At times like these, everyone is busy trying to convince others to trust them, their business, their products and their market. Finance analysts study investor trust indicators and consumer marketing analysts deploy all sorts of techniques and research projects to push consumer trust up, and hopefully translate that trust into more consumer spending.
Maybe the reason why a lot of these efforts fail can be found in the approach that marketers use when trying to build trust in their brands and their organizations. The science of marketing is amazing in its depth and rational complexity, sometimes, but trust is anything but rational.
Her’es the thing: If you realize that trust is a fundamental design principle common to all mammals, you can begin to understand that logic, numbers and mental concepts only make up a very small portion of why people trust some brands and distrust others. Trust is something that begins in people’s gut, it has to do with instinct, with feeling and with a lot of unconscious processing.
So the biggest driver to marketing trust in any form is other people’s behaviours. Coloured logos and slogans are only meaningful when they become associated to the behaviour and ‘vibes’ perceived in somebody that represents that brand.
In the olden days of smaller businesses, the brand acquired the values and qualities of the people who worked behind it. Nowadays, the people behind brands are anonimous, and don’t seem to care much what you think of their brand, if you guide yourself by the way you are treated at standardized-foreign-call centers. Celebrities are paid lots of money to pose for pretty pictures to ‘manipulate’ this unconscious perception process through which consumers will trust a brand because they trust and admire the celebrity that wears it.
Now, if we all know that these celebrities are posing for money, and that today they represent one brand and tomorrow they smile for another one, how credible or trustworthy are they to the public? To a mass of consumers who feels betrayed by politicians, financial institutions and everyone who told them to keep consuming in order to reach happiness?
Here’s the question I leave you with today. How do you generate trust around you? How do you do it at close range, with those that spend a lot of time with you, and how do you go about it in the larger, internet enabled social environment you move in? And how does this impact the trustworthiness of the brand you represent?
