A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

The ten most trusted brands in the U.S. have to do with health, well-being, and hygiene in everyday life — from convenient package delivery to financial health, mindful self-care, and taking care of our kids’ boo-boos.

Welcome to this year’s portfolio of the Most Trusted Brands 2023, a special report from Morning Consult that, annually, paints a picture of what everyday life for everyday people is about.

For the second year in a row, Band-Aid® brand bandages ranked top of all brands assessed among U.S. consumers from data gathered in March-April 2023. Net trust in this study is defined by asking consumers if they trust each brand to do the right thing ‘a lot’ and ‘some’ of the time minus the share who said ‘not much’ and ‘not at all.’

In the first chart, you can check out the top ten most trusted brands starting with Band-Aid brand, followed by Amazon, Kleenex, VISA, The Weather Channel, UPS, Lysol, Cheerios, Dove, and FedEx.

There are some shifts we can see from the 2022 list: last year, Clorox was #3 in the top ten, with Lysol ranking second. This year, Lysol ranks 4th, and Clorox fell out of the top 10. CVS pharmacy (as the brand is still called in the Morning Consult study although the name changed to CVS Health in 2020) fell out of the top 10 in 2023. But there’s more to say about CVS Health, which I’ll get to below in the discussion on retail players — of which CVS Health garners trust with nine other top retailers in consumers’ hearts.

Colgate and The Home Depot also fell off the top 10 most trusted.

Interestingly, Amazon re-joined the top 10 this year, having ranked lower last year.

And in 2023, trust still ranks high for Cheerios, VISA, UPS, and The Weather Channel.

There are many categories considered in this study, and I’ve selected a few that pertain to the health/care ecosystem. First, let’s talk about retail. As mentioned, CVS Health is among the top 10 most-trusted retail and e-commerce brands, with Amazon ranking tops, The Home Depot #2, Lowe’s in third, and Target in fourth place. Note that Walgreens ranks right after CVS Health in trust in the sixth spot. BestBuy, with growing ambitions and footprints in health care and digital health, took 9th place in this year’s most trusted. And, PetSmart is in 10th place, which speaks to consumers’ growing fur families and inelastic spending on their beloved pets (an important health/care phenomenon covered in Health Populi last week).

This year’s list of the top ten most trusted nonprofits yields an interesting finding: that most of the ten are touchpoints for children and young people, including #1 St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Make-A-Wish, Ronald McDonald House Charities, Shriner’s Hospitals for Children, and Big Brothers Big Sisters.

I raise this observation because Morning Consult pulls out a sidebar discussion on “a generational changing of the guards” looming for non-profits. The analysts point out that typically, nonprofit organizations have relied on older Americans as the prime donor base. This is shifting in terms of trust, with Boomers’ trust in nonprofits down by 4 points in 2023.

On the other hand, Millennials’ trust in nonprofits is up 7 points.

So a hypothesis to consider is that younger people (Millennials, who as a generational cohort are raising young families or considering having/raising children) are taking special interest in nonprofits that serve children.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  As people face greater costs related to medical care and their growing self-care demands that may fall outside of health insurance coverage, our household budgets are experiencing these line items in a retail context, competing with or crowding out other household spending.

In tomorrow’s Health Populi blog, I’ll cover The 2023 Axios Harris Poll 100, a list of the top 100 consumer brands in the U.S. which range from the most favorite “excellent” scoring (tops being Patagonia, Costco, and John Deere) and the lowest “very poor” or “critical” brands which this year were 3 major social networks, Fox Corporation and FTX on the very poor score, and The Trump Org for “Below 50% Critical” — that is #100).

I’ve sorted out the 100 to divine those companies that are most directly part of the health/care ecosystem, and you’ll see some surprises in the mix….with lots of overlap with Morning Consult‘s findings, as well.