Most Trusted Brands 2015: The methodology of selection

Conducted by Nielsen, Most Trusted Brands remains among the largest researches of its kind in India, with a design sample of 7,200 - distributed across socioeconomic classifications, age, income and geography.
This year, at the first stage, sales and media visibility data was analysed to arrive at a list of brands for further discussion and shortlisting for the MTB 2015 consumer survey. After considerable brainstorming between Brand Equity and the research team at Nielsen, a few brands from the list were dropped and new ones were added. 56 new brands were added to the list this year - replacing brands scoring very low in previous year’s ranking. Categories such as mineral water made way for more contemporary ones like e-commerce and services. In total, 373 brands were considered for the consumer survey this year.

Respondent profile

- Chief Wage Earner (CWE) ¡V The person who makes the highest contribution towards household upkeep.



- Housewife (HW) Any married female and unemployed, age 15-60 years

- Youth –15-25 years and not CWE/HW

- Older - 26-60 years and not CWE/HW.

The survey was restricted to NCCS (New Consumer Classification System) AB with a view to focusing on the prime target audience for most branded products and services.

Brands & attributes

All brands were divided into 12 different panels; each panel was exposed to a matched set of respondents in terms of demographic variables of NCCS, age group, gender and respondent category. Each respondent evaluated 31 or 32 brands - each brand was evaluated by 600 respondents.

The list of statements used to evaluate the most trusted brands and the attributes they represented.



Brand evaluation:

Stage 1: Each respondent was asked to indicate the familiarity for each brand on a four-point scale. The scale range would be: 1 - I have not heard of this brand; 2 - I have heard of this brand, but know nothing about it; 3 - I have heard of this brand and know a little about it; 4 - I have heard of this brand and know it quite well

Stage 2: The respondent evaluated all brands that have been rated by him/her, 3 or 4 on the familiarity scale stated above. Those who rated a brand 1 or 2 on familiarity scale were not asked to evaluate the brand (their individual brand trust score is considered to be 0)

- Overall rating : The evaluation was done at an overall level for each brand by indicating his/her rating on a 10 point scale where 1 stands for 'Extremely poor' and the 10 for 'Perfect in every way'

- Respondents were then asked to respond to a battery of four statements that define brand trust on ‘1’ to ‘10’ scale where '1' would mean that the statement 'doesn't apply to the brand at all' and '10' would mean that the statement is 'completely applicable to the brand'.

Stage 3: The final brand rating is arrived at through the following steps:-

- Step 1: Calculate a brand trust score for each respondent = [(0.5*Overal l)+ (0.5*(Attr1+Attr2¡K+Attr4)/4)]

- Step 2: Multiply the brand score by the familiarity score /weight. This were either 3 or 4 as those rating the brand 1 or 2 on familiarity are directly considered to have a brand trust score of 0

- Step 3: The total of all the brand scores (across respondents) is calculated and then divided by the total number of respondents (including those who give brand scores of 0) i.e. the average is taken on the overall base of respondents who were asked about that brand, i.e. coded 1/2/3/4 in familiarity scale. to get the overall brand score Thus, the final score for each brand is on a base of all respondents, irrespective of their level of familiarity.

This final rating for all the brands is directly compared and sorted in descending order to determine the Most Trusted Brands.