does trust equal authenticity?

Reading a fantastic article about Trust in Business led to thoughts of brand authenticity. Is brand authenticity interchangeable for trust in a brand?

Brand authenticity can be defined as the degree to which the beliefs, values, communications and actions of an organisation are aligned. And continue to be so over time.
The most direct way that customers experience this is - do you act as you say you will?

According to Green, reliability, or doing what you say you will, is only part of the equation in creating trust. There are also the variables described as Credibility, Reliability, Intimacy, and Self-Orientation. It is suggested they inter-relate to create an overall level of trust as per the equation show.

The Trust Equation


Green explains each of the other variables:

Credibility has to do with the words we speak. In a sentence, we might say, “I can trust what she says about intellectual property; she is very credible on the subject.

Intimacy refers to the safety or security that we feel when entrusting someone with something. We might say, “I can trust her with that information; she’s never violated my confidentiality before, and she would never embarrass me.”

Self-orientation refers to the focus of the person in question. In particular, whether the person’s focus is primarily on himself or herself or on the other person. We might say, “I can’t trust him on this deal—I don’t think he cares enough about me, he’s focused on what he gets out of the deal.” Or—more commonly—“I don’t trust him—I think he was too concerned about how he was appearing, so he wasn’t really paying attention."

The most powerful variable is self-orientation, which has a negative impact on trust levels.This is most commonly gauged by how much someone feels they are being listened to. Or not.

Creating trust requires authenticity in what is said (credibility) and what is done (reliability). Adding in the additional variables of intimacy (= brand connection / emotional branding in brand speak) and self-orientation (= the level of customer-orientation, client centricity in brand speak) is a deeper way of understanding the relationship with customers, with the resultant feeling of trust I would suggest coming closer to the notion of brand loyalty (discounting habital purchases).

Authenticity does not = trust, but trust requires authenticity.

Some brands that have done this well include Zappos, Google and Apple. They are extremely customer-led, with true customer dialogue and have a degree of transparency in the their values, beliefs and actions.
A perfect example of the opposite is a company that operated much of Melbourne's transit system - Connex. Disliked intensely by the community due to their unreliability, lack of credibility and aparent lack of listening (a recent spokesperson recently blamed Australian culture for their tardy record!), they did not have the contract renewed to much community celebration. A snippet found in Social mention shown below.


A final point to note from Green's article is that ultimately people trust people, not organisations. It is their experience of an organisation's people that informs that trust.

How do your people evidence each of the trust parameters? Is there something that can be done to improve this, even if it is asking a simple question in every conversation - why?

will network analysts replace media buyers?

I had the pleasure of meeting a very interesting, very understated expert marketer today.

Not only is he a gem of a person, he made some suggestions that may prove quite fruitful for me in future.

It came about all because I was interviewing someone on the nature, role and quality of qualitative research. The conversation digressed and expanded...and voila, I was having coffee with Mr McPherson. And for the second time in two days, I was advised that I should speak with the same person I had never met!

It made me wonder - beyond the somewhat passe notion of 'networking' that conjures images of predatory sales people, what is the theory behind networks?

A quick glimpse on Wikipedia reveals that network theory explains elements of both the internet and particle physics. Grossly simplified, it is the study of nodes and the simple or complex ties between them. The most relevant study for marketers is the area of social network theory.

Fascinating, and I realised this is an area of increasing relevance for marketers as the emphasis shifts to an acknowledgement and the increased enabling of the power of social networks in influencing purchase decisions.

I ask myself the question - should we move away from, or at least weight our emphasis in research away from a focus on media, existing channels and demographics to a study of social networks? Is this a truer indication of a person and their likely behaviours than the traditional demographic indicators? Is this the next step beyond psychographic profiling?

Is this the next divide to be crossed by researchers and customer-centric organisations?

Flickr credit: martin.canchola

Are big corporates a big backwater?

I am lucky enough that I get to see and work with people in both business worlds, the corporate and the entrepreneurial. The more I do it however, I wonder, is corporate the big backwater?

I am sure that there are fantastic exceptions to this, such as Google and some retailers such as Boost Juice. But the differences are often stark. These are a few of the most common, and most frightening differences:

1. A sense of urgency – when there are lot of floors between you and a customer, it is kind of hard to hear what they are saying. Same goes with the finance department.

2. Spending – A bank recently accidentally transferred $7.8million to customers. I think a smaller organisation might have noticed the extra zeros.

3. Change – 1 person making a decision is (usually) faster and more feasible than layers of decision maker.

This is not earth-shatteringly new – but I feel that the gap is getting greater, and the risk of disconnecting with the marketplace more so than ever before as web-based or micro-businesses are taking off at warp-speed. I recently had conversations with several well established global consumer brands and realised that for all the budget and talented people, their system was continuing to drive them to do the same research, NPD and promotions that they had done in the past. A little more digital dazzle (if you’re in Kids), but essentially doing the same thing, in the same way, as it has been done since Kotler.

I realised that those brands and organisations that used to be a dream to work for may have moved from being the fast track, to the slow wade.

To get you started on moving back into an entrepreneurial frame of mind, here are a few thought starters:

• Get with the start-up mentality with 13 tips from Paul Graham
• Read What Would Google Do?
• Go to an entrepreurial networking event and start to surround yourself with an alternate mind-set.
• Approach someone you admire in a smaller business, profess your admiration, buy them coffee and ask how they would change things?
• Get a genuine change expert involved.
• Talk to your customers. And I don’t mean do a survey. I mean YOU. Get on the phone or in the store.
• Got some like-minded peers – form a “no to brackishness” group to meet for beverages of some description once every couple of weeks.
• Form an internal group / IM group / forum with these people – and keep the conversation buzzing.
• Stop, and consider what YOU really think. Radical, I know…but there is a corporate group-think.

What have you done to shift your backwater? Even if it is forming a faster channel in the middle, it’s still movement.

flicker credit:farleyj

(27 May, 2009)

stealing a post

Too funny not to share. We’ve all been there.

http://branddna.blogspot.com/2009/05/see-right-through-emails.html

time to bring their own voice back into the fold?

I was talking about authenticity of a brand, of a company’s voice with some friends last night, discussing how today, anything less and you will be outed, barred and worst of all – a social media outcast at one sniff of inauthentic writer.

Which made us think aboutall those “newsletters” that companies put out – digitally or physical, most companies have one in belief that this is what keeps them in contact with their customers. Yet, in reality, most of the time these are outsourced to a PR company or similar. If someone isn’t in your business, and has no contact with your customers…how is this an authentic voice? (I realise there may be fantastic exceptions) In a quick straw poll we realised that we all ignore these publications as having no meaningful content. We are certainly not engaged with them or as a consequence the brand.

Parallel to this is the increasing need for companies to participate in dialogue with their customers, often facilitated through blogs, active forums, facebook and twitter accounts. To do this well organisations need to be generating and using a lot more, current, content.

So the logical next question is – will companies start to bring their own voice back into their fold? Will they bring in their newsletters, wesbites and magazines not only to speak with a more authentic voice, but because it is a far more efficient use of resources?

This will vary with organisational type and their customer profiles, for example – a utility may still most effectively use an insert with a bill (for now), but what about a high-end investment firm?

I am looking forward to seeing what happens as more companies find their own voice again – and in doing so, start a real conversation with their customers.

(13 May, 2009)

From super celeb to super connectors?

Influence, voice, status, once the purview of philosophers and politicians, more recently owned by Paris…and although I think Obama has perhaps blended the two sources of influence, I wonder if the new celebrity is the Superconnectors.

What are Superconnectors? People who not only have and promote extensive links between online communities and individuals, but also distill thinking and information to help more people understand and connect over concepts. Their celebrity or position in the statusphere is reinforced and created by their direct connection with the community.

In an interesting post, Techcrunch discusses the transition from the traditional ranking of status online – the blog Authority list by Technorati and how that is no longer a true indication of status given the links, connections and content on micro-blogs and using other media.

I’m curious – what do others think?

more thinking to come….

(30 April, 2009)

user : consumer : experience

Very interesting post on the multi-sensory directions of user experience design. Real synergies with thinking on sensory branding: Miguel Jimenez

(19 April, 2009)