Trust me

In the back half of 2019 I was lucky enough to travel a lot of Asia, in particular South East Asia, working with a host of incredible clients across the region. This period formed some pretty strong memories for me, not least because our ability to travel in such a way would soon disappear.

What I loved above all was the sheer variety and eclecticism of the cities we visited — Bangkok, Manila, Seoul, Shanghai, Siem Reap, Singapore — every new city was brilliantly and illuminatingly different.

And so too the variety in the conversations with our clients. From beauty ecommerce in the Philippines, to hospitality and placemaking in Bangkok, to fintech in Singapore. The challenges these brands faced were varied and complex. And yet, through each and every conversation there was a common thread. Whether it was selling investment products in Vietnam or a room for the night in Koh Samui, each conversation would continue to come back to one thing — trust. “We have to build trust.”

It’s easy to passively nod along in such conversations, to not really engage with the notion. Because what’s being asked feels like such a given. “Of course you want to be trusted, everyone does!”

Yet the concept of trust is one that has long divided marketers. Many brands swear by it and manage it as a key brand metric. While many leading marketing authorities (including the brilliant Mark Ritson) believe trust to be meaningless and of no value in influencing consumer purchasing behaviour.

Rebukes to his article brilliantly point out however that there are two types of consumer trust - cognitive and affective. Cognitive is that I believe you can do the job. Affective is that I believe you have my best interests at heart. For instance, banks have a lot of cognitive trust but few have affective trust.

There’s an assumption - often misguided - by many an established Western organisation, that trust is a given in a relationship with consumers. That the role of brand is to help them stand apart in increasingly crowded markets, connect with consumers in a new and more compelling way, or land a bigger and more purposeful idea for their existence. Each of these is absolutely a role that brand can and should play, but without trust none of it matters.

It’s not simply a case of ‘looking trusted’ or indeed saying that you’re trustworthy, however.  And that’s because trust is so much deeper, so much more complex. While your brand identity can help engender trust, it’s not the answer in itself.

Building trust

In her 2018 TED talk, Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei talks about the component parts of trust.

“If you sense that I am being authentic, you are much more likely to trust me.  If you sense that I have real rigour in my logic, you are far more likely to trust me.  And if you believe that my empathy is directed towards you, you are far more likely to trust me. 

When all three of these things are working, we have great trust. But if any one of these three gets shaky, if any one of these three wobbles, trust is threatened.” 

This is what it takes for brands to build trust with customers in a meaningful way; authenticity, logic and empathy.

Authenticity

So much is written about authenticity in branding and yet it’s only a select few that really pass the test. Why should this be the case? 

In my view, brand purpose needs to shoulder a lot of the blame. It’s a term that didn’t exist 15 years ago and yet today we’re awash with it. British American Tobacco exists to ‘Build a Better Tomorrow’ apparently. JLL is also ‘Building a Better Tomorrow’ while Experian exists to ‘Create a Better Tomorrow’. You can’t help but question the value of purpose when this is where we end up. 

For more reading I can highly recommend both Tom Roach and Nick Asbury who write beautifully on the subject.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some genuinely purposeful brands and organisations out there. Brands founded on an ideal or a principle that truly makes a positive impact on the world and is  the guiding force for all decision-making. But these examples are few and far between.

Whilst I understand - and advocate for - the role of purpose in attracting the right type of people to your business (I’m yet to be convinced of its role in influencing buying behaviour), it needs to be born from something authentic, be demonstrably woven through the culture of the business and front and centre in all organisational decision-making. 

If that’s not the case you don’t have a purpose. You have nothing more than a fancy new statement that probably claims to ‘build a better tomorrow’. Because too few businesses are willing to accept something as an authentic purpose, unless it also makes a claim to somehow change the world.

And this bandwagon jumping isn’t just limited to brand purpose. In recent years we’ve also seen many modern brands (often D2C) slavishly follow a script that’s proven successful for genuine disruptors over the years. Ben Schott wrote about it brilliantly in his article ‘Welcome to a bland new world’. In adopting these tropes, brands fail to see the irony in their identikit approach and become the very antithesis to everything they claim to be - authentically different. 

These lazy brand building efforts allow consumers to easily spot inauthenticity. And they’re eager to do so. Yet many brands continue to fall into the trap. Why?

Because the reality is, being your true self is hard. I’m 40 and only now getting to grips with who I am. It’s far easier - both as human beings and brands - to hold back, to go with the flow, and to say what others say in order to fit in. 

This is especially true for brands (the vast majority) that weren’t founded on principles of changing the world, but whose reason for being is something more straightforward, everyday or even, dare I say, capitalist.

Understanding your true self is also a process. It’s not fast. It takes a lot of deep and rigorous interrogation. And a fair bit of discomfort along the way. Not everyone is willing to go through the journey and they seek to shortcut it in any way possible. But the questionable  results such as those identified above speak for themselves.

Logic

Back in 2019 I worked with a client whose product continually ranked as the best on the market - underpinned by unrivalled technology. But it is a technology that few of us laypeople can actually understand. So whilst the messaging may have resonated with a select few engineers, it was doing little to build trust with the masses.

This leads on to the second area that Frei covers in her talk -  logic - which involves two major considerations. The first, is the rigour of the logic itself. In the context of branding, ‘logic’ can be seen as product or service excellence or the strength of the rational proposition — or cognitive trust. Being trustworthy in real, tangible terms is a huge component of gaining customer trust. But it’s not the whole story. 

Brands also need to be able to communicate that logic clearly, succinctly and in a way that genuinely addresses the needs of the customer. It’s here that they more often falter. 

It’s not uncommon to see brands throwing out proof point after proof point, hoping that one of them sticks enough to trigger a sale or some other form of engagement. 

This is often a result of an unhealthy obsession with the competition, where brands get drawn into parroting for parity: “The competitor is saying they do x, we need to make clear that we do x too”. Unless you’re backed by a 10x media spend, it’s a losing battle. You’re fighting over fractions that don’t matter.

We find ourselves here because many marketers fear being different and wrong. It’s why most avoid the pursuit of ‘contrarian ideas’, assuming that making the right decision - or the one everyone else appears to be making - will guarantee success. 

But if that’s the decision that everyone makes, there’s nothing to separate you and therefore no value in being ‘right’. So it’s also about executing on it in a way that is inimitable. So that you, and only you, can realise the upside from the position.

‘Being right’ requires investing the time to truly understand what your customers are looking for, on a human - almost primal - level. Many brands do this part well, but then fail to build their narrative around an idea that expresses how only they can uniquely deliver on it. Instead opting for the safety of other well-trodden paths.

This combination of deep understanding and inimitable execution is fundamental to building trust through your logic. Executed right, it gives customers a reason not just to buy but to stay. And provides a competitive moat that will endure long-after the competition has hit product parity.

Empathy

The final pillar that Frei talks about is empathy. In the context of brand building, this might be the most challenging to execute upon. The reason for this, I believe, is that empathy is often misunderstood. 

As an industry we are guilty of over-indexing on communications. Research is done to understand the customer, propositions are built in response and then communications are executed to address these needs. 

But does this really give your customers a sense of empathy? Does the fleeting moment of your ad at the bus stop give me any sense that this brand truly understands me or that they’re putting my interests above their own? 

Not often. Because such promises tend to fall flat, particularly when you’re on hold for 40 mins before you can speak to someone. Or when you visit a store, only to be told you need to go online to do what you need to. Or when, despite all the promises of leading-edge innovation technology, the app can’t even remember me or my preferences every time I visit. All three examples are recent experiences from one brand who, incidentally, positions itself as helping solve some of mankind’s greatest challenges in a recent campaign.

These are the moments that cause fracture. A culmination of cuts through the experience that banish any sense of empathy and ultimately erode trust.

Brands need to move beyond siloed thinking and consider their brand as a system of mutually reinforcing activities. In the context of business strategy, this notion has long held true, Michael Porter famously suggesting an effective strategy is ‘founded on a series of activities that fit together and reinforce each other’. 

Brands should be no different. Opportunity will come from reevaluating each and every interaction a customer will have with your brand across the experience, understanding the interaction from their perspective, seeing their varying needs at each touch point, and then responding in a way that only you can.

Brands that are able to do this in a consistent, connected and holistic manner, will go a long way to overcoming any expectation gaps that surface and ultimately build trust with their audiences.

Frei’s thinking clearly demonstrates how complex a concept trust really is. The lessons for brands who seek to build it, are equally multi-faceted.

Yet this is what we should be aiming for. Moving beyond the flawed and simplistic approach of ‘looking and sounding more trustworthy’ and instead challenging ourselves to do the necessary and rigorous self-evaluation, to analyse how we show up in every moment, and consider how our collective action can make, not break, trust.

Not only is it a valuable lesson for brands, but Frei suggests, ‘if we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress.’

I know that might sound a bit grand, but you can trust me.