On a video call in April, someone said the words trust campaign out loud and eleven small faces nodded. The proposal was a three-week push about how deeply the company cares, scheduled for the same month it had furloughed most of its store staff. I unmuted. I said maybe not. There was that particular silence you get when a room agrees with you and nobody wants to be second.
We have all been on the receiving end of this since March. One week in April my inbox held forty-one emails from companies explaining that these are uncertain times and that I can trust them. Some were dentists. One was software I stopped using in 2016.
Which is exactly the problem.
The moment a brand has to say trust us, it has already announced that the trust is not there, because trust is a conclusion the audience reaches and never a claim the brand gets to make.
Consider what that sentence actually asks for. It asks the reader to do the work the company was supposed to do. Orders that arrive. Labels that are accurate. Workers who are paid. A phone number a human answers. Do those things and nobody needs the sentence. Skip them and the sentence is an insult with a logo on it.
I have three tests I run on any line like this before it leaves the deck. Could a competitor say it? We care about our customers survives on any letterhead in the category, which means it is not evidence of anything. Does it cost something? Oatly printing its real carbon number on the carton is expensive precisely because it removes the option to lie later, and that expense is the whole message. Could a customer say it on your behalf? Trader Joe's almost never tells anyone it is friendly. Its shoppers do it unprompted, in line, to strangers, which is the only version that counts.
The brands coming out of this spring with more credit than they started with are the ones that went quiet and did logistics. Salt & Straw moved to pints and a delivery window and told people plainly, in ordinary sentences, when a flavor would run out. No campaign, no wheat field. Just a company being findable and accurate for eight weeks in a row. My trust in them went up considerably and they never asked me for it once.
That is the paradox in one line. Asking spends the thing. Behaving makes it.
Skip them and the sentence is an insult with a logo on it.
Truffles trusts me for exactly one reason, which is that I have filled her bowl at seven in the morning every day of her life. She has never seen a values page and would not respect one. Barnaby is asleep in the window, unbothered, waiting to see whether I do it again tomorrow.