Bridging the Gap: Aligning Academic and Practitioner Approaches to Brand Trust Measurement

While academic research on brand trust is extensive, there remains a gap in understanding how commercial researchers measure and operationalise this concept. This study addresses this gap by exploring how industry practitioners are assessing brand trust in the evolving consumer landscape, and how these practices align with academic frameworks. Through in-depth interviews with industry experts, we examine the methods used by commercial researchers to measure brand trust and compare them to academic approaches. Our research is anchored in the trust-as-process framework, originally developed for interpersonal and organisational trust, which offers a multi-faceted view of trust, including disposition to trust and perceived trustworthiness. Rather than defining trust narrowly, this framework helps to clarify various conceptualisations of trust and their roles in fostering trust intentions and behaviours. Our findings highlight that both commercial and academic researchers focus primarily on perceived trustworthiness, emphasising its importance in brand trust measurement. We recommend adopting perceived trustworthiness measures, and advocate for further research into the development of valid single-item scales, a method favoured by commercial researchers, for measuring each dimension of perceived trustworthiness.