By Janus Boye
“We need a new strategy to earn trust and help consumers and citizens make confident decisions.”
This is the premise behind Trustworthy, a 2021 book by Margot Bloomstein with the catchy subtitle: “How the smartest brands beat cynicism and bridge the trust gap”.
Margot is a Boston-based working content strategist and for more than 20 years, she’s consulted with clients in a range of industries, from software-as-a-service to sex toy retailers and from footwear technology to pension savings.
In a recent member call, we held a book club for Trustworthy. Margot introduced the book and explained how to bridge the trust gap through a three-part framework that encompasses tactics in both content and design. She went on to describe what the smartest organisations are doing to foster trust by using content and design appropriately. She also shared a few other insights as well and below you’ll find my highlights from the call.
As usual, we started with ‘why’. Why write a book about trust?
Cynicism is cheap. Hope takes work
My copy of Trustworthy - an enjoyable and also very practical guide to being more trustworthy
Margot opened by saying that her goal with the book was to arm as many people as possible with her thinking on trust, from marketers and writers in the trenches to creative directors and content managers. This was to some annoyance for her developmental editor.
When Margot started thinking about the book, she had seen a rise of cynicism, and a shift from scepticism towards just not believing in what was usually known as trustworthy sources of information. She had noticed how marketing messages were falling flat and how sales cycles were taking longer, notably because of lack of both confidence, or as Margot called it: Trust in making the right decision.
In her words, the book is really for anyone in the business of persuasion, whether political candidates, marketeers or government officials alike trying to empower you to make better choices. To quote Margot:
“Anyone in the business of providing information is now facing more of an uphill battle”
As an example, Margot shared how things were in 2015 in the media coverage in the US, specifically in the political sector (think Clinton vs. Trump - 2016 United States presidential election). Not only heavily polarised, but clearly also lacking trust. She was wondering if that might impact her content strategy clients, who are not really in the political sector. As she quickly discovered, the trust crisis was a big deal and relevant to all.
The book covers her analysis of the problem, how we got here, what we can do about it and plenty of examples of organisations addressing this. It also contains details on those who are doing the hard work, patterns, and frameworks to create hope and fundamentally build trust. It’s really applicable to any organisation regardless of size, industry and budget. Reading the book, you learn how to build greater trust with your audiences by refuelling their confidence, rebuilding their trust in themselves and their ability to make good decisions.
As it turned out, even now 2 years after the book came out, the audience has been mixed from marketing managers to HR managers, and those with boots on the ground in social media.
Let’s dive a bit more into the book.
A framework for bridging the trust gap
The introduction of the book opens like this:
“I don’t believe you.
Oh, don’t take it personally. I know you don’t trust me either. You probably don’t believe most of what you hear; neither do I, and that’s true for most people”
Besides the introduction, and the closing part with further reading, interviews cited, notes and a comprehensive index, the bulk of the book is a 3-part framework looking at voice, volume and vulnerability:
Voice: How we can build a consistent tone, visually and verbally over time and across channels
Volume: The amount of information an organisation need to share, again both visually and verbally to earn trust
Vulnerability: How organisations can lean into their mistakes, develop greater rapport by exposing inner workings of organisational values and what we can learn from that looking forward
Chapter 6 is in the Volume part of the trust framework. Such an important point - say what you have to say, then stop!
The first question in the member call came from one of our members in the automotive sector:
How can we remain consistent over time in a changing world?
First, Margot went all the way back to ancient Greece, citing the famous text carved over the template of Delphi around 4000 years ago:
“Know thyself”
It’s about knowing yourself and being able to articulate it. Then you can react in a way that is consistent, even in a changing world. One of the things that Margot often does is figuring out the message architecture - what’s the terms and statements that convey our product and priorities.
Sharing a personal anecdote, Margot told the story of when she was once driving a Mini, and how she missed that. Mini’s are known for being quirky and that’s also used in their messages, where they used the term cheeky - in their message architecture. By establishing your communication goals first, it allows you to flex in a way that can react to market pressures.
We then moved onto the trust crisis.
Understanding the problem before you solve it
Margot said that she often goes back to the famous Edelman Trust Barometer to rely on their research on the subject. In their 2023 research they say:
“A lack of faith in societal institutions triggered by economic anxiety, disinformation, mass-class divide and a failure of leadership has brought us to where we are today – deeply and dangerously polarized.”
Going back to around 2015, Margot noticed it wasn’t only polarisation and lack of trust as mentioned earlier. The media covered the political climate in a new way and the reactions had changed. Previously, if they caught a politician in a lie, that could really damage the campaign. That wasn’t the case with the Trump vs. Clinton presidential campaign, where Margot noticed that sometimes there were double-speak on both sides of the aisle, and even if major media outlets were covering it and holding their feet to the fire and doing all the fact-checking, support for the candidates didn’t change. That struck Margot as odd. As if people were walling themselves from information to maintain perspectives?
She also looked at what happened at the same time with the Volkswagen emissions scandal, also known as Dieselgate. Their market share didn’t really slip. Interestingly, if someone thought of themselves as a VW driver, they would take in this new info and it didn’t impact their buying habits. So, perhaps it wasn’t so much about walling from info or being cynical, but rather that their own perceptions of how they would use the info was changing.
She then dug deeper into how we use information and how that requires vulnerability and also a degree of confidence (as in: I’ve learned enough, consulted sources), so that you can now make a decision. What does it require to have a high degree of confidence in making a decision? That’s where Margot found that we were facing a problem.
Noticing the rise in gaslighting (word of the year in 2022!), Margot contributed to having major industries and the media covering those, all saying you can’t trust the evidence of your own eyes. But what they are really saying is: only look to me. When major institutions say that, people lose their ability to have confidence in making decisions. That’s why sales cycles are slowing down, customers want to do more research and actually often not even making a decision.
To summarise: We have a real problem with confidence and Margot’s book addresses how we can rebuild confidence to make good decisions. At the core of that is education. Content that doesn’t dumb things down, but build people up.
The book is filled with examples, and in the member call, Margot mentioned these two:
Email marketing platform Mailchimp. Something they’ve always done is break things down in a way that respects their different audiences. If you are new, you can find basic definitions how to’s and if you are more experienced, you will be directed to more advanced content
The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. They go to great lengths to speak in the vernacular of the people and then pair it with medical definitions. Say, you are seeing swelling in a joint, the doctor will probably call it inflammation. This is to help people get smarter and have a more empowered and informed conversation.
We then moved onto volume. When people ask for more information is that really what they want and need?
The amount of information we are sharing can destabilise some and empower others
Talking about volume, Margot started with some good visual examples which you can also find in the book.
In the call, she compared those famous diagrams from IKEA with diagrams from other furniture manufacturers. One is much more detailed for a typically younger target audience while the IKEA version is more empowering - with an underlying message saying that you can navigate this, you’ll make it using simple visual cues. A different degree of handholding and empowerment that conveys respect for the audience.
Another case that’s in the book is America’s Test Kitchen. They publish literally dozens of cook books per year, cooking school, TV programs and more and they are widely known for a deep level of detail. If you engage with them, you can see everything about a particular cooking technique and as a user of their site, you know that they’ve tried 50 different versions, so they are able to say that this is the recommended and best choice. They also share and publish an abundance of info that you can easily review yourself and use in replicating their tests in your own kitchen, if you are so inclined.
According to America’s Test Kitchen, they share that information because the audience likes to see that it’s there, but they don’t necessarily read it. In other words: Sometimes footnotes give you more confidence in the author, even though you don’t take the time to read them.
A final example from the UK is gov.uk, a United Kingdom public sector information website, created by the Government Digital Service to provide a single point of access to UK government services. They’ve gone down the path of more not being more. Previously they had 75,000 pages on 9 different websites on how to interact with the UK government. This was obviously confusing and overwhelming. Consequently, people were using other sources like The Guardian to find answers.
To address this, gov.uk went through a big content audit and reduced the number of pages to 3,000 using a simple mantra:
Government should only publish content on things on which only government can publish content
Margot’s closing advice is that the amount of info that you publish and maintain has to correlate to the goals and the needs of your audience.
One final question on fact-checking and junk content:
The idea of fact-checking is becoming more complex
With the rise of Chat GPT and oher machine learning tools, the volume of information and ‘facts’ coming at you from different sources can be really overwhelming. While ChatGPT is really interesting, it is also creating more work on those creating content and worrying about accuracy.
According to Margot, the amount of junk content hasn’t become more sophisticated. It’s been around for a long time. One example some 15 years ago was with political lobbyist Karl Rove, pushing out questions with wrong premises on John McCain. While Karl Rove and his team said they were just asking to collect data, the questions they asked also changed the view. Seeding an audience with info can have an impact and specifically seeding misinformation to allow stories to change. That’s a trick that unfortunately gets used again and again.
Closing on a not so optimistic note, Margot said that today our means of creating garbage information can now be automated, and this causes editors to scramble to keep up with it.
Learn more about trust and Trustworthy
We’ve previously written quite a bit about trust. Here’s just a few posts:
You can also lean back and watch the recording from the call.