It’s interesting, as for most research that I’ve seen, “Brand I Trust” is typically the top driver through purchase funnels. What you’re suggesting is that this attribute is artificially boasted by levels of awareness, not neccessarily something implicit to a brand.

And the firm that I work for does something called Pathway modeling, where essentially they try to figure out what functional attributes drive another emotional attribute, such as “brand I trust.” Since we don’t include awareness, or some of the external validation (i.e., Waldbaum’s) that you mention, it again makes sense that we would overlook this.

I think that this is what you’re getting at towards the end of the post. You don’t simply build “trust,” there are other factors that ultimately bubble up to trust, such as “product for me,” “relevant,” “price,” etc.