Article Excerpt
The concept of brand trust can often be overlooked in favor of short-term goals, but it’s a crucial piece of marketing strategy. Trust and loyalty often go hand-in-hand and will cement your brand in customers’ minds; when they’re looking for a product or service, they’ll know exactly where to go. Here, we will analyze the factors that contribute to brand trust, highlight notable, trustworthy leaders and provide recommendations to apply to your own brand.
Brand trust is the amount of respect and loyalty customers have for your brand, or how strongly they believe you can deliver on your promises. It is a public perception often shaped by a mixture of first-person experiences and company communications, for both of which marketing is a crucial component. Brand trust is not necessarily measured by repeat purchases or long-time usage, but rather how customers feel about your brand, and how willing they are to give their time, money, energy or information to you over other companies.
“We, as humans, tend to trust what other humans say and do, so trust is easy to develop but extremely difficult to maintain—and ridiculously easy to lose,” wrote Don Scultz, a global marketing communications pioneer and founder of the Medill Master of Science in Integrated Marketing Communications Program at Northwestern University. “In this interactive marketplace, marketers must be totally trustworthy, continuously, to gain and maintain the consumer’s trust and any ongoing relationship. There is simply no other path.”2
In the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, 70 percent of respondents said that trusting a brand is more important today than in the past—a belief that is shared regardless of age group, gender and income. Further, 53 percent of respondents say the second most important factor when purchasing a new brand is “whether you trust the company that owns the brand or the brand that makes the product”. Trust is second only to price, at 64 percent.5
As opposed to short-term sales goals, media attention or social engagement, brand trust is a long-term investment in your organization’s success. It might seem obvious, but the more that people trust your brand, the more that they will support and endorse it. That trust will likely develop into affinity and loyalty, and customers will be more inclined to recommend your products to friends and family. And that loyalty pays off: 75 percent of people with high brand trust say they will buy the brand’s product even if it isn’t the cheapest, it is the only brand of the product they’ll buy, and they will immediately check out a new product from that brand to purchase.5
Relevance
Trust in a brand and its product is one of the most important aspects when introducing a new product. It can be incredibly difficult to sell a new product if nobody trusts the brand that it comes from. This issues is even more prevalent in the medical world. When peoples health is at stake, they will need to have pretty good reason to trust that the product they receive will contribute positively to their health.
Trust is built through making quality products, that last, and deliver on their original promise of what the product should do. Patients getting into a new form of care may have a lot of concerns regarding what treatment methods and medical devices they could use. Everyone facing something new and this meaningful should be asking these questions, and the company selling these products should be just as involved in answering these questions as selling the product itself. Building trust requires transparency about the products purpose and quality, actively providing answers, and helping the customer fully understand how this products works and can fulfill their needs.
Sources
Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, Northwestern University. (2023, February 13). What is Brand Trust? how to recognize IT & how to build it. NorthwesternSite. https://imcprofessional.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/what-is-brand-trust
