Amazon named America's most-trusted and recommended brand

A new survey by research firm Millward Brown and consultancy firm The Futures Company found Amazon.com to be the No. 1 brand when it comes to consumer trust in America, receiving a score of 123 (where 100 is average, 105 is good and 94 or less is poor).

FedEx came in second in the U.S., with a score of 122.

In a report summary (PDF), the research firms explain the importance of both trust and recommendation to the overall company/customer relationship:

• Trust remains essential. It is the customer’s belief, cultivated over time, in the efficacy and reliability of the brand.
• Recommendation is a separate and vital component of the consumer-brand relationship. Recommendation is the customer’s belief, grounded in recent experience, that the brand continues to perform consistently and fulfil its promise.
• Brand success requires Trust plus Recommendation. This equation forms an innovative new metric, the TrustR Score, which measures how effectively brands meet the more demanding expectations of the post-recession consumer.

Interestingly enough, the firms noted that the study was conducted in 2009, prior to the recall troubles experienced by Toyota, which ranked 7th on the U.S. charts but ranked first in Japan and Canada, with scores of 123 and 119, respectively.

Nokia topped the list in eight countries - China, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan and Thailand - with scores ranging from 117-129. Microsoft ranked No. 1 in the Czech Republic, with a score of 121.