Many of my real world friends who read this blog might be bored by me banging on about trust - so I apologise off the bat for this post. But quite few of my readers dropped me a line following my recent trust post about BT so I thought I'd share a few more insights from my research into the historical, economic, psychological and sociological research into why trust is important to human beings and their societies. I hope to create a dedicated site to this research soon. So if you have questions or thoughts on how businesses can build trust then please leave a comment or get in touch with me.

I'd like to share three further insights into what businesses (and their brands) have forgotten about how trust works.


1. Trust is only built through dialogue. And the thing with dialogue is that is it two way. Most brands have forgotten that in order to have conversation you need to have a point of view, be interesting and have continuity. Make an (easy) imaginary leap that I am boring and suffer short term memory loss (but you don't know that). Our first conversation won't be good and the second, as I deny all knowledge of knowing you, has the potential to be positively damaging . Yet call the typical contact centre and you will be subjected to minutes of disclaimers telling you what can't be discussed and then they have no knowledge of the 10 calls you've made before. Zip on the trust front.

2. We trust more in people than anything else. Everything else is an abstraction. Whatever the brand models and marketing literature say trust is fundamentally a human thing. Yes, it is possible to trust in brands, businesses, governments, organisations etc but the quickest and easiest way to build this is to get people to do the talking and the doing. The recent Toyota recovery press advertising covered this well. Whilst they might have handled the whole crisis poorly but this advertising with its premise of "we are thousands of people working as hard as we can to recover the situation" was fundamentally human and powerful.

3. To be trusted, you need to trust. Every brand I've worked with wants people to trust them - that's the point of brands right? Yet most businesses and their processes don't trust the customer. Businesses too readily default to a position of policies that cater to the downside risk of fraud and loss rather than trust their average customer. You've banked with a high street bank for 40 years with a perfect record but retired last year. Try asking for an unsecured loan - 40 years counts for nothing - policy says "we don't trust you".

If you want to build or rebuild trust you could do worse than allow your humans to be human.

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As ever thanks for reading.....

Justin

Mail me: justin@basini.com
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