Australia’s most trusted and distrusted brands revealed
Bunnings remains Australia’s most trusted brand as telcos, supermarkets and fuel companies suffer in light of outages and allegations of price gouging.
The popular hardware chain held its position from the previous survey, as did the rest of the top five most trusted brands in Aldi, Kmart, Commonwealth Bank, and Apple, according to pollster Roy Morgan.
Coles and Woolworths continue to suffer reputation damage due to ongoing court cases. Getty Images
The study, released quarterly and surveying 17,704 Aussies, also found the most distrusted brands had not changed, with Optus still reeling from its Triple Zero outage last year.
Coles and Woolworths remain in the top five as high-profile court cases found the former guilty of misleading shoppers over its discounts, while the latter remains before the court.
Meta - the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - and Temu are the second and third least trusted brands in Australia respectively.
Roy Morgan CEO, Michele Levine, said Optus’ continued poor standing reveals how strongly people felt about the outage and the company’s response to it.
Gina Rinehart has contributed to Hancock Prospecting becoming less trusted. Lisa Maree Williams
“Australians didn’t treat [it] as an inconvenience, but as a betrayal,” she said.
Telstra’s position also declined, with the brand now the sixth-least trusted in Australia, with the judgment coming before the company suffered a widespread outage of its own last month.
Hancock Prospecting, owned by billionaire Gina Rinehart, entered the top 20 least trusted brands for the first time, with Rinehart’s political involvement in supporting and funding One Nation’s Pauline Hanson a contributing factor.
BP, Shell, and Ampol had their reputations take a hit as Aussies express anger at the price of petrol during the Middle East conflict, amid beliefs price gouging was taking place.
“People [were] watching the same litre of petrol change price by suburb during the Middle East Conflict,” Levine said, with Aussies feeling the impact in their hip pocket as a result.
Levine also noted OpenAI’s position had deteriorated with the company losing trust with Aussies.
She said the company and other AI providers were losing trust due to privacy concerns and the risk to people’s personal data being exposed.
“That’s an AI brand sitting in a list of distrust, otherwise earned by outages, court findings, and price gouging,” Levine said, referring to OpenAI.
“And it got here faster than any of them, without a disaster to its name.”
Share a tip-off, video or photo with us
Most viewed in Australia
‘Unimaginable loss’: Two children killed in horror crash on the way home from school
Talia and Ebony were physically abused by their mother. Then she was made into a TV star
Blanche d’Alpuget, writer and widow of Bob Hawke, dies aged 82
Justine lost her brother suddenly. Then an unexpected email arrived
