I’ve been thinking about trust recently. We trust banks with our money. We trust retailers to send us what we’ve ordered. We trust that the hotel we’ve booked will look something like the photographs. We trust brands when they tell us something is safe, secure, sustainable, good for us or simply that they’ll do what they say they’ll do.
But, I’m not sure we really know how much we trust a brand until something goes wrong.
The parcel doesn’t arrive. There’s a payment we don’t recognise. The flight gets cancelled. Something breaks.
Suddenly, trust stops being this slightly woolly brand word and becomes very real. We start to ask…
- Will they help me?
- Will they believe me?
- Are they going to make this painful?
- And, ultimately, will they sort it out… will they actually act in my best interests?
We’ve probably all had those experiences where something has gone wrong but the way a company dealt with it made us like them more afterwards. Which is great. Except you can hardly build a brand strategy around waiting for something to go wrong.
So how do you build that same feeling of trust before it gets tested?
Maybe it’s in the smaller things – the detail? Being clear, doing what a brand says it will do, making it easy to find help, being upfront about charges, limitations or what happens if there is a problem and, perhaps more importantly, feeling like there are actual human beings somewhere behind the process.
Because trust isn’t really one thing. It’s a combination of things:
- Competence – I believe you know what you’re doing
- Security – I believe you’ll keep me and my information safe
- Reliability – I believe you’ll do what you say
- Fairness – I believe you’ll treat me fairly if something goes wrong
- Warmth – I believe you’re on my side
It’s that last one I find particularly interesting.
A brand can feel incredibly efficient, capable and secure and yet still leave you completely cold. Another can somehow make you feel understood, looked after and that, if something did go wrong, they’ll act in your best interests.
This matters enormously when we’re developing new products, services and brands.
The tricky bit is that trust can be surprisingly difficult to research.
Ask somebody, “Do you trust this brand?” and you’ll probably get an answer. Ask them why and it becomes much harder.
Trust isn’t terribly rational or easy to articulate. It sits in the little things – language, signals, previous experiences, expectations, gut feel and what we think might happen in a situation we haven’t experienced yet.
This is where research gets interesting.
At Gusto, we can get underneath trust by exploring the moments that create reassurance or doubt, putting people into different scenarios, looking at the trade-offs they’re willing to make and understanding which cues make something feel credible, safe, fair or human.
Perhaps “Do people trust us?” isn’t the most useful question a brand can ask.
The better questions are:
- What does trust mean to our customers?
- What creates it?
- What quietly undermines it?
- And, what can we do about it?
Because once you understand that, trust stops being something slightly intangible that sits on a brand tracker. It becomes something you can actively build into the experience.
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