Editor’s note: Stephen Denny and Paul Leinberger are co-authors of Unfiltered Marketing: 5 Rules to Win Back Trust, Credibility, and Customers in a Digitally Distracted World. They are principals at Denny + Leinberger Strategy, a Colorado-based management consultancy.
In January 2018, Murtaza Hussain, a journalist from The Intercept, said:
“The main issue I see with technology and culture and trust … is that the advances of technology, which are unmoored from any cultural or political context, have created an epistemological crisis in society. We see this accelerating over time and the most dramatic case is the consequences for electoral politics. For American democracy.”
Our conversation with Hussain centered on a wide-ranging discussion of the collapse of trust and the rise of technology as the world’s most profound cultural driver.
Fast forward to the immediate present: The dust is settling on a highly contentious American election unlike any in memory. Silicon Valley has shown its power, with the entire technopoly – Amazon Web Services, Facebook and Twitter, among others – entering the American political fray. Hussain’s warning feels like it has the immediacy of an air bag deployment – still technically possible to throw into reverse, possibly, but ultimately too late.
The above series of events must give all brands pause as they continue to feel their way forward toward what stakeholders believe is an appropriate values-based stance on shifting social and political issues. New questions need to be asked.
How do we approach a complex question like brand values alignment? How do we look at the growing relative power of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google when our increasingly digital-first stance is reliant on their platforms and networks? And what to make of our own points of view when our markets are comprised of citizens reading with increasing alarm over abuses of trust?
We explored this complex issue of creating trust in a low-trust environment in the Culture & Technology Intersection study, a global tracking study Denny Leinberger Strategy has been fielding since 2016. Based on this study, we’ll share three steps brands can take as they struggle with how best to build a culture of trust against a background of low trust and the increasing power of technology giants.
1. Push control back into the hands of your customers.
We don’t trust the institutions around us – and for good reason. We’ve caught the technopolies using our data or collecting information without our knowledge or consent too many times to trust them. And this is only getting worse.
How do we address this as stewards of our businesses? We find ways to give our audience – our customers – the control that we would traditionally keep to ourselves. From information on demand to self-service and re-humanizing what can easily become a technology-only relationship, the ways we push control back to our users not only provides closure but de-stresses what can be a stressful experience.
2. Shift your perspective away from trying to be the hero and toward a more “raw” approach.
We’re tired of being lied to. We don’t trust post-production. We want the truth – and the easiest way to come across as truthful is to strip away the scripting, the production value and the artifice.
How do we shift toward raw? We lose the script and speak from the heart. We show our true colors this way. We include our audience in the development of the plan, co-creating what many would assume would be passed down to them complete. We teach rather than dictate, acting not as the hero but as the Greek chorus, explaining to our audience what they’re seeing.
3. Align with your customers’ values instead of trying to force them to align to yours.
We experienced the “death of outrage” in late 2018 – we saw support for brands that took controversial positions on social or political issues plunge from the mid-50%s to the mid-20%s. We are now in an environment where consumers are willing to follow … if the brand is unquestionably credible on the issue. Patagonia can lean on its environmental credentials with ease, while Dick’s Sporting Goods’ attempt to weigh into the nuances of the Second Amendment cost them hundreds of millions in lost revenue.
What are we supposed to do? It makes more sense for brands to tap into the values of their customers than to try to convince a skeptical audience to change their way of thinking. Consumers are tired of the lectures. They’d rather ignore you and get on with their lives.
Building trust and credibility
This holistic system of “seeking control in an out-of-control world,” along with “raw” and “heroic credibility” gives business leaders a playbook – a blueprint – with which to build trust and credibility in a jaded, distracted world.
We’re walking a dangerous path. The only way forward is to ensure our audience is with us every step of the way.