Does ‘trust’ really matter for brands?
Thinkerbell's Matt Plant and Taylor York explore the desire among brands to become the most trusted in their industry while also striving to replicate Liquid Death's bold, disruptive marketing success.
Sneak your way into any CEO, CMO or board member’s brain, and you’re likely to come across two common thoughts and motivations: ‘We want to be the number one trusted ___ brand’ and How can we be more like Liquid Death*?
Which, on the surface, feels like an irreconcilable trade-off.
Let’s look at trust first. Edelman measures trust across five key elements including ‘dependability’,’ integrity’, ‘purpose’,‘ability’ and ‘self-alignment’; as per their annual ‘Trust Barometer’ report.
The theory goes the more trust, the better off the brand.
The reality is that brands have a tendency to respond to the need to create ‘trust’, by trying to convince consumers they are trustworthy. This is often achieved with homogenous and earnest communications that lack distinctiveness or attention (required to create brand fame), muddling their position in the market, and sailing into the seas of sameness (i.e. being bland). Like Pepsi trying to solve race inequality. BrewDog selling cheaper beer to women to account for the gender pay gap. Mastercard giving free meals if Messi scores goals in soccer.
Chris Voss is a world-renowned FBI negotiator. When trying to win the ‘trust’ of a valuable target, he doesn’t run up to them and provide a laundry list of all the reasons why he is an amazingly trustworthy person. The tactic Chris Voss has adopted to build trust is to simply walk past his target, making sure he is noticed frequently as they each go about their day. Eventually, a look turns into a smile, into a wave, into a hello, and it escalates into a friendship, and he successfully wins over a valuable and reliable informant.
The trust and significant behaviour change he establishes here relies on the ‘mere exposure effect’ (Zajonc, 1968). The mere exposure effect is a heavily studied psychological concept that simply says: the more we are exposed to something, the more we like it and the more likely we are to continue interacting with it (Janiszewski, 1993; Lee, 2001).
In Layman’s terms, the more familiar, the better.
So, the more familiar the brand, the more famous it becomes, and the more likely it is to do well on most business metrics. In comes Liquid Death (point two) and how this brand acts.
Liquid Death is water in a can, and they have had a 7,000% increase in online followers and a 9,000% increase in revenue in the past five years.
Why do businesses want to be like Liquid Death?…well…cause of that. It has huge attention, and it’s making lots of money. The double whammy. It’s recently been valued at $1.4 billion USD. It’s also helping solve the plastic bottle issue clogging our waterways.
Let’s look at Liquid Death in the world of ‘trust’.
We’ll start with ‘dependability’. Liquid Death regularly posts scathing and negative reviews from disgruntled customers. Hmm, okay, not screaming dependability. But you notice it in your social news feed.
Maybe they have good ‘integrity’? Liquid Death recently launched communications about ‘corpse paint’, face paint to look like you’re in a death metal band targeted at teenage girls. They’ve also released a ‘glory hole’ recycling bin with comedian Tom Segura. Not exactly a brand with integrity. But you definitely read about it in an article across a mainstream news outlet.
Okaaaay, how about ‘purpose’? Liquid Death’s purpose is to…’make people laugh and get more of them to drink more healthy beverages, more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution’. Nice, this ticks the box of having a good-for-the-world brand purpose. This also ties into ‘ability’, water in a can, helping kill the use of plastic bottles clogging our oceans whilst providing a refreshing beverage (that makes people happy as it helps keep them hydrated and alive). Great!
The last element of trust is ‘self’, which is simply around the brand being ‘a good fit with who I am as a person’. They’reproviding people with a better for the environment alternative to plastic bottles, for something we all need to drink to survive, in a cool can. There’s a reason why it’s the number one water brand in the US now. Every brand wants to be Liquid Death too, just look at your LinkedIn feed filled with thought leadership around the brand’s success and what other brands who aspire to be the same must do.
They also received over $500K USD from Coinbase, who had the winning bid to be advertised on their packaging, as part of Liquid Death’s Superbowl marketing stunt. Coinbase wants to be seen asattributed to Liquid Death.
Looking at the above, Liquid Death barely hits 3 out of the five trust meters. So there’s not much ‘trust’ there technically, but Liquid Death is familiar. It attracts attention with its provocative, shocking and hilarious moments. They give people a reason to talk about them, helping Liquid Death become familiar at an exponential rate. This familiarity is helping Liquid Death establish good mental availability and ultimately, significant brand growth.
Nobody is denying that being a good corporate citizen in the world isn’t mandatory (especially with the state of the world at the moment), however, moral virtues are not always the best or sole tool to utilise for brand growth. They are just the responsibility businesses hold as a member of the global community (provided they would like the global community to have a long, healthy and happy future).
So instead of earnest, persuading and ultimately forgettable brand moments/actions that are used to build ‘trust’ with consumers, the goal for every brand should be consistent reinforcement of a clear and ownable brand positioning to help grow and maintain very very strong familiarity.
*insert any cool brand built from attention-getting ‘out there’ activity
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Don’t worry about trying to go good and change things for the better. Just do whatever it takes to sell stuff to the most people at the highest margin. Got it. Thanks brainiacs.
This article is shallow and reflects everything that is wrong with this industry. I am amazed that Thinkerbell were happy to go out with this piece. I’m sure a bunch of their clients and staff can see this article for what it is – a couple of privileged white blokes telling the world how it is.
…isn’t it entirely case-by-case?
You’d think marketers working in regulated industries like financial services and airlines are concerned with being a trusted brand; rightfully so.
You can’t necessarily say trust is not apparent on an FMCG level, either. Pharmaceuticals are an entirely different proposition to bottled water.
The local baby formula shortage in 2015 comes to mind: poor trust in the quality of Chinese baby formula led to massive diagou shopping here in the more ‘trustworthy’ Australian market.
That’s not considering other factors like whether or not the advertiser’s a publicly-listed company, or if they’ve had any recent scandals… you get the idea.
There’s a bit more nuance required for a piece like this, but it’d be great to see a revision or follow-up piece on this. Not sure all this hate is warranted, either.
This is a fad, not a sustainable brand.
This coming from an agency that’s more interested in it’s own fame that it’s clients is so ironic.
There’s a reason brands are measured by trust in the long term, as it’s leads to the brand staying in market for generations. Household brands are trusted brands. Sure you can show a couple of flash in the pan examples of brands that generate sales through stunts and being different, but will they be around in 20-30 years time? This feels like a very shallow article designed to be controversial and not really thought through.
Classic example of an agency trying to define a broad category (brand and reputation) through the lens of the bit they do, using an example of extremely limited applicability to most brands.
Shallow, immature and self-serving.
… of Mumbrella comments.
Thanks to the Thinkerbell team for igniting some passionate engagement with your self-serving reductionism, logical leaps and false equivalencies.
In an attempt to contribute some substance, may I offer:
Don’t hire an ad agency to think holistically about your brand, unless your brand only needs culture-stunty attention hacks to grow. But if it does, then Thinkerbell is probably a good choice!
Using bad examples of “trust-building” advertising to support the proposition that building trust is irrelevant fails even the most basic clear thinking test. Hot tip: there is more to building brands – especially outside flash in the pan fmcg brands – than advertising and culture stunts.
Lessons from Liquid Death, like Patagonia, Olympic athletes and FBI negotiators are of incredibly limited relevance to most brands.
OK, if the science is so good then provide some examples from the other categories? Liquid Death sells because it is front and centre of a bunch of podcasts young males listen to.
Make a compelling argument for fridges.
I’m not sure using one product in one category is a significant enough sample size to make your point. Can you expand to look at finance, whitegoods, auto etc please before we take you seriously?
@@nice article… no it wasn’t Adam, he can’t elucidate his thoughts that well. Probably someone else at the agency.
@the authors…
Dependability. The purchaser expects water, and the purchaser gets water. That feels like dependability to me. Please qualify the types of negative feedback the company was highlighting; were they not receiving water in their can?
Integrity. A product called Liquid Death leveraging corpse paint and glory holes. Marketing that aligns with the brand. I’d call that integrity. You seem to be analysing this from your how-do-you-do-fellow-kids perspective.
But, really, these are just quibbles. There should be no reason for a product like this to exist, unless you’re in Flint, Michigan, the Gaza Strip or other such distressed locales. Celebrating its container for being only slightly less damaging to this earth than plastic is a sign you need to get your heads out of your proverbials.
Thanks Adam.
‘Having a go’ without adding to the argument is rather vacuous. To aid in advancing the conversation here are some logical fallacies for your benefit:
Ad Hominem – one that attempts to invalidate an opponent’s position based on a personal trait or fact about the opponent rather than through logic.
Straw man – one that argues against a hyperbolic, inaccurate version of the opposition rather than their actual argument.
Equivocation – a statement crafted to mislead or confuse readers or listeners by using multiple meanings or interpretations of a word or simply through unclear phrasing.
Appeal to ignorance – a claim that something must be true because it hasn’t been proven false. It can also be a claim that something must be false because it hasn’t been proven true. This is also known as the burden of proof fallacy.
Circular argument – one that uses the same statement as both the premise and the conclusion. No new information or justification is introduced.
Appeal to hypocrisy – also known as a tu quoque fallacy, is a rebuttal that responds to one claim with reactive criticism rather than with a response to the claim itself.
But what if every time Chris walks by said target, he’s naked? Exposure effect still in play there fellas?
I think the marketing sciences they refer to is making the points they are talking about. The example is attempting to bring the science to life.
The toxicity of this is concerning. Is all this hate purely due to the article or an irrational hatred of the agency who released it?
Samsung fridges
Name four.
Yes to all of that, but also maybe your ‘Thinkers’ aren’t as smart as they think they are. There a so many holes in this article that I’m really surprised I highly regarded agency would put it’s name to this.