Bullshitting me is not an effective way to build trust in your brand

One of the core tenets of brand marketing is trust. Some branding experts refer to “building trust.” I don’t like that phrase. I prefer brands that “earn” trust to those that “build” it. Nevertheless, oodles of experts have written on the topic.

“Any brand, no matter how memorable, will fail to achieve its goals if it does not gain the public’s trust. Given the skeptical nature of the public today, this is exceedingly difficult to come by.” (Brock Ray, “Building Trust Into Your Brand,” Oct 07 2009.)

Why is it then, that most advertising today seems desperate or manipulative?

“‘[T]elling the truth—authenticity—is one more requirement of effective branding....’ 75% of the American people don’t trust advertising or advertisers.” (Charles H. Green, “Is ‘Brand Trust’ An Oxymoron?,” May 09 2008.)

I suspect it is a result of dysfunctional organization, lack of corporate leadership or both. Often times, especially in large corporations (or at least in corporations with large marketing budgets), there is a tension between maintaining the integrity of a brand, and showing short-term positive results. While, I appreciate the temptation to mortgage the future to pay for the present is nothing new, I am suggesting that succumbing to that temptation is harmful. I have some advice to corporate leaders everywhere to attempt to resolve this tension and strengthen brands (and companies) in the process.

Do what you say you’d do

Reliability is one of the single most effective ways of eliciting trust. Necessary corollaries are, “Don’t promise what you can can’t deliver,” and, “When you screw up, take responsibility.” This may seem obvious, but one wouldn’t know that by examining modern corporate and social behaviors. We are constantly perpetuating half-truths designed to avoid confrontation and judgment. This happens in most of our relationships with the companies we patronize, the politicians we elect, even our friends and loved ones.

What most people fail to acknowledge is that eventually most of those half-truths are exposed, and they detract from the trust we have in those relationships. If someone promises to perform and fails two or three times, we learn that person is unreliable. If we find that someone misleads to avoid embarrassment, controversy or responsibility, we learn to expect that person’s statements to be self-serving and dishonest.

Thankfully there is a way to correct this behavior in your organization: make your mission simple and specific; make your mission part of your culture and make your brand synonymous with your mission; and identify and resolve competing interests.

Make the corporate mission simple and specific

A long time ago, in a marketing guru seminar far, far away, someone decided that a corporate mission statement should be a single, run-on sentence that is sufficiently vague so as to avoid accountability. I am calling for an end to that practice.

Yahoo!’s most recent mission statement reads: “Yahoo! powers and delights our communities of users, advertisers, and publishers - all of us united in creating indispensable experiences, and fueled by trust.”

Besides being grammatically awkward, I don’t get a clear sense of what it is that Yahoo! is trying to accomplish. If I were to attempt to rewrite it, I might suggest the following:

Yahoo!’s mission is to:

1. provide users with the most compelling content and most useful applications for their daily lives;
2. provide publishers the best way to reach their audiences; and
3. provide advertisers the most effective way to market their products and services.

Making the mission simple and specific is a way of making it understandable. This is key. Members of your organization cannot do what the company says it’s going to do if they don’t understand what was said in the first place.

Make the corporate mission part of the culture and make the brand synonymous with the mission

Making the mission a top priority for everyone is a lot harder than it sounds. It requires that everyone in the organization has some short-term periodic (e.g., daily or at-most weekly) gut-check about how their recent efforts further corporate goals.

Lazy managers rely exclusively on shortcuts like integrating certain phrases into call-center scripts (e.g., “How can I provide you with excellent service today?”) or distributing vision statements printed on company t-shirts, coffee mugs or squeeze toys. I’m not saying these things aren’t valuable, but they are insufficient on their own.

Good leaders will find effective ways to keep the corporate mission in their employees’ sights. This could be as simple as a weekly priorities meeting where the host holds up the company logo and mission statement and earnestly asks, “How do you think we helped or hindered this image last week?” Where appropriate, a good follow-up might be, “How would our customers agree or disagree with your assessment?” To be effective, these interactions have to be free from judgment or reprisal.

Identify and remove competing interests

In law school, one of my professors taught me that good legal writing goes beyond motions and briefs. Every memo, every e-mail, every communication is an opportunity to either strengthen or damage one’s reputation as an attorney.

This is particularly good advice for corporate content providers like public relations managers, advertising agents, copy writers, etc. They have to keep in mind at all times when designing content, it should not only accomplish short-term goals (e.g, reduce service calls, increase registrations, etc.), but shouldn’t harm the brand.

If there is a division in your company that is detracting from your brand, find out why. It may be lack of leadership (in which case the company mission isn’t part of that division’s culture), or it may be that there are competing priorities. If it is the latter, then one has to identify the conflict and determine if the cost to the brand is worth the return.

Fraud and theft prevention is an frequent area of tension. On the one hand, legitimate customers tend not to like to be treated as criminals. However, thieves often take advantage of this in order to disguise their thefts. This may be an area where mistakenly treating a few legitimate customers as suspects may be acceptable to avoid significant loss. But a company should not try to disguise this trade-off (see below).

Advertising is another frequent area of tension. If an advertising agent’s income is directly tied to short-term performance of specific advertising campaigns, then maintaining brand integrity will take second seat. Compensation methods may need to be reevaluated to achieve the appropriate priorities.

Some simple examples

Here are some common examples of how to erode consumers’ trust in your brand:

Example 1: dishonestly portraying a limitation as intended

This is one of my pet peeves whenever I call a bank. Often times, I speak to a general representative who asks me for my account number and some verifying information, and then that person transfers me to a specialist who asks me for similar information. When I indicate I’ve already given it, I’m often told that I have to give it again for security purposes.

This is infuriating. It suggests I’m too stupid to detect the lie. I would much rather hear, “I know, but unfortunately our system doesn’t transfer that information along with your call, so I need to ask you for it again.” Being honest in this scenario does two things. First it is instantly disarming, and actually builds trust by openly acknowledging the limitation. Second it keeps the representative out of an adversarial role as a conspirator in a lie.

Example 2: disguising advertising as something else

Product placement in the entertainment industry is a notorious example of this. Frequently-asked questions (FAQs) are a less obvious, but common target of abuse.

“Many FAQs pages don’t actually respond to frequently asked questions; instead, responses relate to questions businesses expect their customers to ask — or worse, simply answer questions they want customers to ask.” (Rick Allen, “FAQs Pages: Good Web Usability or Outdated Content Strategy?,” Aug 17 2009.)

Even some of the best-loved companies make this mistake. After years of complaints from a very vocal user base, Apple decided to remove the copy protection (DRM) from music sold through iTunes. Yet on its FAQ page, it listed the question, “Can I still buy music encoded at [an inferior bit rate] with Digital Rights Management (DRM)?”

I’m not sure what Apple was trying to accomplish with this question, but it seems like it would have been much better to answer, “Will any media available via iTunes be restricted?” or, “How can I tell if what I purchase on iTunes is restricted?”

Don’t attempt to mislead your consumers by disguising advertising as “help” or “important information.”

Example 3: spinning hostile behavior as advantageous

There are no shortage of examples of this behavior, but one ubiquitous abuse often occurs in “privacy” policies. These contain information which should educate a consumer how and when a company shares that consumer’s personal contact information, purchasing habits, etc. However, they are often designed specifically to mislead and confuse. For example, companies often use a heading similar to, “how [Company] protects your information,” before a paragraph with very small text describing how they do the exact opposite.

Anti-theft measures also frequently fall under this category. Consumer electronics stores, retailers, and even respected companies like Costco have receipt checks for people exiting their stores. Consumers are often told these checks are for their own protection (i.e., to make sure they have everything they paid for). They are not. They are designed to prevent theft, and have the unfortunate side-effect of treating each customer as a suspect.

Stores have a right to try to prevent theft. Companies can try to make money in a myriad of ways. But by misleading consumers about their reasons, they erode the trust those consumers have in the company. If a company is willing to lie about why it requires receipt checks, it may be willing to lie about quite a bit more.

Conclusion

If your brand is not important to you, or if your company mission is something like, “to provide as little value as possible for the most profit,” this article won’t be relevant for you. But if brand integrity is as important as marketing experts have claimed for decades, the above will help give it the priority it deserves. Incorporating it into your organization won’t be easy, but I suggest that if you are successful, the power of your brand—and your company—may very well become immeasurable.

But hey, that’s just one guy’s opinion....