Making The Business Case For Trust In Brand Advertising

Trust matters, right now, more than ever; it is an essential differentiator between you and the competition. If you want your brand to win the battle to be a customer’s first choice, you must ask how, where and why your campaign will build trust in the promise it offers.

As a marketer, your role is to bring value to people’s lives through the product or service your brand offers, to build awareness and understanding of the promise your brand makes and to deliver on that promise. The advertising choices are critical to building trust in that promise.

What is happening to trust in 21st century?

The ground is shifting and the pillars of society as we understood them are crumbling. Edelman’s Trust Barometer, analysing the first 25 years of this century, clearly sets out how trust has been falling in governments, in media, in NGOs and in business across the western world. This in the face of higher trust levels in governments run by autocrats and dictators. But the latest analysis shows people are looking to businesses to solve problems, ahead of governments and NGOs, because they believe businesses have the capability to deliver.

Rachel Botsman’s analysis of trust in a time of technological and societal change shows that people still trust, but they trust sideways – in their peers and people around them - not upwards to the ‘leaders’ of before. Her case is backed by the reality that millions of people place their trust in strangers every day: from Uber drivers to eBay sellers, customer reviews for all kinds of things and recommendations through user-generated content.

Take a moment to consider the way 2026 has begun. Can we trust our political leaders to deliver the change we want? Is our obsession with The Traitors a deep-rooted way of understanding how our trust (or distrust) in each other works?

Analysis of the IPA’s Effectiveness Databank by Peter Field has shown trust as a factor in the business success of advertising campaigns has risen from seventh in importance just a few years ago to second, behind only the quality of the product or service. When your customer is faced with a choice between your brand and a competitor offering a similar price and promise, you can win if that customer trusts your brand more.

How do you make sure your advertising is doing all that it can to help build trust in your brand?

This is the goal of our book and the work we have done to review and assess every element open to you.

Crucially, your brand must, somehow, present a way to make people’s lives better, perhaps even solve a problem they are facing. This is particularly true where you seek to build trusted status with customers concerned about sustainability or inclusion - factors like benevolence and integrity come into play as you try to demonstrate you are on the customer’s side.

Every conversation we had naturally led towards two particular topics of interest – the rise of the influencer and the use of Gen AI. There is a strange paradox in attitudes to influencers in advertising: nobody trusts ‘influencers’, but everybody has an influencer they trust. The way you select influencers to work with, as possibly your most important customers, is vital to achieve the authenticity customers look for from brands and their communications.

When it comes to Gen AI, we are at the foothills and yet, in a sense, this new technology will be like all those that have come before. It will bring change, for sure, but the way it impacts on trust in your brand will be entirely down to how you choose to use it. As Evan Davis told the advertising industry back in 2019, ‘if you want to be trusted, then do trustworthy things’. This applies to how you use AI in your advertising.

Media selection and trust

Where your customer sees your brand says a great deal about what it stands for. We cover compelling research that explains how significant the choice of where your brand appears is to what someone thinks of it. In one interview, we discussed how sponsorship is the encapsulation of this. Compare eBay’s sponsorship of ITV’s Love Island with the Rolex association with Wimbledon. Now, imagine for a moment if we flipped those two brands and sponsorship properties. We try to inform a greater understanding about the different ways you can increase trust through your choices of media channels, including online partners.

And there is the content of your advertising. Creating and producing the messages which communicate what your brand stands for requires a well thought-through and executed approach. Not only trustworthy, but also entertaining, offering a good, useful and engaging experience that is respectful of your target audience.

I believe the brand commanding the strongest trust wins and advertising has an important role in building this trust. If I don’t trust you, why should I listen to you? Furthermore, why should I believe you and act in the way you’re asking me to if I don’t trust you? Success (or your ability to deliver that brilliant solution to my needs) ultimately depends on how much I trust you and this includes the advertising you present me with.

Our goal, as I stated at the beginning of this article, is to encourage every marketing and advertising practitioner to put trust at the heart of their advertising campaigns.

Why? Because a world where people can trust brands to help make their lives better is the world I want to live in.

Save 30% on Trusted Advertising with code AMS30.