How to build trust in your brand?
The purpose of every brand on the planet is to build trust.
But how?
This is the money question. Trust is such an abstract concept that it can sometimes be a little hard to rationalize.
Over the last years working as a Creative Director, I’ve been developing a framework that helps me approach branding more strategically.
I think trust can be built around three main areas:
Capacity
Your ability to solve someone else’s problem.
Coherency
Your ability to be predictable by maintaining your actions and words aligned over time.
Consideration
How much you care about the people of whom trust you want to earn.
To make it simple: you want someone to bake your birthday cake. Who will you pick?
Max, who’s a professional cook and owns a hipster coffee place in your hood.
Your friend Lauren, who’s cooked great and healthy vegan recipes for you in the past.
Your mum, who… well, is your mum essentially. ❤
Any of these options is a good choice, and there are big chances you’ll have a great birthday cake.
On the other hand, you wouldn’t trust someone who has no previous experience, has let you down in the past, or doesn’t care about you.
In branding, you can earn your customers’ trust by focusing on these three areas. Here’s how.
Make people trust your capacity
Companies and organizations help their communities solve a certain problem through their products or services. The better your products are, the more capable your brand is perceived.
At Typeform we spent a lot of time crafting and designing better templates to delight our customers. Sometimes we even partnered with top creators and studios to deliver diversity and excellence.
Some of the templates we created for our users.
Your product shows how capable your brand is.
Another way to show capacity is by putting out content. Your content helps your audience solve their problem in a different way.
Content marketing is a way to help your people for free through content, so you get discovered and loved.
Being a capable brand is rewarded with revenue, brand awareness, and brand loyalty.
Your product and content are proof of your capacity as a brand.
Be reliable by staying coherent
As humans, we love predictability.
Predictable things give us a sense of control, make us feel safe. This is why having a consistent brand identity is so important for a brand. It gives employees a way to express their brand in a way that is recognizable after a certain amount of interactions.
It’s important to differentiate consistency from repetition. Picking a brand color and typeface and using it in every single communication is definitely consistent, but will very soon become extremely boring.
A good brand identity is flexible and uses certain elements combined in different ways to help the brand stay coherent and interesting at the same time.
At Typeform, I hired DesignStudio to work on our brand identity. Together, we developed an organic, friendly, and energetic identity to express our brand.
Typeform’s initial identity concept
Our identity uses lines and shapes to express layers of knowledge. However, we don’t use these elements in every single communication. There are no lines on the home page.
Typeform.com website in November 2020.
Being a coherent brand and staying consistent (not repetitive) over time, will help your customers identify your brand in just a glance, and it will help you differentiate it from your competition.
Your logo, identity, and brand strategy make you coherent.
Be loved by being caring
Have you ever fallen in love with someone just because that person treated you extremely well? I know I have.
Being caring and acting with empathy and compassion with those you serve is the most powerful way to earn long-lasting trust.
Your customer service is a clear indicator of how much you (really) care about your customers.
Look at this message one of our support agents received last year.
One of our support agents received this message last year.
How would you respond to this?
Our support agent got personal. She shared a previous similar experience she had and decided to show empathy and support for that person. She got this message back:
“Thanks for your time and honesty. To be fair I only sent this message to see if anyone would even care. It’s amazing to see caring and compassionate people working in such a big company.”
This is how brands are built. In every single interaction.
Your customer service, and the way your brands communicate show how much you care.
Hopefully, this helps you approach branding in a more rational and simplified way. It definitely has helped me in my career, not only when creating tech brands, but also by providing me guidance on how to develop my own.
At the end of the day, as I like to say, brands are just like people.
