The Trifecta of Brand Trust
Whether your brand is on a mission to save the world or simply to help people save time making dinner, it all comes down to trust.
In order to become loyal customers, people have to believe in your brand; but they don’t just want to believe that your brand can succeed in simply keeping its brand promise, loyal customers must also believe that your brand cares about their success in return.
“Too many brands fall so in love with what they believe they could be that they fail to look outside their organization to ask whether their customers believe them. ”
Take something as common as laundry detergent: If you’re brand loyal, you likely believe you are buying the product that best meets your cleaning expectations, while also fitting into your budget and possibly even aligning with your concern for the environment. But you also believe (even subconsciously) that this brand cares about your family having clean clothes, which allows you to trust that each time you buy this product, it will perform as well or even better than last time. You believe this brand knows what you need and is committed to delivering it, so you continue to buy their products. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
Too many brands fall so in love with what they believe they could be that they fail to look outside their organization to ask whether their customers believe them.
Regularly assessing your brand through this symbiotic lens is the best way to avoid getting stuck in myopia. At Inquisitive Insights, we use our proprietary Brand Trust Inventory, a framework to assess brands through three critical drivers of consumer trust: Authenticity, Capability and Empathy.
Inspired by Harvard Business Review’s Trust Triangle, our Brand Trust Inventory framework applies many of the same principles of great interpersonal leadership to building successful brands – because both depend on trust.
The Brand Trust Inventory framework evaluates three key drivers of trust.
This framework allows us to answer three critical questions for our clients:
Do customers believe you are honest and credible? (Authenticity)
Are you consistently meeting your customers’ needs? (Capability)
Do your customers feel your brand understands and cares about them? (Empathy)
By measuring a brand’s strengths and weaknesses in these three areas, we help clients pinpoint opportunities to build greater trust, enabling them to focus future efforts in the right places.
Interested in taking the assessment? Let’s talk.
