Trust in business is at a low ebb. The latest round of the Edelman Trust Barometer found that 68% of people worry that business leaders are purposely trying to mislead them, while 61% hold grievances against government, business and the rich. Rather than think that companies are there to help them in their daily or working lives, most people view them as making things harder for them and serving only narrow interests.

The Trust Barometer has always painted a fairly gloomy picture of trust in business, but these findings are striking. The implication is that companies are now on the back foot with any message they want to communicate. When the starting point of the audience is that companies are trying to trick them and going expressly against their interests, they are really facing an uphill battle.

Defining trust

What does a company actually have to do to create trust? Definitions of trust vary quite widely, but in essence it’s about making promises and then delivering on them. It means being clear about your motivations and transparent about what you are trying to achieve, and treating the customer with fairness and empathy. If a company can do these things repeatedly, it will build and sustain trust. If any of these elements are lacking, trust quickly evaporates.

Trust is an essential part of good marketing and communications. If the audience does not trust what you say, then it’s unlikely that any message will influence their thinking or change their behaviour. The journey to becoming a first-time customer is an iterative one that depends on us trusting the promises made at different stages of the buying journey; becoming a repeat customer means that we trust in the delivery too because the promise has been fulfilled.

Looking at the levels of trust that people have in business, and specifically marketing, it’s a wonder that anyone buys anything. Take the level of trust in advertising. The most recent Credos Trust Tracker from the Advertising Association found that only 39% of UK consumers trust advertising. This is actually an increase of 9% compared with 2022, but it’s still a minority. There are, of course, numerous reasons why people do not trust advertising: they think it is misleading; that it tries to trick them with behavioural psychology techniques; or they don’t like the channels through which they access it - especially social media, which has its own huge trust issues.

Trust and thought leadership

Yet not all marketing is so distrusted. In the 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report from Edelman and LinkedIn, 73% of B2B decision-makers say that an organisation’s thought leadership content is a more trustworthy way of assessing its capabilities than other marketing materials. So on that basis, thought leadership in a B2B context seems a far more effective way of building trust than straight advertising. Customers are even willing to pay more for services from companies that consistently create good thought leadership, with 60% saying that they are willing to pay a premium to work with companies that deliver this, according to the same study.

So why is thought leadership more trustworthy than advertising? The received wisdom is that it builds trust because it is not directly pitching products and services, but discussing wider issues that are relevant to the audience. The goal is to provide something of value, address challenges and build relationships over time rather than go straight for the sales jugular.

Of course, no thought leadership is ever wholly objective and independent. The sales approach may be more indirect than advertising, but it is still, usually, marketing. Companies produce it with commercial impact in mind, even if this happens obliquely and over a relatively long period of time. The pressure to demonstrate the dreaded “ROI” from thought leadership is intensifying, however. CEOs and CFOs now want to see a more direct link between thought leadership and sales than ever before. It’s no longer just about brand building, the effects of which are anyway hard to measure.

This increased emphasis on sales from thought leadership can start to create a kind of cognitive dissonance between content that purports to be empathetic and value-adding, and messages that are actually laser focused on generating short-term sales. So despite the encouraging findings from Edelman, I don’t think marketers should take it for granted that thought leadership will always remain a trusted medium. This is particularly true when it manifests as thinly veiled sales materials, which can end up eroding, rather than building trust because the intentions are not clear. To avoid this risk, I would advise practitioners to think about the following:

Don’t make promises that you can’t fulfil. We’ve seen that trust is about making commitments and then delivering on them. Thought leadership only covers the first half of this; it’s then over to the business to deliver the work that makes good on that promise. This highlights the importance of positioning your brand as an expert and authority only in areas where it is legitimate to make that claim. Don’t write marketing cheques that the business can’t cash, essentially. As soon as you stray out of areas where you genuinely have expertise, you are making it very difficult for the business to deliver and meet the other half of the trust equation.

Reduce the information asymmetry. One of the biggest sources of friction in a sales transaction is that sellers know more than buyers. This means that sellers can exploit buyers, while buyers can end up making poor purchasing decisions because they lack appropriate information. As a valuable source of insight, thought leadership can help to reduce this information asymmetry, enabling businesses to be more transparent and open about what they do, and buyers to understand better the wider context in which they are making their decision. Focus on knowledge gaps that buyers have, and look for ways to fill them.

Put a human face behind your message. People trust people. Too much B2B marketing still remains largely faceless, and left-brained in its approach. It may position you as an expert in your area, but it often does not do enough to demonstrate that you empathise with the audience. Listen to their challenges and understand them, and be humble in your own situation. Yes, thought leadership needs to position you as an authority but that does not mean that you can’t admit you don’t know all the answers. Humility is an essential human trait that helps to build trust through discussion of shared challenges.

Make it a dialogue, not a broadcast. Trust builds incrementally and buyers need different information at different stages of the buying cycle. A one-way conversation, with the company focusing on what it wants to say and its own agenda, is a sure sign that a company is not listening. Instead, thought leadership that builds trust must be structured around a dialogue whereby fresh insight is shared in response to new information about the buyer’s needs and context.

Be transparent about your intentions. As we have seen, there is a risk that thought leadership can come across as dishonest if it pretends to be independent and objective, but actually only cares about sales. There is nothing wrong with content designed with commercial impact in mind, but it helps to signpost this intent to the audience. This can still be done quite subtly, with calls to action, connections through to product sheets and contact details of commercial representatives. Many companies shy away from this in their thought leadership because they are afraid of appearing too sales-y but, in the long term, transparency about intentions creates trust, and audiences will thank you for that honesty.

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Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash