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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