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?
Trust isn’t the starting point: it’s the destination. We trust brands for a specific task – if they get that job done, they are relevant to our needs. If they get that job done each and every time, they are trustworthy. Two stops, same train line.
I notice a theme from the individual/s involved in this article – going for the headlines… or as they say ‘relevance’.
This is a perfect example for me where the relevance got me reading, but this has gone a long way to breaking down trust and exposing a lack of integrity behind what is said and done. We need to remember in our industry that the clicks don’t replace trust or a purchase, or re-purchase.
I’d rather a social media or PR campaign that got no clicks online but instead provoked the phone to ring by a select few highly qualified and relevant customers any day.
Some say that ‘Any publicity is good publicity’ and seems to be the fundamental belief behind this article – and I totally disagree and find it unethical to say the least. Don’t think my values could be any clearer here… I think many brands will be appalled by this article too and the outdated philosophy in the old way of ‘public relations’.
Check out https://consciouscapitalism.org.au/ @ConsciousCap and understand how the most profitable businesses are succeeding and by maintaining their integrity and being who they need to be rather than just sharing a relevant topical message to win people over. Just saying….
Interesting topic. Yes relevance places the brand on the public radar in the first place. Then trust enables the preference and loyalty.