By Lori Jones, President & CEO, Avocet Communications
Key Takeaways
- We are not in a trust recession; we are in a trust extinction.
- The most dangerous assumption in marketing today is that “telling the truth” earns trust.
- Trust is not a message. It is an architecture designed, tested, and experienced.
- Modern credibility is not built through consistency. It’s built through congruence.
- Your brand’s reputation is no longer what it projects. It’s what it permits.
Welcome to the Age of Earned Belief
We’re not just navigating market noise anymore; we’re navigating cultural nihilism.
Trust, as a currency, has collapsed. Not devalued; obliterated. Edelman’s latest trust barometer confirms it, but we don’t need a report to know what we feel: buyers, employees, even partners, are moving through the world with institutional allergy.
They’ve seen too many corporate apologies. Too many mission statements that unravel on contact.
They don’t disbelieve you because they’re cynical. They disbelieve you because they’re awake.
This isn’t a crisis. It’s an inflection point. And it changes everything about how we build brands.
The Death of “Authenticity” as a Marketing Play
In my opinion, marketers have overplayed the word authenticity to the point of meaninglessness. Consumers can smell curated sincerity from across the algorithm. The problem isn’t that we’re lying. It’s that we’re performing truth, choreographing transparency, producing vulnerability, scripting relatability.
The modern audience doesn’t want proof points. They want to see:
- What you do when no one’s watching.
- How you behave under pressure.
- Whether your smallest decisions match your loudest claims.
As I often say, brand is no longer a message. Brand is an observable pattern of behavior.
Designing for Trust, Not Performing It
At Avocet, we are always asking, “What’s the story we’re telling?” But we’ve also started asking: “What trust infrastructure are we building?”
Because belief is no longer earned through message reach, but through message resistance, how well your narrative holds up when interrogated, reshaped, and repurposed by others.
This is how I break down the shift; it’s…
- From broadcasting to distributing credibility.
- From storytelling to trust choreography.
- From key messages to trust vectors, the specific paths by which belief travels: employees, customers, community, code, culture.
The New Trust Vectors: Quiet, Distributed, Inescapable
Today’s buyer doesn’t believe what you publish. They believe what they accidentally learn about you from:
- A former employee’s Glassdoor review.
- A LinkedIn comment from someone who once worked with your founder.
- An open API or documentation that shows how you really operate.
This is proxy trust at scale; ambient, uncontrolled, and profoundly powerful.
And this is where brand leaders need to refocus: not on controlling narratives, but architecting evidence.
Four Strategic Trust Plays for CMOs and CEOs
These are not tactics. These are operational commitments to build trust into the fabric of your organization:
1. Operationalize Narrative Integrity: Every brand claim should be traceable to an operational decision. If you say, “we put people first,” you should be able to prove it.
2. Design for Interrogation: Assume your audience will fact-check you mid-scroll. Build your brand like a good codebase: clean, modular, and auditable.
3. Shift from Consistency to Congruence: Consistency is repeating your story. Congruence is when every part of your business lives that story, from customer service to culture to procurement.
4. Use Silence Strategically: Not everything needs to be branded or broadcasted. In an overexposed world, restraint is credibility. Build your brand in quiet places: Slack groups, DMs, private communities. That’s where reputations crystallize.
Provocative Questions for the C-Suite
- What truths does your brand perform, and which ones does it actually prove?
- How do your quietest moments reinforce your loudest claims?
- What would your brand look like if it had no access to advertising?
- Do your employees trust your brand enough to evangelize it unprompted?
- Are you measuring trust velocity, the speed at which credibility spreads within a network?
Final Thought: Brand as a System of Belief
In this new era, the brand is no longer the megaphone. It’s the mirror, reflecting your choices, revealing your inconsistencies, and amplifying your alignment.
Belief is not granted. It’s grown. And like anything grown, it needs design, care, and patience.
Let’s stop chasing attention. Let’s start earning belief.
