The brands that Australians are now hating on, and why

Investors may love the US tech giants OpenAI, Google, (Facebook owner) Meta and Nvidia but for consumers these mega-companies are among what Australians view as the most distrusted brands – in part reflecting our distinct suspicion around artificial intelligence. And these brands are the public face of it.

Australians have been legendary early adopters of technology over the decades but, according to the most recent survey on brand trust by Roy Morgan, we have concerns about these companies’ ethics, profiteering and anticompetitive behaviour, with privacy protection, in the case of Google, also a concern.

These brands appear to be falling with a bullet in trust at the same rate their share prices surge.

Fears that AI will replace jobs – which are receiving increased currency in the media and spurred by large organisations talking up their AI adoption credentials – are undoubtedly feeding into the community’s distrust of AI’s largest names.

Only this week Andrew Charlton, the assistant federal minister covering technology and the digital economy, laid this bare when describing how the public thinks about this latest technical revolution. He quoted a different survey, which found only 36 per cent of Australians trust AI – the lowest among our global peers. When rated on interest in learning about AI, Australia takes the international wooden spoon.

Charlton said Australians are not refusing the future but asking, in effect, who is this technology for?

“It is the reasonable response of people who suspect they are being asked to carry the risks while someone else hoovers up the rewards,” Charlton says.

OpenAI was the 19th-least trusted brand, while Google was the 15th-least trusted.

AI isn’t alone among industries that rank poorly for trust. Social media, including Facebook (Meta) and X, and TikTok, all fare poorly. But social media still ranks better than telecommunications – dragged down by our most distrusted brand, Optus, and our eighth-most distrusted brand, Telstra.

Optus has been beset by scandals including the triple zero outage, the cyber hacking disaster in 2022 and last year’s finding of engaging in unconscionable conduct for which it was fined $100 million – all trust-testing events.

So it’s particularly interesting that occupying the other end of the scale – the most trusted brands – bricks-and-mortar retailers and what could be described as old-school businesses dominate the top rankings.

It is clearly thematic that we trust the brands of physical stores. No surprise that Bunnings and Aldi rank one and two respectively. But they are also in the company of retail peers including Kmart, Apple, Big W, Myer, JB Hi-Fi and Australia Post inside the top 10 for trust.

The Commonwealth Bank is the only one of the big four banks to score a top 10 position in the brand trust stakes but the banking sector is still positive overall.

And while Aldi ranks second in most trusted, its competitors Coles and Woolworths score very poorly – both in the top 10 most distrusted brands. A concerted campaign over recent years by the government attempted to lay blame for the cost-of-living crisis at their feet. And this survey was taken before the recent Federal Court decision that Coles had misled shoppers on discounting. If the Woolworths decision goes the same way, their respective brand trust rankings could well deteriorate.

The remainder of the brands that comprise the 10 least trusted brands are less about the industry in which they sit and have more aberrant reasons for their inclusion.

Qantas, for example, still carries the long tail of its treatment of customers in the post-COVID period under its former chief executive Alan Joyce, and Tesla seems to be tainted by the face (and often bizarre behaviour) of its largest shareholder, Elon Musk. Toyota, for example, scored a strong trust rating – among the top 10.

Lost trust is difficult to recover – particularly in the echo chamber of social media.

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