• by Todd Wasserman , Staff Writer, June 17, 2022

The pandemic seems to have been a boon for brands like Band-Aid, Lysol and Clorox, according to a recent report from Morning Consult.

Those brands topped the list of the most-trusted brands, a list that is markedly different from 2020's, whose results were tabulated before the pandemic hit.

For instance, in 2020, the most-trusted brand in America was the U.S. Postal Service. This year, the U.S.P.S. isn’t in the top 10. Similarly, Amazon was the No. 2 most-trusted brand in 2020, but is out of the top 10 in 2022. The only brands in the top 10 in both years were The Weather Channel and Cheerios.

This year’s No. 1, Band-Aid, wasn’t even in the top 20 most-trusted brands in 2020.

Part of the reason may be generational. Gen Z adults don’t have the reverence for the U.S. Postal Service that Boomers and Gen Xers did in 2020. The U.S.P.S ranked No. 12 with Gen Zers in 2020. (In 2022, Morning Consult didn’t break out generational perceptions of brands.) That may explain the Postal Service’s absence on the list in 2022.

Joanna Piacenza, head of industry intelligence for Morning Consult, said the variation in the three years of the study has to do with Morning Consult tweaking its methodology. “Net trust is one of those things that doesn't change a lot year over year, which is kind of what makes this list so appealing to get on,” said Piacenza. “It's a bunch of household names that have been around for decades that have built trust, through consistency.”

That said, the pandemic has influenced the rankings. “If you look back to like 2017, 2018, you do see net trust is pretty high for brands like home improvement brands,” Piacenza  said. “But they became a key part of keeping our sanity during the pandemic, and did a good job of delivering good services, during a time where a lot of retailers were really scrambling.”