McCann Study: Two-Thirds of Consumers Will Leave Brands They Distrust
The Development
McCann released research on June 10 showing that more than two-thirds of consumers — 68% or higher — will actively disengage from brands they perceive as untrustworthy. The study, which spans multiple consumer segments, frames trust not as a sentiment score but as a behavioural switch: once broken, it directly drives defection rather than passive indifference. The findings arrive as brand investment has been systematically deprioritised across many marketing budgets in favour of lower-funnel performance spend, creating a structural vulnerability that this data now quantifies. McCann positions the research as evidence of a widening gap between how brands measure health and how consumers actually make disengagement decisions.
Our Take
The commercial case for brand investment has always struggled against the precision of performance attribution, and that imbalance drove the budget reallocation of the last several years. What McCann's data does is change the framing: if 68% of consumers who lose trust will leave, then trust erosion has a calculable customer lifetime value consequence. That's the language CFOs respond to. The question isn't whether this research is directionally accurate — it almost certainly is — but whether marketing leaders can operationalise it fast enough to reverse a multi-year trend of brand underinvestment before retention metrics deteriorate visibly enough to trigger reactive spending, which is always more expensive than preventive investment.
What Changed
Marketers now have empirical evidence — attributable to a major network research study — to translate trust erosion into projected churn probability. That reframes trust from a qualitative brand metric into a quantifiable revenue risk model that finance leadership can interrogate.
Marketing Impact
Brand marketing and CRM functions are most directly affected. Brand teams gain hard data to defend investment in perception-building; CRM teams now have a trust-to-churn signal that should sit alongside satisfaction scores and engagement frequency in retention modelling.
Competitive Implication
Brands that have maintained consistent trust-building investment — particularly through accurate, non-exploitative data practices and coherent messaging — are structurally advantaged in retention. Brands that have leaned into aggressive data monetisation or inconsistent brand communication face a measurable defection risk that performance spend cannot offset.
Strategic Outlook
Expect McCann and competing network agencies to position this research as the foundation for brand strategy pitches through the remainder of 2026. More consequentially, expect CFO-level scrutiny of brand health metrics to intensify as the trust-to-churn linkage becomes harder to dismiss in planning conversations heading into 2027 budget cycles.
The Exploit
Action Item
Brand strategy leads should rerun their most recent brand health tracker data against this 68% defection benchmark and present the implied churn exposure in revenue terms to their CFO before Q3 2026 budget reviews close.