The results are out, and it’s time to hear what India’s largest and most influential technology community has to say to all the brands out there…
Ernest Hemingway once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” While this tongue in cheek approach can work sometimes, when it comes to technology products most of us have had our hands burnt many times before. And when the stakes are high (thousands of rupees of your hard earned cash) you wouldn’t want to take chances. This is where we come in. By tapping into the collective wisdom of India’s most influential tech community, we bring to you our Icons of Trust report. Our mission (and we choose to accept it every year) is to analyse which brands our readers trust most and why. The Digit community is not only the oldest and most influential tech community but thankfully the most vocal. When our readers speak, brands sit up and listen.
What builds trust?
The quality of the products themselves should ideally be the most important parameter by which consumers build their trust in a particular brand. In reality, however, there are a myriad number of factors which go into this overall T-factor. For instance, consumer perception – driven to a great extent by aggressive marketing strategies employed by companies – contributes a lot. At the outset at least, a weak product will gain some amount of traction in the market thanks to this sort of a push. Eventually early adopters experience the disappointments and the word spreads. As a technology navigator our role is to prevent even these initial disappointments by way of our news, reviews, buying guides and analysis, by which we aim to empower the consumer. We cut through the jargon and distill some unbiased, objective and rational advice your way. The Icons of Trust research report is one such effort that collates the collective intelligence of people just like you and in turn empowering you make the right purchases going forward. For tech brands it’s an opportunity to put their ears to the ground and gauge the rumblings of their consumers.
How we trusted
How is trust calculated?
All respondents are asked to complete a rather long and comprehensive questionnaire, which aims at arriving at scores for six parameters: Awareness, Availability, Credibility, Loyalty, Quality and Satisfaction. These six factors are what determine how much the respondents “trust” a brand.
Awareness: Not all of you own a product from all the categories we cover, but buying decisions – in the future for yourself, or even in the present for others who seek your opinion – depend a lot on your awareness and the market’s awareness of a brand. You’re not likely to buy or recommend something you’ve never heard of before, are you? To quantify awareness, we asked the respondents open ended questions to judge unaided brand recall such as, “Which is the first brand that comes to mind”, and later, we provided people with a list of the brands, and asked them which they were aware of to measure aided recall. Awareness is like a much needed popularity contest and depends a lot on how well a brand markets itself within our shores. Awareness had a weight of 10 in the overall score.
Availability: How easily a brand or more importantly a desired model of a brand is available is an important factor in building trust towards that brand. Products that forever remain on a consumer’s wishlist for lack of availability are not really worth the hype. Availability amounted to 10 percent by weight in our overall trust index.
Credibility: Questions that assessed credibility tried to bring out how much respondents trusted a brand. Questions were asked to gauge what respondents felt about the improvements in their products, technological advancement, ease of use etc. This parameter was a substantial contributor to the overall trust index, weighing in at 15 per cent.
Satisfaction: As owners of a brand’s products, how satisfied you are with their products is one of the key factors that influence how much you trust the brand. In this regard, we questioned the respondents as to how satisfied they were after purchasing a product. Questions judged after sales service; whether repairs and service was hassle-free, how well-informed were the sales people about the product, how easy was it to get after-sales support etc. Weighing in at 15 percent this was one of the more important factors contributing to the overall trust index.
Loyalty: A lot goes into making people stay loyal to a brand. Although at Digit we strive to give fanboyism a wide berth, you have to give credit to brands for being able to incite passion in their buyers. To ascertain the loyalty that respondents held for brands, we asked them a series of questions such as “Would you buy another cell phone of the same brand again”, and whether, based on their experiences, they would buy a product in a different category from the same brand. Since ownership is a major factor in bringing about loyalty, which brands they owned contributed a great extent to the overall trust extent. We also gauged how eager the respondents were to recommend products from a brand to friends and relatives, and whether the respondent generally spoke positively or negatively about the brand.
Quality: Questions around reliability, design, innovation and features were grouped under this category. Since quality is of paramount importance, this category was given a weight of 20 in the overall trust index.
To find out the winners of other categories including Motherboards, Mobile Phones, Digital Cameras, Networking, External Storage, GPUs, Laptops, Printers, and Internal Harddrives please turn to page 60 of the January issue of Digit Magazine.
Index
| Category | URL |
| DTH | DTH |
| HD TVs | HD TVs |
| Flash / SSD | Flash / SSD |
| PMPs (or MP3 Player / DMP) | PMPs (or MP3 Player / DMP) |
| Mice & Keyboards | Mice & Keyboards |
| Home Theatre / Speakers | Home Theatre / Speakers |
| Monitors | Monitors |
| Networking | <Link> <Coming soon…> |