507. The actual recipe for trust 🪢
Every brand wants to be a trusted brand, but does any brand actually know how?
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
On the Bonfire newsletter this week, I wrote about the intersection of AI and creativity (more like a demolition derby track, sometimes). And I shared the rather silly, polite ways I talk to ChatGPT.
Every brand wants to be trusted. But what does “trusted” even mean?
"Trust is when customers see you repeatedly standing up for them when you don't have to."
I’ve given away the entire rest of the newsletter in the pull-quote above. You can stop reading now, if you’re in a hurry!
Otherwise …
Everyone wants to be trusted
It’s only barely hyperbolic to say that every tech brand wants to be a trusted brand. Every single company I’ve worked with, at one time or another, has wanted “trust” as part of its brand values.
But these companies, despite some good intentions, rarely know how to actually build trust among their audience and customers.
Trust is a feel-good concept without an obvious action plan. And if it’s so important to so many companies, we should be talking much more about what trust looks like in companies who are doing it right.
It just so happens I heard a great conversation about trust recently. Eric Ries is a startup founder and investor and the brains behind the Lean Startup methodology. When I was getting my feet wet in startups, just a little baby working for Buffer, we were all about the Lean Startup. And for good reason! The lean startup, which is not what this particular newsletter issue is about but I can’t help tell you anyway, encourages you to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can so you iterate as fast as you can so you don’t end up spending too much time building something that no one wants. The same can be applied to marketing campaigns or new projects — basically anything you build in stealth mode, which you shouldn’t. Here’s the Lean Startup cycle, if you’re interested:
All that to say, Eric Ries has always been someone whose ideas and opinions have intrigued me. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t, sometimes I have no idea what he’s talking about (he made a stock exchange, which confuses me greatly).
Most recently, I heard him on a business podcast talking about one of my favorite things: branding.
Check out what he has to say, starting around the 28:00-minute mark.
His definition of trust looks like this:
"Trust is when customers see you repeatedly standing up for them when you don't have to."
Do you agree?
He talks through an example from Airbnb, which created an endowment fund for its hosts, essentially giving hosts access to the shareholder value that other shareholders receive since hosts have played such a crucial role in Airbnb’s success. To go back to Ries’s definition, Airbnb did not have to find a way to stand up for hosts (they probably could have been much less generous with hosts, too). But instead, Airbnb chose to do what it felt was right, and they have a highly-trusted brand to show for it.
What trust isn’t
When I’ve been in the room for conversations around trust, these are some of the items that businesses are usually thinking of:
SOC2 compliance
Server uptime
Customer support time-to-resolution
CSAT
No data leaks
GDPR
Transparent billing
Sure, all these things contribute to being an upstanding citizen in the world of tech, but these qualities alone are not trust. In fact, they are THINGS WE SHOULD ALL BE DOING ANYWAY.
I guess it might feel like a brand can be trusted if it hasn’t compromised my email and password in over 24 months, but shouldn’t protecting the personally-identifiable information of your users be par for the course? This should not be a company’s trust-building stretch goal, this should be the trust-building default state.
Everyone wants to be trusted, which makes actual trust-building seem pretty homogenous across our industry. Unless …
What is trust? Baby don’t hurt me
If we agree that actual trust is more than some tactical checkbox on security and safety, then we can start thinking more expansively about how our audience and users and customers actually feel trust with a brand or business.
How do they feel trust with their favorite brands?
It starts with a foundation of dependability and reliability. It’s about being consistent about who you are and what (or who) you value. This is the “stand up for your customers” part of Ries’s definition.
Then, you need to go above and beyond in showing this consistency, standing up for customers in noble, delightful, surprising, and unique ways.
(Fortunately, brand marketers are great at coming up with ideas to do this!)
For a good example of this, you can look toward mission-driven companies who expend lots of time, energy, and resources in working toward their impact goals. At Oyster, we cared a lot about our customers being able to level the playing field for global hiring, and we invested time, energy, and resources in coming up with public reports that held us accountable to how it was going.
So … how do you measure this new definition of trust
Often, when you’re focused on trust as a company, you’re prioritizing projects like compliance, performance, and security. If you ship these projects, then you’ve successfully met your trust goal.
Output isn’t a bad way to measure against a trust goal. But as we talked about above, trust shouldn’t be the table-stakes projects. Trust should be the stuff that you don’t have to do but you do it anyway.
So, option 1: Goal your team on coming up with trust-building projects that go above and beyond.
Option 2: Surveys. I know, I know, rather boring answer, but surveys do reveal a lot about what your customers and audience really think about you. There are already a host of brand trust surveys out there. Here’s a good overview from SurveyMonkey / Momentive. As a starting point, there’s:
NPS - On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend or colleague? (Chances are, trust might be a reason why you recommend)
The TrustID survey - Respondents indicate on a seven-point scale the extent to which they agree or disagree with the following statements:
Humanity: The company/brand demonstrates empathy and kindness toward me and treats everyone fairly.
Transparency: The company/brand openly shares information, motives, and choices in straightforward and plain language.
Capability: The company/brand creates quality products, services, and/or experiences.
Reliability: The company/brand consistently and dependably delivers on its promises.
But it could also be a series of bespoke questions that measure how often you’re doing the things you say you’re going to do for customers, in ways both predictable and novel.
When was the last time you can recall a social impact campaign from this brand
Do you believe that this brand has your best interests in mind
Over to you
How does your company talk about trust? How do you measure it? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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