Navigating the Consumer Trust Crisis: What Brands Need to Know

In 2026, consumer trust is anything but a given. In fact, for many audience segments, distrust is the norm.

A recent Edelman Trust Barometer framed today’s climate as a global “Crisis of Grievance,” the result of events over the past 25 years—from the Iraq War to the 2008 financial crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic—that have chipped away at trust in leaders and institutions. Evidence of this crisis includes an unprecedented decline in employees’ trust in their employers to do what’s right, record-high levels of concern that leaders lie to the public, and four in 10 global respondents reporting that they view hostile activism (including threats or even violence) as a viable means for driving change. That ratio rose to 1 in 2 among people between the ages of 18 and 34. 

Among major institutions, brands still hold a relatively advantageous position—ranking as more trusted than government, NGO, and media entities—but this climate of growing distrust is impacting them as well. The rise of AI usage among brands has opened up fresh concerns: A stark 79% of Americans don’t trust businesses to leverage AI responsibly. AI has also amplified consumers’ data privacy concerns, with fewer than half (48%) of US consumers saying the benefits of online services outweigh the privacy risks.

Even more, consumers have grown increasingly willing to voice their displeasure by “voting with their wallets.” Recent years have seen a variety of high-profile consumer boycotts—on companies ranging from Bud Light and Cracker Barrel to Target to Apple and Netflix—driven by consumers unwilling to support brands whose actions conflicted with their values. Nearly a third of Americans have boycotted a business, and 45% say they research a company's values or stance before buying at least some of the time—a figure that climbs to 59% among Gen Z. To top it all off, US consumer sentiment dropped to a record low in May, adding economic anxiety to an already fragile trust environment.

Brands today cannot take consumer trust for granted. As leaders strategize around how to earn and maintain that trust, authenticity, consistency, data privacy, and brand safety must remain top of mind.

Building Consumer Trust Through Authenticity and Consistency

Over the past decade or so, the rise of conscious consumerism has led to brands increasingly taking social and environmental stands. But consumers and stakeholders demand authenticity and expect a coherent alignment between brands’ words and their actions: Those who try to talk the talk without walking the walk will quickly garner backlash and lose consumer trust—and dollars—as a result (see: “greenwashing”; “rainbow washing”; “woke-washing” ).

But a key aspect of effective authenticity that’s less discussed (though equally important) is consistency. “Brands need to be loud and proud about what they stand for,” says Molly Marshall, Client Strategy and Insights Partner at Basis. “But they also need to do that consistently. When brands try to please everyone or shift their values according to the cultural or political climate, that’s when they receive backlash.”

Bud Light offers one of the most notorious recent examples of how inconsistency can generate backlash from multiple directions at once. In 2023, the brand partnered with influencer Dylan Mulvaney on a promotional campaign. The campaign received backlash from conservatives, with critics accusing Bud Light of “going woke” for featuring a transgender woman in its campaign. That response drew its own backlash, with calls for a "buycott" encouraging people to buy Bud Light in support of the campaign. Anheuser-Busch released a statement that further fanned dissent on both sides by neither standing by its partnership with Mulvaney nor directly addressing the controversy at all. Added together, the financial and brand damage was sustained and significant: Bud Light sales and purchase incidence were roughly 28% lower than the same period in prior years in the three months following the boycott, a decline that persisted for close to eight months.

Another cautionary tale around consistency (or lack thereof) has been playing out in the industry in recent years in relation to Target. In 2023, the brand received blowback for the Pride month-themed merchandise it featured, with conservative consumers and social media creators encouraging a boycott. Target, which at that point had celebrated Pride month with Pride-themed merchandise for over a decade, then released a statement that it would remove some of the items from that year’s Pride collection in response to the backlash. This, in turn, garnered even more negative reactions: The company received bomb threats accusing it of betraying LGBTQIA+ people, and a coalition of 15 state attorneys general came together to encourage the brand to stand by the LGBTQIA+ community. Panelists discussing LGBTQ brand advocacy at SXSW the following year agreed that Target’s decision to walk back its stance in the face of backlash ultimately made things worse for the brand. Still, the controversy continues in 2026: The State Board of Administration of Florida has an ongoing class-action lawsuit against Target alleging that the brand misled shareholders about the risks associated with its 2023 Pride Month campaign, resulting in billions of dollars in investor losses.

A similar controversy began in early 2025, when Target—known at the time for its strong support of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and Black-owned businesses after the 2020 George Floyd protests—announced plans to scale back several DEI programs. This move aligned with a broader trend among major brands and came as the Trump Administration took steps to end government DEI programs. The retail giant received swift blowback from consumers, including boycotts that appeared to compound Target’s existing financial and operational struggles, with Target executives admitting in May 2025 that it had contributed to a decrease in sales. The company’s CEO stepped down in August of that year as the company reported its third consecutive quarter of declining sales—a slump that continued through 2025 and is only now beginning to lift.

“When consumers see a brand like Target—which had previously committed to DEI—pull those commitments back, they’re going to wonder if they can trust them to authentically act out their brand values or if they’re just going to react based on what’s happening politically,” says Kate Diehl, Group VP of Integrated Client Solutions at Basis.

For brands, the combination of today’s crisis of trust with the rise of conscious consumerism and a polarized political climate means that taking a stand on social and political issues comes with real risk. Brands should only take a stand when they can back it up with authentic action and are prepared to weather criticism. And, when pushback comes, the best response is often to stay the course and maintain their initial stance to demonstrate consistency.

That said, for many brands, the best move may be to simply not take a position on such polarizing issues. US adults are split on whether or not businesses should take a public stance on current events, with 51% saying they should and 49% saying they shouldn’t. For brands whose products or services aren’t related to social or political issues, that split may be reason enough not to engage.  

Building Consumer Trust Through Data Privacy

Ethical data use is also central to building consumer trust in 2026. Data privacy concerns have increased dramatically in recent years, with the share of US consumers worried about data privacy and security increasing by 10 percentage points between 2024 and 2025, from 60% to 70%. Advertisers recognize how these concerns impact trust, with 46% naming transparent communication about data practices as the best way to grow customer confidence. “Data privacy is considered table stakes by consumers at this point,” says Marshall. “Still, brands and advertisers are struggling to implement it consistently.”

In addition to consumer concern, signal loss has also pushed advertisers towards more privacy-first approaches in recent years. “Even beyond building trust with consumers by respecting their data privacy, advertisers need to be able to rely on privacy-friendly solutions like first-party data to successfully target and measure their campaigns as signals drop off,” says Diehl. At the same time, first-party data comes with an ethical responsibility for advertisers—to gather, organize, store, and leverage that data in ways that preserve consumers’ privacy.

Data Privacy and AI

The rise of AI has further amplified privacy considerations. With 95% of digital advertisers reporting that they use generative or agentic AI in their work at least once a month, marketing teams must take even more care to protect customer data.

Some AI-driven tools, particularly those used in collecting and analyzing data, present serious data privacy risks. Agentic AI raises the stakes even further, as AI agents can access data across systems and act on it autonomously, meaning a privacy misstep can compound before a human ever reviews it. As advertisers increasingly adopt these tools, brands risk garnering significant distrust if they don’t take the proper precautions.

To adapt AI responsibly, advertisers must establish clear data governance protocols and place guardrails around what data feeds AI tools. AI partner selection is equally important: Marketers should audit AI vendors to ensure their commitment to data privacy, prioritizing solutions that offer transparency and demonstrate the reasoning behind their outputs rather than operating as a black box. Brands that treat privacy as a core component of their AI strategy will be best positioned to earn and maintain consumer trust.

Building Consumer Trust Through Brand Safety

Finally, advertisers looking to build more trust with consumers should work to prioritize brand safety across their campaigns, with recent industry developments making this focus all the more critical.

Advertisers have felt increasing concern around brand safety for years now—indeed, close to half of media experts name brand suitability as their top priority when it comes to media quality. The rise of generative and agentic AI has only amplified these concerns, with 100% of marketers agreeing in a recent survey that AI presents a brand safety and misinformation risk, and 88.6% describing that risk as moderate to significant. The proliferation of MFAs and AI-generated content online has made rigorous supply path optimization (SPO) even more critical for programmatic advertisers—without it, ad spend will continue to flow toward low-quality, AI-generated inventory that both compromises brand safety and inflates impression counts while delivering little real value.

Social media carries the highest brand risk of all digital media channels, according to just over half of advertisers. In fact, two-thirds of global marketing and advertising decision makers feel concerned about the suitability of ads placed on social platforms. Recent years have given advertisers plenty of reasons for that unease. In one high-profile 2025 incident, Meta apologized after Instagram users reported seeing extreme violence in their Reels feeds, including videos of people being murdered.

“This is an example of a brand safety concern that’s really hard for brands and agencies to get ahead of,” says Marshall. “I do think it brings up larger questions around what platforms are safe and effective for advertisers, and what consumers expect from brands who run on those platforms.” Even more, content moderation rollbacks at social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X have aggravated the riskiness of social media environments.

Beyond social media, brand safety made headlines just last year as a result of an Adalytics report that found that multiple adtech companies have placed ads for major brands on websites hosting CSAM. (Note: The report cites Basis as an adtech vendor who did not serve ads on any of the sites in question.) This extraordinary brand safety crisis underscores how critical it is for brands to have robust and multi-layered systems to ensure their advertising content is only shown in safe and suitable environments—to safeguard consumer trust as well as to avoid ethical catastrophes such as these.

Of course, there’s a case to be made that consumers are now savvy enough to know that brands aren’t choosing to serve ads next to disturbing content, hate speech, or misinformation, particularly on social media. Still, 82% say it’s important to them that the content around online ads is appropriate, and three-quarters say they would feel less favorable towards brands that serve ads on sites that contain misinformation. Considering this majority opinion as well as the broader culture of consumer distrust, brands who prioritize brand safety likely stand to gain a competitive advantage over their peers who take a laxer approach.

Leading advertisers are responding by investing in brand safety tools that go beyond surface-level filtering. For example, solutions such as Protected by MediaOcean are using semantic intelligence to evaluate content in context rather than relying on keyword blocking alone, and can incorporate real-time signals to stop waste more efficiently. And as ad fraud and brand safety concerns rise in the realm of CTV, vendors like Peer39 offer content-level contextual segments that give advertisers more control over where their CTV ads are served. Teams who stay at the forefront of these technological evolutions stand to gain concrete performance advantages over competitors.

Consumer Trust as Brand Imperative in 2026

In the face of deepening consumer distrust, heightened social tensions, and growing scrutiny around corporate behavior, earning and maintaining trust from target audiences will be a defining priority for today’s most successful brands. And authenticity, consistency, data privacy, and brand safety will be foundational elements of their strategies.

For marketing and advertising leaders, now is the time to double down on trust as a core metric of success. Failing to do so may carry financial consequences in a world where consumers are spending more intentionally and brand loyalty is increasingly difficult to earn and maintain.

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