With consumers the world over feeling greater financial stress in 2025, people are trusting brands more than institutions to help them both feel good and expecting them to “do” good, we learn in Brand Trust, From We to Me, a special report from the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer.
The overall theme of this year’s Trust Barometer was “Trust and the Crisis of Grievance.”
One artifact of peoples’ grievance is their shift from “we” to “me;” in this new report with a lens on brands, Edelman finds that consumers expect brands to support peoples’ well-being — bolstering security, optimism, knowledge, and community.
See these features here, led by consumers’ demand for brands to make me feel good across a range of “goodness” emotions — to feel happy, confident, inspired, and calm.
Next, help me be optimistic, followed by help me do good and make a positive change in the world, educate me, and provide me with community.
Taken together, these factors drive dual brand responsibilities: to do good and make me feel good, simultaneously.
As Edelman’s data reveals, two in three people globally say they adopt brands based on their beliefs about what’s happening in society. At the same time, two-thirds of people say it’s important for brands to help me personally feel good across those goodness factors discussed above.
Brands far outweigh peoples’ trust in institutions, Edelman found this year, which prompted this deeper dive into the nature of brands and consumers’ relationships with them.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: This last chart from the Edelman brand-trust report examines business sectors and the “good feelings” categories each business segment can influence or support.
As you’re in Health Populi, we start with the top category of health and pharmaceuticals. In the heat-map style graphic, the “hottest” responses fall fairly equally across the five feeling-good drivers including giving me optimism, helping me do good, making me feel good, providing me with community, and teaching and educating me. Simply put: across all eight business sectors — tech, food and bev, fashion and apparel, beauty and personal care, financial services, hospitality and travel, and energy, it’s health care that ranks “hottest” for doing good and bettering peoples’ lives.
That’s the opportunity for stakeholders in the health/care ecosystem to continue to re-build trust in a world of grievance. Grievance has negatively impacted health care, health insurance and plans, life science companies, med-tech, and many segments of retail health. We see here that people as health consumers yearn for health/care brands to support their values and value in this time of eroding financial health.
