Reilly Newman | A brand must first gain awareness to earn the ability to garner trust. This is where most small businesses find themselves.
Awareness is the first step simply due to the fact that if your audience doesn’t know about you. They most likely won’t become a customer at any point because they don’t know about you. The business must gain awareness and become a viable option for their ideal audience. This comes down to the grit all owners need to make their business work. Either paying for advertising or good old-fashioned pounding the pavement and shaking hands. A great positioning for your business within your market would help the awareness and memorability of your business so you can gain an audience more effectively. Now that you are building awareness, you’ll want to begin converting this into trust.
Next, the ability to garner true trust it granted through opportunities where the business is able to prove itself to its audience. This type of opportunity usually comes in the shape of a transaction or an experience that the customer is part of. It’s tricky for a business to go from sheer awareness to a transaction unless you are selling $1.00 widgets where there is no risk for the buyer. So you need to build momentum first to get there.
The good news is that incremental levers to build trust can be an array of things ranging from written content, credentials, visual identity, messaging, legitimate online and social presence, podcasts, or simply by networking more. Through these efforts you are signaling your expertise, knowledge, and building familiarity with your audience. These efforts build awareness as well as lean into the trust-building increments needed to gain the opportunity for a transaction to take place.
By simultaneously building familiarity and slowly gaining traction with trust, you begin to position your business to be a trusted provider of your specific offering. They not only become comfortable with your personality as a business, they can learn about your values and determine if they align with them as well as begin to understand your method and approach to your offering. You’ve gained their attention, now we must prove to them why your worthy of it. Attention is fleeting so you must be present and deliver value to show you are a trustworthy resource of knowledge and solutions.
These small steps of trust prove to your audience you are worthy of a transaction. Once they embark with you through a transaction, this experience will verify the little trust they have given you. If successful, this experience can grant you trust that becomes solidified for future transactions with them and their willingness to be an advocate for your brand. Mission accomplished. Just remember, no matter how slick your advertising or marketing is, every consumer knows that “the proof is in the pudding” and they have the autonomy to change their opinion about you if a product or service experience doesn’t live up to the promise.
After a while, your business will have a whole slew of successful customer stories and plenty of smiling faces that will recommend your business. You have successfully gained the initial awareness and trust needed to get momentum with your business. This trust is a cornerstone of your brand as it is a representation of the consumer and their selection of you. Your job now is keep the momentum by delivering more value that is continually refined to your customer base and their wants. This compounds the success of your business and encourages further momentum.
Once a business reaches a certain level, its brand is consistently known and gaining more awareness while the trust can be derived from its size, experience and success. After trust is maximized, the next level for the brand is when the audience finds pride in their association with the business. They “own” it and are proud to be part of the brand.
As mentioned before, your brand is a representation of the consumer and their selection of you. This means that by them choosing you they need to be reaffirmed of their decision and need the brand to represent them. This happens because they know they have given your their trust (and money). No one wants to be proved a fool in their decision or feel they got ripped off or duped. This trust is fragile and needs to be nurtured. It’s an honor they chose you and your business. Treat it as such.
Now on a values level, your brand is to reflect similar values of your customer. This can be a sliding scale of depth and types of values, but the important part here is that your audience may trust you, but that doesn’t mean they want to be associated with you. As a teenager may trust their parents, if their dad embarrasses them, they most likely won’t want to be associated. This disassociation erodes the trust over time because the disconnect reveals an unaligned value system. We trust that which is familiar and aligns with us. This is why sports teams, political sides, or even brand preferences exist.
In order for your audience to take pride in your brand, they must want to be associated with it. This is obvious when you think of fans who wear their team’s jerseys, someone with their political party’s bumper sticker, or someone’s metal water bottle with an Apple sticker on it. These brands have become familiar to them, gained trust, and the pride of owning the brand is a byproduct of the alignment when it comes to values and feeling of self that the brands express about them.
Where is your business on the journey of Know, Trust, and Own?
