Brands set high standards, 1200 companies that impact print

The Brand Trust Report, India Study, is an annual study based on a primary research conducted across Indian cities based on Trust Research Advisory's proprietary 61-attribute Trust Matrix. The Report, fourth in its series, generated five million data points and 20,000 brands from which the top 1,200 brands have been listed in this year’s report. These brands have been classified into 284 different categories as against 213 categories in 2013. 2014’s study involved 15,000 hours of fieldwork covering 2,500 consumer-influencers across 16 cities in India.

The grim news for print is, print media’s trust quotient took a major hit, the number of print media representatives in the 1,200 brands fell to 14 this year from 18 in last year’s report. The report includes six English language dailies (Times of India, Midday, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Economics Times and Indian Express), four English magazines (Fortune, India Today, Outlook and The Week), two Hindi dailies (Hindustan, Dainik Jagran) and one Bengali (Anandabazar Patrika) and Marathi (Sakal) daily. 

The Times of India still remains the most trusted print media brand, but its position slipped considerably to 174 as compared to 100 in 2013.

The Brand Trust Matrix consists of three basic foundations, each of which is further divided into attributes. Each foundation is a means of building a brand's trust in the minds of the consumer, by measuring the various scores on each attribute and then the overall score is calculated and compared and analysed on the Brand Trust Index. 

N Chandramouli, CEO, TRA, said, “When a brand focuses on its trust with intensity, apart from trust the brand gains in market-share, product premium and acceptance of new products is an automatic by-product. Among the 100 most trusted brands, 75 were net gainers while 25 took a fall. The gainers went up by an average of 86.23 ranks, while those that fell took a dip of 27.16 ranks on an average. This shows that the average gain among the top-100 has beaten the average loss in ranks by 317%.”

Among India’s 100 most trusted brands, 44 are based out of National Capital Region (NCR), 40 from Mumbai, and Bengaluru had the third largest number of brands at 10. A look at the 100 most trusted brands in 2014 reveals that most brands in the top 100 are from the diversified sector with 11 followed by consumer electronics with 10, bath and beauty with 9, mobiles with 8, 4-wheelers, telephone, and 2-wheelers with 4 each, and personal technology, sportswear and aerated drinks with 3 brands each. 

Infosys to fund Indian classics
Murthy Classical Library, a four-year-old project backed by Infosys co-founder, NR Narayana Murthy's family, in association with The Harvard University Press, expects to bring out five new publications that will offer translations of works in over a dozen Indian languages.

The library, set up with a grant of USD5.2 million, has now commissioned translations from over 40 scholars worldwide. These experts are working on literary texts dating back to the pre-1800 era in languages including Tamil, Kannada, Urdu, Bengali and Sanskrit.

The five works that will be released this year apart from Therigatha, songs of the first Buddhist nuns in Pali language, include Bulle Shah's sufi lyrics in Punjabi, Peddana's Manicaritramu in Telugu, Surdas' Sursagar in Hindi and Abu'l Fazl's Akbarnama in Persian.

The project comes under the Harvard University Press (HUP), a division of Harvard University focused on academic publishing. Besides making the literature accessible, the project also aims at preserving and furthering the life of ancient languages. The books, coloured in dark pink, will provide the original script on the left hand side, and a corresponding English translation on the right.