When a brand unveils a new look, a younger ambassador and the language of social networks, it expects attention to bring trust along with it. The latest data from US research firm Morning Consult show that this transfer does not hold. For 94% of the brands tracked, Gen Z has lower trust than the adult population of the United States as a whole.
The gap is widespread and slowly closing
Morning Consult asks a representative sample one question: how much do they believe a given brand does the right thing? From the answers it calculates a net trust score, the share of people who answer “a lot” or “some”, minus those who say “not much” or “not at all”. The analysis covered more than 3,200 brands, with on average over 10,000 questionnaires per brand, collected between 1 January and 15 May 2026.
Across this sample, Gen Z's net trust sits on average about eight points below the general adult population. The gap is, however, slowly closing. The share of brands where young people lag by ten or more points fell from 43% to 33% year on year. Morning Consult reads this as meaning that as Gen Z ages and gains direct experience with products, the worst gaps are closing, and brands that invest in the relationship earlier are rewarded.
Platforms at the top, established brands at the bottom
The ranking of the most trusted brands among Gen Z is led by YouTube with a net score of 49.1, just ahead of the dish soap Dawn (49.0), Dove soap (47.7), Costco (46.9) and PayPal (46.4). Beyond the ranking, the data show where Gen Z trusts far more than the rest of the market. TikTok performs most strongly above average: its net trust among young people is 24.8 points higher than among all adults. Crocs, the editing app CapCut and the cosmetics brand Fenty Beauty follow.
At the other end are the established brands from supermarket shelves. Nabisco, General Mills, Kraft, Charmin and Pepperidge Farm have trust among Gen Z 27 to 34 points lower than among the average adult. Trust among the young is therefore held by the environments where they follow creators, and by brands that grew up in those environments, while names from the television era lag the most.
Ten brands that remade their marketing
A parallel ADWEEK analysis shows that switching tone to Gen Z is not enough on its own. Reporters Brittaney Kiefer and Rebecca Stewart took ten brands that have remade their marketing for younger customers in recent years, among them CeraVe, Gap and Sprite, and checked the shift against the Morning Consult data for popularity, purchase consideration and trust. By their account, the results are far from conclusive.
The same debate includes the number used to sell Gen Z to marketers. The estimate that its spending will reach roughly $12 trillion by around 2030 comes from NielsenIQ analysis. But NielsenIQ itself added a caveat in August 2026: age-based targeting is no longer enough. According to it, the biggest-spending group remains Generation X, at $15.2 trillion for 2025, and it is expected to hold that position until 2033.
The brief starts with what the brand knows about its audience
For the creator economy, one practical consequence follows. When a young audience does not trust a brand, but does trust the platforms and creators within them, the weight of the campaign shifts to choosing the creator, and to the brief the brand takes into that relationship.
This is exactly where creator RV Mendoza paused, commenting on the Morning Consult data from an influencer marketing perspective. “For influencer marketing, I'd want that kind of baseline in the brief before creator selection,” he wrote. “A campaign built around Gen Z should name what the brand already knows about that audience and the response it wants the creator work to produce.”
A brief that names what the brand knows about its audience, and what response it expects from the collaboration, gives the creator a concrete problem to solve rather than a vague assignment. It also makes it easier for the brand manager to defend the choice of a specific name internally, because the format and the creator's relationship with the audience can be tied to the campaign goal.
The Morning Consult and ADWEEK figures describe the American market and cannot be transferred one-to-one to European audiences. But the structural shift behind them also applies to brands that target young people in Europe. The trust that established brands are losing among Gen Z has not evaporated. It has moved to the platforms, and to the people who have audiences on them.
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