MIT Sloan Management Review

 

About the Research

The research underlying this paper began in 1997 with an MIT project funded by General Motors Corp., the goal of which was building a virtual trusted-advisor site called “Truck Town” to help customers select the best pickup truck. This advisor was complemented by a virtual engineer who “listened in” to the advisor/customer dialogue in order to identify opportunities for new products so that GM could develop the best cars with these ideas in mind and win through a fair comparison. Both the advisor and the virtual engineer were evaluated with in-depth market research and model building.

A large sample study (more than 6,000 respondents) of trust correlates was conducted from 1999 to 2001 to identify how trust was built through the use of an Internet site; it was funded by McCann-Erickson WorldGroup and NFO WorldGroup Inc.

From 2001 to 2003, additional research extended and tested the theories of trust generation with five market experiments at the customer-support division of Intel Corp.

Currently, research is under way with Qwest Communications International Inc. to develop a profiling and evaluation technique designed to determine how much trust is appropriate for the company.

These specific projects generated specific trust findings and tools. That work has been supplemented by 12 cases (for example, based on research from Citibank, Dell, Osram Sylvania, Travelocity.com and Terra Lycos) written to explain fundamental elements of trust building... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.