Trust has always been an important aspect of business. Consumers buy a product because they trust or believe that it will fulfill their needs. However, consumers have increasingly lost trust in business, culminating in the situation of today's society where we have an inherent distrust for business-to-consumer marketing and advertising. Social media has intensified the loss of consumer trust by creating a new channel in which consumers no longer need to trust businesses, they can simply trust each other.
Social media allows people to grow their own communities to supply resources, one of which is consumer trust. If we are interested in a new product, we don't have to trust what the ad on TV says, we can sit at the computer (or phone) and in 5 minutes access a community of thousands of reviews and suggestions. Businesses must acknowledge that their traditional channels of trust may be broken. Their branding and marketing voice may no longer be a trusted source of information for their consumers. People may be hearing your ads and marketing pitches, but they might not be listening to what you have to say anymore.
If the channel of B2C trust is broken, then the channel of C2C trust has replaced it. Instead of trust flowing vertically from business to consumer, trust flows horizontally from consumer to consumer. This reality has serious implications for marketing. There is no longer a higher ground in the battle for trust. Your position as a brand is no longer a source of trust for your consumers. Companies must come down off their corporate podiums, and start creating a trusted voice within their consumer communities. Brands must abandon the broken channels of vertical trust, and reposition themselves within the horizontal channels. This new position will create an invaluable source of trust that flows not only among your consumers, but from your current consumers to potential future consumers.
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(Shout out to Jay Falls at Social Media Explorer who's post on inbound marketing inspired this thought.)
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