Can Customers Trust Your Brand?

Our world today is ever-increasingly predicated on, influenced by, and revolving around a unifying currency of trust. Our quickly changing but newly created ecosystem, comprised of institutions, brands, and individuals, offers transparency which in turn unleashes both liberation and trauma. Without building and maintaining trust, the systemic virtues that promise an optimistic future can rapidly disappear. This subsequently clears space and creates opportunity for authentic interaction and new ideas. 

In this dynamic the one question that brands must ask themselves as they look to strengthen their businesses and prepare for the future is: can they trust us?

If looking for the next disruption – simply do your due diligence sector by sector under the pretense of searching for gaps in stakeholder and audience satisfaction and confidence. If the answer for any of your stakeholders, customers, audiences or employees – is no, then either get busy trying to rectify the divide, or get busy dying. In other words, you’ll be out of business soon, so start building trust.

In an age where the accumulation of interactions with your brand defines your brand (“the experience of the brand is the brand”), and everything, including consumers’ experience, is hyper-connected – this dynamic relationship decides your fate. How does the market react when people lose faith in big banks? Their businesses take enormous hits and there’s an exponential increase in fin-tech startups.

From FMCG and hospitality to automotive, retail, and healthcare, the resulting disruption may vary, but common discussion lies around big data, transparency, and transformative automation. As incumbents exploit market dominance and economies of scale, they forget to look for ways to tailor offerings to customers and strengthen relationships yielding trust.

With change being constant, it’s necessary to understand your space and what experiences and interactions build trust. Ask yourself, “What are our customers trusting us with?”

A bit of self-assessment can go a long way since brands must forge relationships that are both engaging and mutually beneficial with their audiences. Companies who want to sell to a diverse array of audiences are thus, in fact, inherently diverse. Brands must know that they will make mistakes, and must act with sensitivity and compassion as opposed to ignoring the idea that they now have potentially engaged in an ongoing relationship, not simply executed a single transaction.

It’s something often overlooked or disregarded altogether, but the central, guiding principle from which every person within an organization should view the business and their world should be trust. 

If you’re not doing so already, consider these steps:

• Always ask yourself, “Are we building trust?” Always question, always be curious. See what others are doing, experiment. Iterate.
• Identify each one of your stakeholders, and develop an understanding of what defines the relationship. Start small, focus on your core mission or stakeholders – your employees – and extend outward concentrically, strategically.
• Focus on interactions, engagement for each experience and how it drives behavior.
• Collaborate. Collaborate. Collaborate – find ways to build mutual experiences with a diverse array of stakeholders.
• Admit your mistakes and work towards finding solutions openly. Transparency can be transformative. Ask for feedback. Build very open, honest relationships with employees, customers and suppliers.