Three apology emails landed in my inbox in one week. A retailer whose loyalty database had leaked. An airline explaining away a fare glitch. A meal kit company saying it had heard our feedback about the packaging, sincerely, from the whole team. I read all three the way you read a weather report. Noted. Filed. Nothing felt.
That is the real finding in every trust survey I have looked at this year. Not the line going down. The shrug that comes with it.
Every January Edelman publishes its barometer, and every January somebody puts the declining line on slide four and discusses it like weather. It is not weather. We built it. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and I have written the sentence that caused it.
Trust was never one brand's asset to spend, it is a shared account, and every company that overdraws it is spending everybody else's balance, including yours.
Look at this year alone. Facebook handing eighty-seven million profiles to a firm most people had never heard of. Wells Fargo still explaining accounts it opened for customers who did not ask. Equifax, a company whose entire product is being careful with data, losing the data. None of those firms are your client. All of them are your client's problem, because they set the reading level of every promise that comes after.
Here is the part that gets lost. The industry response to a trust decline is almost always more communication. A values page. A transparency report with a photograph of a wheat field. A campaign about honesty, which is the strangest product a brand can ship, because honesty is not a message, it is a record.
What actually rebuilds the account is narrower and slower. Stop making promises with a longer horizon than your operating plan. If procurement can undo it in the third quarter, do not say it in the first. Say the smaller true thing instead, and then keep saying it for six years until somebody notices.
Publish the claim that costs you something. Patagonia telling people not to buy the jacket landed because it had a price attached, and everyone could see the price. A claim with no cost is a slogan wearing a lab coat.
And let the correction be as loud as the claim was. Most apologies are quiet on purpose, which is how everyone learns the claim was marketing.
Most apologies are quiet on purpose, which is how everyone learns the claim was marketing.
Truffles has never believed a single thing I have told her and I have stopped taking it personally. Barnaby, meanwhile, trusts the sound of the cabinet where the treats live, because that sound has never once lied to him. Not once. That is the entire barometer, sitting on my kitchen floor, available to anyone willing to be boring about it.