• by J. Walker Smith , Op-Ed Contributor, April 22, 2025

From all my years in research and consulting, I think I’ve learned a thing or two about marketing worth sharing. Enduring fundamentals, mostly—yet often overlooked. So, over the course of my biweekly column this year, I want to share some snippets for your consideration. I hope they’re helpful.

This week’s thought: Trust comes from an alignment of interests.

Trust is everything. And nothing. 

Even brands and institutions that are widely and deeply mistrusted can still succeed. Which is precisely the way of the world these days. Everything is mistrusted, yet everything still works, at least well enough.

The idea that nothing works without trust is belied by the world around us. Trust in institutions, authorities and even each other is at an all-time low. Nonetheless, grocery store shelves still get stocked, the lights still come on at night, the garbage still gets picked up, and there is always a WiFi signal available to post something about the decline of trust. Life proceeds apace, mistrust notwithstanding.

If everything depends on trust, then trust is all-or-nothing. The degradation of trust over time has been decried in just these sorts of existential terms.

In the past, all-or-nothing was largely correct. For brands today, though, this is a miscalculation. However, with the ascendance of AI, trust may well be on its way back as a keystone requirement.

The reality today is that mistrust is rarely fatal. However, it is always costlier. Mistrust costs more time, effort and expense to motivate, persuade and engage. Which means that, at root, trust is a spreadsheet calculation.

When the cost of trust outweighs the benefits of trust, there is no bottom-line reason to invest in trust. Indeed, the math might show that mistrust is cheaper on balance. Getting caught at deceptions or exaggerations may exact a very high price, but as mordant a thought as this may be, that might be more profitable than following the rules. This is not imaginary—several well-known, still-thriving brands have done just this, some even breaking the law.

This may sound dreadful, but everything in business can be priced and modeled. Of course, brands can choose to put a thumb on the scale by assigning greater weight to certain social or ethical factors like trust. But building and sustaining trust costs money, making it an investment, and so, like all investments, trust must be weighed against the returns.

The value of trust is determined by the broader context within which brands operate. This is what has changed between then and now.

Decades ago, trust in institutions and authorities was a lot higher—nearly universal in government, for example. In this context, there was a presumption of trust. People took trust for granted. What stood out was mistrust—that was the exception. A brand that betrayed trust stood out, and the cost could, indeed, be existential.

This era of the past continues to guide thinking and theories about trust. But there is no longer a presumption of trust. The presumption today is one of mistrust. Mistrust no longer makes a brand stand out. Few people have confidence or faith in any institution or authority. People expect the worst. The exception these days is trust, not mistrust.

In the past, brands needed only to send out the signals of trust—transparency, authenticity, gravitas—to reassure consumers. There wasn’t much need for scrutinizing brands because trust was presumed. What people looked for was standard issue proof of trust. That was scrutiny enough.

These days, brands must establish that they are not to be mistrusted. Search, social media and sensationalism have made skepticism a given. Merely signaling trust is not enough, because the signals themselves are not to be trusted. People can only be dissuaded by disproof of mistrust.

What’s required now is a tangible demonstration of an alignment of interests—which takes a reciprocal exchange. Trust is now transactional.

The operational definition of trust is the same as always. Trust between two parties is secured by the reassurance that no matter what the other party does as they pursue their interests, the interests of both parties will be protected and advanced, not ignored, compromised, diminished or betrayed.

We trust each other when we can take it for granted that neither of us will pursue our own interests to the detriment of the other. We’re aligned. Mistrust stems from misaligned interests.

Maybe the worst example of misalignment occurred during the financial crisis. In the run-up to the meltdown, many homebuyers thought a lot of seemingly inventive mortgage brokers had their interests in mind using innovative loans to get them into houses that were otherwise out of reach. But when the market crashed, these homeowners found themselves upside-down. Only then did they realize that those inventive brokers cared only about their short-term fees—broker interests—not the long-term housing security of homebuyers—buyer interests. This was a profound misalignment of interests that still haunts the marketplace.

The challenge is that people cannot scrutinize everything all the time. Even if people could, it’s hard to find out everything they might want or need to know. Who can really know what’s going on inside a big bank—even stock analysts have trouble figuring it out, much less ordinary people. People just want reassurance that whatever agenda the bank is pursuing, it will align with their agendas and interests. In a climate of mistrust, though, merely saying so is not enough.

Brands must do things that show they are putting the interests of consumers in alignment with their own interests. All too often, though, brands are determined to pass all the pain along to consumers—to pursue their interests at the expense of consumers. Take customer service as an example. 

Doing the multiplication from the National Customer Rage survey conducted every few years by a team at the University of Arizona reveals that half of consumers have become angered or enraged in the past year by their inability to get a brand to fix a problem. This is no surprise. With few exceptions, companies have stripped out costs from customer service, knowing full well that doing so is worsening the experience for consumers. Worse for trust as well.

Paradoxically, this very decision to worsen trust points to the value of rebuilding trust in today’s marketplace. When every company is downgrading customer service, the company with superior service stands out. With demonstrable, transactional proof of an alignment of interests, trust can become a meaningful difference in a brand’s proposition that attracts customers and builds loyalty.

Building trust as a competitive advantage will also gird brands for the impact of AI on brand trust. AI is bringing trust full circle. It used to be essential for survival. Now, it’s more of a competitive advantage. But with AI, trust will soon be essential again.

The big gap for consumers in today’s era of mistrust is the ability to scrutinize brands. As AI takes over more of the engagement that consumers have with brands, AI will close this gap.

People are hard-pressed now to master and do the work required to satisfactorily scrutinize brands, enabling brands to trade off trust. But information-rich and research-savvy AI apps will scrutinize brands in an instant. Consumers will use AI to hold companies accountable. In this sense, trust will shift from transactional to technological.

The presumption of mistrust is unlikely to change, but with AI, the ability to navigate mistrust will change dramatically. Consumers will increasingly put their trust in AI, and they will then let AI figure out which brands best align with their interests.

Brands can ahead of tomorrow today. Brands can make the math work by pursuing trust over the near-term as a competitive advantage and then from there, leveraging trust for the long-term as AI restores trust as the keystone for commercial engagement.