Head to Head: Is trust more important than relevance?

In this series, Mumbrella invites the industry’s senior PR professionals to share their opposing views on the industry’s biggest issues. This week, Nicole Reaney, director at Inside Out PR goes head to head with Sefiani director Nick Owens on whether trust is more important than relevance.

What’s more important: trust or relevance? Nicole Reaney, director at Inside Out PR, believes that if a brand can stay relevant, it can weather any trust issues. Nick Owens, director at Sefiani Communications Group, argues that trust must be valued above all else.

Yes, argues Nick Owens, director at Sefiani Communications Group:

Is trust more important than relevance? It’s a bit like the chicken and egg – which comes first? It’s also probably a false dichotomy, because brands need both to succeed. A brand has to be relevant enough that customers want or need to engage with it and then learn to trust it, but without a critical mass of trusting customers, it won’t become relevant.

Put another way, can you imagine a product or service succeeding if it is trustworthy but irrelevant, or relevant but untrustworthy?

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