Building Trust by Building Your Brand
“How can brands build trust back up?” asks Paul Armstrong in a recent article for Forbes. He interviewed a number of CEOs and senior executives and encountered reactions to this topic ranging from frustration to concern to blind hope that the ‘ship will right itself.’ Generally, they seemed to consider the task of building trust too big to confront.
Armstrong writes that in order to affect change, you must take action; however, in order to know what action to take, your company needs a solid sense of “self”—an awareness of what you stand for and where you’re headed. To a certain extent, companies present this information in the form of the “About Us” pages on their websites, or perhaps in published brand books, but these things often come off as hollow.
The author suggests a new tool from a digital agency called Cyber-Duck, which he describes as a workshop process, tailored to the needs of each individual company, through which is created an “interactive, online story-esque experience that consumers, stakeholders and employees actually enjoy using.” Features of this tool include:
- Helping brands redefine their customer relationship
- Ease in getting started, using, and updating
- Interactive nature
- Future applications with artificial intelligence and automation (self-generating)
- Future applications with machine learning (self-evaluation)
Armstrong concludes that “in a time of ‘alternative facts’, ‘post-truth’ and general confusion, having a clear north start for employees and customers makes good business sense.” He strongly recommends that companies focus on improving their brand in order to achieve success in today’s world.
To read the article in full, see Forbes.