The Trust Series, Part 1: Building Trust in an Age of Distrust and Distraction: Powering the Business-Trust-Brand Flywheel
Table of Contents
In this essay:
- The trust economy
- What is trust, anyway?
- What Warren Buffett says about trust
- The brand-trust-business flywheel
1. The Trust Economy
We’ve had the fourth industrial revolution, and the passion economy, and the attention economy.
All of them are genuine.
But there’s something that’s as important as any of those, something that has always been important and is probably more important now than it’s ever been before.
The trust economy.
Trust is a vague, indefinable thing.
If you have it, almost anything is possible.
If other people place their trust in us, and just as importantly if we trust fully in ourselves, the ceiling that presses down upon us is lifted, and we begin to see the world in a whole new light.
But while we might all agree on how important it is, the questions remain.
How do you build it? How do you nurture it? How do you take the first steps to getting it in the first place?
Where do you start with something as silent and invisible as trust?
The place some people go is an old favourite.
The Know-Like-Trust Framework
It’s a common device.
In order to do business with you — and let’s take “doing business” more broadly than just commerce here, because it includes all kind of relationships — the old wisdom is that people first need to know, like and trust you.
It’s a three-step process.
First, because they don’t know you, they’ve got no idea who you are, what you’re about, or what you stand for.
Then, one day, they do. They start to know you, a little at first. Step 1.
Whether it’s through a tweet, a random conversation, an introduction by a mutual acquaintance, or just returning your slow second serve at the tennis club, they get to know you a little.
Next, if you’re lucky, they approve of you, whether that’s an unconscious decision or not (and to be clear, this decision, like most of our decisions, is almost always an unconscious one). That approval marks the move to Step 2. They begin to like you.
Over a little time — because time is a force multiplier here — things progress smoothly enough and from not knowing you (Step 0), to knowing you (Step 1), to liking you (Step 2), then there’s a chance things might progress up to the apex of the pyramid: they begin to trust you (Step 3).
Frameworks like these can be useful.
Like stories, frameworks help us make sense of things that previously looked like a mass of confusion, and making sense out of confusion is a key part of the human experience of the world.
The Human Element
But the know-like-trust framework is simplistic.
Where people are involved, as they are in a three-dimensional way at every stage of know-like-trust, we need always to take into account the endless combination of competing desires, biases, moods and emotions of everyone involved.
Each stage of the know-like-trust framework is a fragile place to be.
Firstly, all of us are fickle, beholden to jetpacks of hormones and moods and opinions and influences, from inside our own bodies and minds, and from the thoughts of others that are projected incessantly into the world through conversations and media and online social networks.
So it’s not at all impossible that someone who likes you today might like you less, or not like you at all, next week, and it might have very little to do with you at all.
Secondly, even a little distance or absence from either party can result in everything being pared back or dissolving entirely.
People might get to know you, and then get to like you, but if for some reason you or they are absent or otherwise occupied for a while, they might feel like they no longer know you so well at all, and the dissolution of the know factor causes an instant dissolution of the like factor too.
And that’s when you and they are still in the realm of know and like, even before you get to the altogether more complex factor of trust.
2. What is Trust, Anyway?
There’s an old Joni Mitchell song, “Big Yellow Taxi”, about the creeping intrusion of commercialism on the natural world.
You probably know it. The recurring refrain goes like this:
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone
Trust is like this.
We don’t really know it when we have it, but it will be obvious when it’s gone.
Stéphane Hamel is a techie, a data-oriented, digital privacy professional guy. I once asked Stéphane about the task of measuring trust in business.
[Our email conversation prompted him to write a short article, under the title “Can we measure trust?”]
His focus was very much on trust in business, as opposed to the common-or-garden-but-not-so-very-different variety of trust among people.
Stéphane is plugged into the topic of trust in business at a deep level — the tagline of his consulting business is “All the world is made of faith, and trust, and privacy dust”.
I like his philosophical comments about trust.
“Trust, like love, is hard to describe, but it’s easy to know when it’s lost. Trust, like engagement, is hard to describe because it varies so much depending on your personal values, culture, life events and such. Trust is a quality, not a quantity.”
Trust is hard to describe.
And it’s a quality, not a quantity.
3. What Warren Buffett Says About Trust
Warren Buffett, to many the greatest investor the world has ever seen, once said:
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
A good brand is an established positive reputation. And an established positive reputation is an essential ingredient in trust.
This is why branding is so important in business.
Branding is inextricably related to trust.
A positive brand is a brand that’s trusted.
When a company’s brand turns negative or even toxic, the first thing out the window is trust, and it can take massive investment, mass changes in personnel, and years, if not decades, for that trust to be rebuilt — if indeed it ever is.
We’ve seen this recently with the FTX / Sam Bankman-Fried crypto scandal. When CZ, the head of rival exchange Binance, tweeted that he was selling off all his FTT, the cryptocurrency created by FTX, it created a collapse in trust that saw tens of thousands of customers immediately queuing up to withdraw their funds, eventually exposing the vast black hole at the centre of the FTX finances.
But forgetting about basket-case crypto businesses, we don’t have to look far to see how great businesses leverage marketing to build trust.
Nike doesn’t buy ads just to encourage people to buy running shoes.
Nike instead creates powerful short films with the former NFL quarter-back Colin Kaepernick to create a powerful feeling in anyone who watches.
That feeling creates the brand, and the brand creates the trust, and that trust is lodged deep in your psyche and deep in your gut, and it contributes in a major way to your decision when you set out to buy some trainers.
The same goes for other great businesses everywhere, from the McDonald’s Christmas ad of 2022, to Purina, the pet food conglomerate, to Mattress Mick, the proudly lo-fi Irish bedding company.
4. The Brand-Trust-Business Flywheel
So branding is about much more than just advertising or marketing.
Branding is about shaping people’s perception.
David Ogilvy, the archetypal builder of brands, described branding as
the intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.
In that definition, the two words that jump out to me are “intangible sum”.
Intangible, because your brand is about so much more than what we can see or hear or touch. Mostly, it’s about what we feel, and how we feel.
And sum, because it’s very much an invisible form of mathematics: most of the time, the best we can hope for us an additional sum. This one good thing, added to that one good thing, added to the previous one good thing.
If you do it especially well, it becomes positively multiplicative, a viral and exponential network effect taking hold to raise your brand to new and previously unknown and unexpected levels.
Occasionally, it becomes subtractive, when one mediocre thing takes away from the whole, and another, and another, and if that keeps going there is the risk of the divisional collapse, a negative tipping point where contagion sets in and reputation hits the floor, something that can happen, as Buffett suggested, in a matter of minutes.
Within all this, it is possible, I think, to create a flywheel effect, where the first thing causes the second thing to happen, and the second brings about the third, and the third in turn causes the first to happen once again, and on and on with perpetually gathering forward momentum.
This flywheel might look something like this.
Investment in branding builds trust, and that trust leads to an increase in business, that extra buffer on the bottom line allows the business to re-invest in brand again.
That investment builds more trust, which builds more business, which allows more investment, and the flywheel continues to pick up pace with every trip through the cycle.
An incomplete understanding of business and branding misses out the trust step, and whenever a step is missed, the entire flywheel comes crashing to the ground.
That incomplete understanding suggests that it’s a two-way give-and-take: that branding builds business, and that business invests in branding.
But this misses out the key ingredient: trust.
A branding exercise that does not build trust is a failed branding exercise.
Of course it’s easy to look at big, established businesses — Coca-Cola, Nike, Tesla, Patagonia — and understand with the benefit of time (and a generous helping of “survivorship bias” too) all the elements that added up to the brand, that intangible sum of everything, that exists in the world today.
But if you look carefully, you might be able to peel back the layers and see examples of how brands were built from the ground up.
Take this example of an ad run in the 1980s by an agency acting for an up-and-coming but then completely unknown fashion designer.
What are the hallmarks of Tommy Hilfiger, the world-famous and well-established brand of the 21st century? Would they include a brazen sort of cockiness, an unshakable confidence, a commitment to individuality, a general fearlessness of taking on the status quo?
Those hallmarks are all there in this 1985 ad, which was designed “to create a fashion celebrity in a few weeks”, and probably succeeded in that aim.
Tommy Hilfiger and his brand agents and his business operatives — everyone involved, all together — still had to do the hard work that adds up to trust.
They had to deliver on their promise every time. They had to be consistent, even when they were pushing boundaries. They had to offer surprise without shock.
To sum it all up in a tl;dr line or two, it might be simply this.
To develop trust, be trustworthy. Trustworthy does not have to mean good. Trustworthy just means being fully aware, at all times, of all the promises you’re making, with or without words, and to fulfil each one, one at a time, forever.
Thank you for reading all the way to the end. My name is Shane Breslin. I write for globally ambitious businesses, helping them elevate their brand through writing that reaches for the stars. If you run or own a globally ambitious business and you’d like to talk about how I can help, please get in touch.
