Brands must reassess the path to building belief…

By Robert Wheatley

United Airlines extols that It’s Time To Fly, while simultaneously revealing more fees to go alongside the other precipitous declines in service. Travel is already painful but never mind. Banks and financial service firms wax on about their forthright expertise and ask investors to place their faith in them. Right behind the message comes scandal, bankruptcy and accusations of malfeasance, which are flying in all directions.

Dean Crutchfield in his AdAge piece about faltering trust reminds everyone of the bubble piercing facts aligned around us:

Columnist Jonathan Baskin weighing in on the crisis du jour reports, “traditional branding theology suggests we can apply emotions to things. That approach doesn’t hold much water with consumers who live in a media-sphere that is constant and pervasive, that draws its content from events, not declarations, and from experience, not imagination. So it’s not enough (anymore) to announce that your company is ‘bullish on America’ or that consumers should ‘Whoo hoo.’ That stuff not only seems irrelevant but somewhat dishonest.”

How important is the bond of trust between consumer and brand? Does it potentially extend now beyond transaction and product to include having trust in the people who run organizations? Why is it that consumers place more trust in the advice of their peers and less so on company-produced messaging? Is it possible that these living examples of missteps, misdeeds and bad judgments could create a crisis in confidence about the truth and propriety of messages they are so routinely courted with by brands? Especially the promises served up in a soft, warm blanket of emotion and artful story telling?

Trust can no longer be a statement or message point. It can’t be diminished to an outcome or deliverable for the latest campaign. Truth has a remarkable way of pushing itself to the surface over time anyway. And no truer statement can be said than “what goes around, comes around.” So if the bottom falls out of “trust” as we know it does the market then begin to place a greater premium on the Real Thing? Just as you can’t order it up from central casting, trust and belief aren’t just words to insert in the next communications brief objective line.

Trust is finally about demonstration. Actions truly do speak louder than words. Deeds are more meaningful than pronouncements. What you see is what you get? Trust can only be earned as an outcome of doing the right things, all of the time. Now the cachet and value of trust as an important brand attribute may rise to the surface as a definer of future success and growth. As Crutchfield conveyed in his article, the shares we pursue so aggressively are no longer just about securing chunks of sales in a given category. We are also going to be competing with each other for shares of trust.

What do you think?