The Fall of Societal Trust

Declining Societal Trust: A New Marketing Problem

In an increasingly suspicious culture, whither brands?

Compared to ten years ago, how much more or less do you trust your government to spend your tax contributions wisely?

Do you trust the tech giants to look after your well-being, securely hold your data privately and to promote prosperity for all?

And do your trust the neighborhood your children walk through on their way home from school?

If, compared to ten years ago, your trust has deepened, please write to me because you are living somewhere amazing compared to the rest of us.

Here in the USA, trust in government and institutions in general is at the lowest point ever since 1964 (Pew “Trust and Distrust in America” 2020). Two thirds of Americans report they don’t trust other Americans. Only 16 % of the public trust politicians to do what they say. An even lower 13 % trust advertising executives to care about the truth. The average parent can’t name five people they would trust with their children.

You could chuckle sardonically at these statistics. “Well, the truth is finally out; we won’t get fooled again.”

But here’s a sobering human insight.

Living in a society where you experience trustworthy behaviors as a matter of course is the key to prosperity and safety. The currency is solid. Deals are done on handshakes. Job opportunities abound. Credit is good. Crime goes down. Public safety goes up. And people can focus on bettering themselves and their communities. Now take it away and what happens? Pervasive suspicion makes us all poorer, more isolated, and less safe.

Trust can be experienced, but it is one of the hardest emotions to accurately define. “Trust rarely occupies the foreground of our awareness,” observes the psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa DeBruine. It has its roots in our biology, and with good reason. We humans are born to trust; we assume it until we have reason to question it. Call it presumptive trust – as with gravity, you don’t notice it until it’s gone.

This reality matters for brands because trust and fairness are strongly linked in our brains. The social contract most of the world operates within is that those who violate trust must experience a negative outcome from their actions. It is our inherent definition and understanding of fairness. When that doesn’t happen, we lose faith in the institutions and people upon which we all rely.

Despite the declines in trust, two American institutions have maintained high degrees of trust: the military and small businesses (Gallup “Trust in Institutions” 2021). They share some meaningful trust characteristics that we can all learn from:

Their purpose and intent are relatively clear to almost everyone
They don’t overcommunicate
Their actions and behaviors are a large percentage of their brand’s message
They have skin in the game – their trust failures are usually swift and punishing
They suffer real consequences of bad decisions or behavior - an implied social contract that we intuitively understand
They are exposed to risk that they cannot easily shift to others, or avoid

The days of assumptive trust in big and established brands are gone. We now need to manage our trust equities and behaviors better and more actively. We have reached an inflection point where assumptive trust is eroding so quickly that we can no longer assume that a brand’s provenance and history and equities will carry it through. Trust, now, must be actively pursued.

Trust needs to be considered a product to be managed and supported – via brand actions, and actively defended the moment it is challenged.

The opportunity: brands may very well fill a trust-gap for consumers where government and other big institutions have let them down.

We can no longer expect consumers to put a lot of trust in what we make. We need to be far more conscious of all the things they could be skeptical about. We rarely get to shake hands with consumers or build personal rapport with them, but brands need to get closer to simplified and more human-like connections with the people who buy into our brands. This is small businesses’ advantage, but it isn’t limited to them.

Trust management now needs to be a full-time job. We need to view trust as a brand’s product too - an actual output of what we’re creating. Something to be seen as a core output, much like the products we make, and market.

Trust is built from little bricks of your “dos”, not the billboards of what you “say”. With skepticism at an all-time high, the tangible bits matter more now than ever before.

Brands have an obligation to create and protect that trust and nurture it as best they can. Leaving it up to happenstance and circumstance is bad policy, and risky.

Here are seven keys for how brands must do that today...

#1

Keep the risks for the consumer small – make the choice of our brand consequence-free. [Example: KIA’s 10-year/100,000 mile powertrain warranty]

#2

Engage in small trustworthy acts – behaviors that are recognized by consumers as meaningful to foster trust. [Example: American beverage manufacturers creating, and communicating the “Every Bottle Back” initiative for plastic bottle recycling]

#3

Don’t lock people into their choice – give consumers and “out” via guarantees, refunds or “make good” options so it is easy to say yes to your brand without fear of consequences if they chose poorly. [Example: Casper’s “100 nights to try it for free” program]

#4

Don’t assume that consumers recognize your good acts - communicate them. [Example: Marks & Spencer’s Plan A sustainability marketing that includes a consumer involvement component]

#5

Be provocable when your trust is threatened as a brand - fight back hard when someone, or something, challenges your brand’s trustworthiness or core principles. [Example: NETFLIX is famous for always responding to critics of their content on Twitter, and it powerfully demonstrates their passion for shows and movies]

#6

Show empathy for the distrustful – prove that you get them and say so. [Example: ebay’s “Up & Running” small business storefront creation program to accelerate online ecommerce presence for businesses during the pandemic]

# 7

Be like your audience - don’t try to appeal to everyone at once. Trust breeds on similarities. [Example: BLK & Bold coffee – created by black entrepreneurs to remedy and inspire change within the unfortunate circumstances of inner-city youth]

[Cm] August 2022