With the growing consumer awareness and market competition, the ‘trust factor’ has garnered a lot of significance in business parlance. Trust is the belief that a consumer has in a purchase situation towards a company that it will deliver goods and services on a par with quality that the consumer expects. This belief is often accompanied by apprehensions about the company. Though trust could explain many marketing phenomena, it has been less researched. Thus the current study tries to analyze the attributes of trust towards a corporate brand, and builds a conceptual framework incorporating consumer trust in a corporate brand.

For the past few years, trust received a lot of importance in the business and academic studies. Trust exists between two parties when one party has confidence over the other party’s reliability and integrity (Morgan and Hunt, 1994). Rotter (1967, p. 651) defined trust as “a generalized expectancy held by an individual that the word of another...can be relied on”; and as said by Gustafsson (2005), citing Baier (1986), trust has been defined as the “reliance on another’s goodwill”. Elliott and Yannopoulou (2007) had cited Deutsch (1958) in stating that trust can be referred to as the willingness on the part of the person to depend on another party on the basis of the belief that the other party will not purposely disappoint him. Elliott and Yannopoulou (2007) had also cited Dwyer and Oh (1987) in stating that “trust refers to a party’s expectation that another desires coordination, will fulfill its obligations, and will pull its weight in the relationship”.

Though trust could explain a lot of marketing phenomenon, it has been less researched in literature in comparison to other concepts like loyalty and customer satisfaction. There have been many works on trust and its antecedents or consequences. But only Sichtmann (2007) focused on both antecedents and consequences of trust in the corporate brand. Sichtmann (2007) developed a model in which he had taken competence and credibility as the antecedents of trust in a corporate brand and current purchase intention, purchase intention for product innovation and Word of Mouth (WOM) as the consequence of trust in a corporate brand. However, if we look at the literature on credibility, some researchers (Bowers and Phillips, 1967; MacKenzie and Lutz, 1989; and Newell and Goldsmith, 2001) have suggested competence as being a precursor or antecedent of credibility. Coupled with that, MacKenzie and Lutz (1989) and Newell and Goldsmith (2001) have also opined about the impact of honesty on credibility. In this paper, the authors take a broader and more strategic look at the concept of trust. The objective of the paper is to build a conceptual framework that will involve both precursors and outcome of trust. Specifically, the paper will discuss the role of ‘trust factor’ in attitude towards the brand and purchase intention as consequences of trust which ultimately lead to a long-term benefit for the firm. The idea behind this logic is the observation that corporate brands embody the perception a customer has for an organization. Hence, trust in corporate brand leads to positive purchase intention and attitude towards brand. The current study intends to build a conceptual framework that will incorporate consumer trust in a corporate brand in the Indian context.

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