How to measure brand trust: the Brand Trust Quotient
Brand trust is measured by checking whether a brand's experience matches its story. NEWaukee's Brand Trust Quotient (BTQ) does this with four sources of evidence: how a brand describes itself, how it shows up in public channels, what customers say in reviews, and what employees say about working there. A dedicated AI agent analyzes each source. Together they produce a BTQ score and a gap analysis that shows where your brand is building trust and where it is losing it.
Trust is earned in experiences: the invitation, the welcome, the follow-up, the review response. Most brand metrics tell you what people say about a brand. The BTQ looks at what people actually experience.
Why most brand metrics miss trust
Awareness, reach and sentiment show whether people know your brand and how they talk about it. They don't show whether your brand keeps the promises it makes. A brand can be well known and well liked in its advertising while its reviews, its social replies and its employees tell a different story. That gap between the story and the experience is where trust is lost, and it is what the BTQ measures.
“Most brand metrics tell you what people say. Our Brand Trust Quotient platform highlights what people actually experience. We didn’t see a tool in the market that measured trust the way we believe it’s actually formed, through real experiences. So we built it ourselves.”
The four dimensions of the BTQ
Dimension
Stated Brand Identity
Coherence, specificity, distinctiveness, and consistency of your brand across public channels.
External Presentation
Consistency, engagement, and responsiveness of your brand on social media and other public forums.
Customer Experience
Sentiment trends, recurring complaints, and response quality across public reviews.
Employee Signals
Sentiment trends, employee comments, and gaps between executive and individual contributor ratings.
What it Measures
What a Gap Looks Like
Your website, LinkedIn and directory listings describe the company in different ways, or describe it in terms any competitor could use.
Questions and comments go unanswered, or the tone online doesn't match the brand you describe.
The same complaint repeats across reviews, or replies are generic and slow.
Leadership rates the company far higher than the people doing the work.
How the Score Works
Each dimension is scored on its own, then combined into one BTQ score on a scale of 0 to 100. Scores are benchmarked against competitors and against your industry, so you can see whether a gap is specific to your brand or common in your category.
We have more than 200 North American companies in our current sample across sectors: direct-to-consumer, professional services, hospitality, healthcare, finance and more.
The BTQ reads public evidence: your own channels, social media, public reviews and employee review sites.
What You Receive
Your BTQ score, overall and for each of the four dimensions.
An outline of your brand's trust strengths and gaps.
Benchmarking against competitors and your industry.
Recommended actions, ranked by where trust is being lost.
Formatted into a presentation within 5 to 7 business days
How the BTQ compares with other brand measures
How likely customers say they are to recommend you.
Measure
Net Promoter Score
Brand Tracking Surveys
Awareness and perception among a sampled audience over time.
Social Listening
Volume and sentiment of public mentions.
Whether your stated brand, public presence, customer experience and employee experience line up.
Why, and whether employees and public channels tell the same story.
Brand Trust Quotient
What actually happens in reviews, replies and day-to-day experience.
How mentions compare with your stated identity and employee experience.
It reads public evidence, so it complements a survey of your own customers rather than replacing one.
What it Tells You
What it Misses
Organizations Using the Brand Trust Quotient
Organizations using the BTQ include PS Seasoning, Sargento, Catalyst Construction and Discover Wauwatosa.
“BTQ gave me something I didn't have the time or resources to do myself: a real look at whether the brand we're putting out into the world is actually landing the way we intend.”
— Beth Gleesing, Tourism Specialist at Discover WauwatosaTurning a Score into Action
A BTQ score is useful only if it changes what people experience. The gaps usually sit in small moments: a confusing registration page, an unanswered review, a welcome that depends on who is working that day. NEWaukee's customer experience team maps those moments and redesigns them, then the next BTQ shows whether trust moved.
When to measure: before a rebrand or a major campaign, after a leadership or ownership change, and once a year to track progress.
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Brand trust is the confidence people have that a brand will do what it says. It is built or lost through experiences, not messaging alone, which is why it can drop even while awareness grows.
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Compare the brand's stated identity with the evidence of how it behaves: its public channels, customer reviews and employee feedback. The Brand Trust Quotient scores each of these and benchmarks them against competitors and your industry.
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A “good” BTQ score is often sector-specific, but well-aligned brands tend to score between 80-100.
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We can typically turn around a report within 5 to 7 business days.
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No, BTQ is not only for large brands. We work with many different types of brands. For the BTQ specifically, we usually recommend it for companies that have at least 10 or more employees.