- 6 years ago
5 March 2021
Trust increased more among Australians in the past 12 months than it did in any other country, new research has revealed.
The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer shows trust jumped 12 points in Australia between 2020 and 2021, moving the country out of the red and into the black when it comes to trust. It now sits at 59 points – just below the positive zone on the trust scale – a huge improvement given Australia’s negative 47 points last year.
It goes to show that Australian governments, businesses and the media got a big boost from their handling of the pandemic, pushing Australia to the front of the global pack when it came to gaining trust at a time when many countries saw the value decline.
However, Edelman also found Australia suffered from a ‘trust gap’. It found while trust among the informed public was extremely high, it was middling among the mass population, with a significant proportion of Aussies showing strong distrust in government, business, non-government organisations (NGOs) and the media.
This result sends a strong signal to all sectors that there is more work to be done.
“Business and NGOs are now seen as both competent and ethical,” the Edelman report states, while government and the media are viewed as being less confident, although they still rate positively for ethics.
The 2021 report also highlighted that Australians want a greater focus on improving our health system, and showed trust in government officials jumped a huge 14 points when it comes to being credible spokespeople.
So how will this impact Australia moving forward?
There is no doubt pharma companies have, by and large, fared well in their managing of the pandemic, yet it appears the amount of trust given to companies was more luck than design.
Pfizer is riding high after bringing to market a new mRNA vaccine that has to date proven to be both safe and effective, even though it is selling the shot at a profit. AstraZeneca, on the other hand, teamed up with Oxford University for its adenovirus shot and, despite bringing it to market at no cost and with little experience in vaccines, has suffered criticism for the shot providing less efficacy than RNA vaccines.
The risks of reputational damage by trying to do the right thing but failing to meet unreasonable expectations due to science and a lack of understanding in the community demonstrates the tightrope companies have walked in navigating the pandemic.
In another study, almost two-thirds of Americans gave the pharma industry a thumbs up. Just one year ago, the industry was rated positively by only 32 per cent of Americans, according to The Harris Poll survey.
The company’s recent February poll found 62 per cent of Americans rated the pharma industry as a five, six or seven on a 7-point scale where 7 was “very good”. That’s an increase of 30 percentage points since January 2020, before the pandemic hit US shores.
According to Fierce Pharma, Lilly CEO Dave Ricks said last April the industry has a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset” its reputation.
Christina Falzano, Havas’ Conran Design Group managing director, told the publication in August that it presents “an opportunity to demonstrate… what is at the heart of what they do, which is improving people’s lives and applying science to do that”.
Pharma has a huge opportunity in front of it now to change its reputation long term. Making the gains it has achieved in the past year stick and building on this foundation will be the real challenge.