Building Brand Trust
Building trust is about more than claiming to be trustworthy. As a matter of fact, claiming to be trustworthy without a credible, sincere narrative to back it up can even diminish customer trust in your brand. The banking industry spends millions on advertising, yet a recent Harris poll reveals that only 13% of Americans hold a “great deal of trust” for national banks.
Advertising can only take you so far. Words like “trust” and “integrity” have been hammered so much in messaging that their impact has been exhausted to the point of commodification. In other words, you have to establish trust without ever saying “trust us.”
So, how do you demonstrate the trustworthiness of your brand?
“People don’t buy What you sell.
They buy Why you sell it.”
As Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why puts it: “People don’t buy What you sell. They buy Why you sell it.” Companies that succeed in the future are going to have an authentic brand message. And if you want your messaging to be authentic, it needs to rest on a foundation of trust, woven into your institution’s very identity.
This means building trust requires much more than brand messaging: trust has to become a business proposition, built into the core of your business. From the way you attract your customers to how you engage them and finally capture their long-term business, trust has to be part of the nature of the business you conduct with them.
As Gary Vaynerchuck puts it: “Market to where their customers are and in the year we live in.” From your radio advertising campaign to your online presence, from the space design of your lobby and all the way to your loan officer’s handshake, trust must become a consistent business proposition that drives all the facets of your brand.
