Commonwealth Bank, and Apple. The speaker notes that the top six trusted brands have remained relatively stable, suggesting Australians continue to reward businesses associated with reliability, quality, value, and doing the right thing.

Several brands improved significantly in the rankings. Samsung moved up three positions due to perceptions of product quality and reliability. Chemist Warehouse entered the top 20 after the Sigma merger, benefiting from associations with affordability and customer focus. Outside the top 20, Allianz, LG, and Dan Murphy’s showed strong improvement, driven respectively by better relationships, product quality perceptions, and competitive pricing.

Australia’s Most Distrusted Brands

Optus replaced Woolworths as Australia’s most distrusted brand following the triple zero outage. Facebook and Temu ranked second and third for distrust, while Woolworths and Coles remained among the most distrusted brands due to ongoing concerns around supermarket pricing and fairness.

The speaker also highlights technology-related distrust. OpenAI, including ChatGPT, experienced one of the biggest declines in trust rankings due to concerns about profit motives and ethics. Google continued its long decline, showing that even highly successful technology companies can accumulate distrust over time. The presentation argues that brand familiarity and usage do not protect companies from underlying distrust.

Coles, Supermarkets, and the Importance of Real-Time Monitoring

The speaker discusses how quickly distrust rankings can change following public events. March data showed supermarkets improving, but a later Federal Court ruling against Coles regarding misleading discount claims demonstrated how quickly new issues can affect public perception. This highlights the difference between quarterly or annual reputation reports and continuous distrust monitoring.

The key lesson is that businesses need ongoing awareness of risk movement rather than relying only on historical measurements. A company may appear stable based on past performance while new events create rapidly growing distrust.

Reputation Is Not Enough

The second half of the presentation focuses on the question many organizations ask: “Is reputation enough?” The speaker’s answer is no because reputation and distrust measure fundamentally different things. Reputation measures whether a company is respected, admired, familiar, and socially accepted, but it does not reveal whether customers are becoming angry or losing confidence.

Reputation is described as an aggregate, backward-looking measure that summarizes past perceptions. Distrust is presented as a forward-looking risk indicator that identifies potential future problems. The speaker compares reputation to looking through a rear-view mirror, while distrust acts as an early-warning system that shows what may happen next.

The Limited Role of Reputation in Trust and Distrust

The presentation argues that reputation has less influence on trust and distrust than many organizations assume. According to the research presented, only 6% of Australians who distrust a brand identify reputation as the reason, while only 9% of those who trust a brand credit reputation as the cause.

Instead, consumers mainly judge brands through factors such as honesty, value, customer treatment, ethics, service quality, privacy, and whether the company appears to prioritize itself over customers. Distrust is especially connected to the belief that a company will put its own interests first when it thinks nobody is watching.

Google as an Example of Hidden Brand Risk

Google is used as a case study showing how a brand can have strong reputation and high usage while still carrying significant distrust. The company remains familiar, widely used, and often performs well on traditional reputation measures, yet Roy Morgan’s research shows Google has consistently been more distrusted than trusted.

The main sources of distrust relate to privacy concerns, perceptions of unethical behaviour, and beliefs that the company is overly profit-driven. The speaker argues that this matters because distrust reduces customer forgiveness and creates vulnerability when competitors or alternatives emerge, such as AI-powered search tools.

Why Organizations Need Both Reputation and Distrust Measurement

The presentation concludes that companies should not abandon reputation measurement but should understand its limitations. Reputation provides insight into overall brand standing, while distrust identifies whether a brand is moving toward potential danger.

The speaker argues that serious organizations require both measurements, but when the goal is identifying emerging commercial risk, distrust becomes the critical metric. It provides leaders with earlier signals of problems before they become visible through traditional business results.

Roy Morgan’s Risk Monitor Research Foundation

The final section explains the research foundation behind the Risk Monitor. Since late 2017, Roy Morgan has surveyed approximately 200,000 Australians about which companies they trust, which companies they distrust, and why. Responses are open-ended, allowing consumers to explain their opinions in their own words.

This research has produced around 600,000 brand nominations and operates as a continuous monitoring system rather than a once-a-year reputation scorecard. The goal is to identify risk trajectories, escalation points, and opportunities for brand recovery.

Key Insights

• A brand can be highly trusted, widely used, and strongly respected while still accumulating dangerous levels of distrust underneath the surface.
• Distrust is not simply the opposite of trust; it is an active emotional response that increases complaints, reduces forgiveness, and encourages switching behaviour.
• Traditional reputation metrics are mainly backward-looking, while distrust measurement is designed to identify future vulnerability.
• Major brand crises often begin with small signals of frustration that traditional metrics fail to capture until the damage is already visible.
• Consumer perceptions are driven less by reputation itself and more by lived experiences involving fairness, ethics, service, privacy, and whether companies appear self-interested.

Conclusion

The presentation’s central recommendation is that organizations should stop relying on reputation alone as a measure of brand health. Reputation shows where a brand currently stands, but distrust reveals where it may be heading and provides an early warning system for future commercial risks. Roy Morgan argues that businesses need both measures, but distrust monitoring is essential for identifying vulnerabilities before they become major problems.