Programming Digital Trust

What brought you here? As a recreational writer, I’m a lot more eager to pen my thoughts just to better express myself. There’s that innate need of wanting to share useful knowledge with others. Perhaps that’s what brought you here – you’ve read some of my previous musings and felt encouraged to give me another shot with your valuable time. Or maybe you were unknowingly forced to get here – LinkedIn “recommended” you to have a look. Regardless, there’s very little chance that you’re reading this blog by coincidence. In some shape or form, you were programmed to be here. But before thinking that I’m questioning your intellect and suggesting that your mind is being dictated by algorithms, read on.

Trust, Influencers and the transition to "Digital"

Trust is a complex construct, but a very intrinsic part of us. Our internal trust barometer starts getting programmed very early on in our lives. For starters, our earliest influencers, our parents, start inculcating trust or sometimes distrust in our minds. This can be as simple as trusting a brand of milk and as complex as developing positive or negative biases towards a political party very early on. To a child’s mind though, the complexity is hidden because of the bond with our early influencers. As we grow older, our circle of friends tend to become a huge influence on our trust preferences. Parents of teenagers are well-aware of this phenomenon. You want to own the same brand your friend owns and you want to diss the brand that your friends deem unworthy. Simple enough.

Brands, especially consumer good brands, have leveraged these mechanics for decades. Marketing teams spend millions trying to uncover the levers that influence trust and then tweak them to create brand awareness and onwards to brand trust or loyalty. While this programming still existed in the pre-digital era, the digital age has totally short-circuited this lifecycle of building trust. Get an influencer with tens of millions of followers to endorse your product and start seeing instant results. And instant results means instant results (!) – go from a TikTok or Instagram message directly onto a platform like Amazon to fulfill the desire of your retail customers instantly. The faster you close this gratification cycle, the faster you gain the digital trust coinage of your consumers. The journey from awareness to purchase, especially, can be shortened drastically in this day and age.

Importance of Digital Trust for Brands

If it’s really that easy to influence and produce results, why are the chances of success still so slim? The fact is that the task of building a brand is still tedious and time-consuming. While digital influencers may seem like a sure-shot formula of success, whether you want to influence a toddler or the CEO of a multi-million dollar company, there’s a lot that needs to happen to get to the stage of influencing trust. Don’t forget that these influencers themselves are brands in their own right. Reviewing toys on YouTube or reviewing cars may seem like an easy enough job…if it were that easy, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing boring blogs. Most of these social media influencers have had to toil hard to get to where they are. They’ve had to tweak a lot of levers on the way, gauging what works with their audiences and what doesn’t. In fact, you see quite a few influencers making exits because of workload and the constant pressure to engage with their followers. Corporate brands are no different. Gaining digital trust is a continuous exercise – you snooze, you lose!

The Digital Trust Equation

In a recent survey of about 13,000 consumers from 11 countries, we discovered how the notion or perception of trust varies between industries, geographies and demographics. And it’s important to emphasize the word perception here. Trust is just a perception and not necessarily an indicator of the actual trustworthiness of a brand. In fact, it’s the disparity between perception and reality that leads to poor customer experience, and worse – fraud or deception. Social engineering is a perfect example, where a malicious hacker is usually trying to gain the trust of the victim before maneuvering them into a trap. Some might look down upon drawing this parallel, but a brand is trying to gain trust too, obviously not for nefarious reasons.

Interestingly, the survey revealed that the modern digital user is quite aware of such threats. Over 80% of the respondents see MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) as a must or at least go-to-have. This might seem like a “planted” result from someone who markets identity & access management solutions, but trust me, it isn’t! With perceptions captured from this survey, Digital Trust, in my view, is a function of three fundamental components: user experience, security, and privacy.

Digital Trust = f (user experience, security, privacy)

User experience is obvious, and often takes center stage for most product development teams responsible for building digital channels. Consequently, UI (user interface) often becomes a focal point of attention for these teams. User experience, however, goes well beyond UI. A bank, for example, cannot overlook that consumers still want to visit a branch for certain transactions as they might require a higher level of assurance or trust for certain transactions. This is why omni-channel experiences are a big deal in the banking industry. Question, however, is how far banks can alleviate their consumers’ assurance needs through digital channels, as this is mutually beneficial. This, in turn, is why security and trust become a fundamental part of the digital trust equation.

Data breaches and the awareness thereof, have elevated the need for security and privacy. Macro-level sovereignty concerns have accelerated this trend. Data privacy regulation is now a crucial factor to consider for brands. With GDPR initially, compliance seemed more like a nuisance and an afterthought for building digital experiences. Ever since the enforcement has led to high-profile fines, the consumers have become even more aware of their rights. A significant majority of the respondents of our survey expect brands to not only inform consumers when personal data is being collected (55% respondents), but also to give them the provision to erase that data (53% respondents). Nuances can be interesting too as only 34% of respondents in Japan expect the right to be informed about data collection as opposed to 78% in South Africa. The numbers regarding data privacy expectations or the expectation of security controls like MFA are quite telling for brands across different industries.

Enabling and sustaining digital trust

What do you do as a brand to build and sustain digital trust? Well, I’ve done a terrible job, as I didn’t write a single LinkedIn blog in 2023! It is surprising how many companies still don’t think programmatically about digital trust. It doesn’t matter which industry you’re in. While there can be variance in expectations from your customers, you do need to build your own digital trust equation. Knowing such expectations can go a long way in determining the right balance of variables for building that digital trust equation. Once done though, the equation needs to be revisited because behaviors change! For instance, we speak to organizations today that look at data privacy and security as tenets of differentiation in the digital realm, rather than just an afterthought, making both components heavily-weighted in the trust equation. Your customers are getting more educated and demanding. Organizations that are deferring their plans of implementing security and privacy measures at the end of their digital product development plans are putting themselves at risk of alienating their digital users. Modern CIAM solutions offer a great mechanism to bake security controls (e.g., identity verification, MFA or SCA) or privacy-enabling capabilities (like preference & consent management or progressive profiling) into digital offers. Like every other strategic initiative, product development needs to take a shift-left approach to security and privacy in building digital offers. Remember: you snooze, you lose!

(Download your copy of the referenced survey here: Digital Trust Index.)

DISCLAIMER: All the cool views presented in this post are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my past or present employers.