TRUST FACTORS

Identifying America’s go-to products was only one goal of this year’s Reader’s Digest Trusted Brands survey of 3,500 representative consumers, conducted by the national polling firm Ipsos. We also wanted to know what influenced buying decisions, and some of the results were surprising. For instance, price didn’t generally affect trust. Only 10 percent of people said that an unusually low price would make them distrust a health-care product, and only 11 percent said they distrusted generics. Positive online reviews spoke to many people: 45 percent of those looking for a weight-loss system said that they put significant faith in them. Overall, the biggest factor driving trust was whether a product had worked in the past—63 percent of people cited that factor, followed by 54 percent who looked at the brand’s overall reputation. On the other hand, only 6 percent of consumers said their trust was affected by a claim of being “new” or “improved,” the lowest factor on our list.