Brands Shifting

Run for your lives. It's going to blow!

Watching the upheavals in world markets, particularly in the banking sector, it's hard not to arrive at the conclusion that much of the hysteria comes down to a deep mistrust in many of the individual brands standing on the fault-lines.

The queues of people at the cashier desks, removing their money to somewhere safer, certainly don't seem to buy the assurances of those at the top that everything is going to be alright. The mood in the streets suggests that no-one really believes what they're being told and that the once-dormant evasions and half-truths of the past have erupted, with confidence hurtling downhill faster than those in the financial institutions can run.

When you consider the vast amounts of money that have been spent in winning our affections, it's shocking to see how quickly things come tumbling down, and how many of the banks stand isolated and vulnerable.

Where is the bedrock? Much of what has been built is foundering on the sands of self-interest. None of the banks is emerging as a bastion of integrity and good sense.

For those whose savings or business fortunes are tied up a financial house, there's no comfort to be found in the shadow of a teetering giant that might collapse following the next eruption.

Am I being over-dramatic? Again, think of the ads with which we've been inundated over the past years and ask yourself how many of them were concerned with building trust. How many of us truly believe that our lending institutions have our best interests at heart? Even the better of them seem to enter into shadowy arrangements that strike us as having more to do with speculation than investment.

Almost certainly, once the tremors have subsided, we'll hear how we've all over-reached ourselves and words like 'prudence', 'frugality' and 'caution' will be bandied about by the financiers. But there was little caution shown by those same leaders and politicians when the markets were at their height.

In the aftermath, the real challenge to the financial brands is not to lecture us on our spending habits but to build instead on solid rock and earn the trust of a deeply suspicious public.

There Are Lies...

On talk-radio during the week, I heard a caller describe how she'd been duped into giving her credit-card details to a fraudulent website, after which a series of unauthorised payments had been made. Since then, she'd been unable to make contact with anyone through the telephone number given on the site.

By her account, there was little to be suspicious about in a well-presented website that offered tickets to international sports events, recorded an address close to Victoria Station in London and apparently counted many well-known businesses amongst its clients.

I suspect I'd have fallen for this particular deception too. All the little details seem to add up (the mention of an address close to a well-known and reputable landmark strikes me as a particularly delicious stroke).

But what astonished me in the course of the discussion was how both she and the talk-show host seemed to hold out the hope that everything would somehow work out and that it was all one big misunderstanding. The clincher seemed to be that the company behind the site was a 'family-business, which has been offering this service for over twenty years'. Even when taken amongst all of the other lies that had been pulled apart during this woman's efforts to track down the people who had taken her money, this deception had somehow remained intact. Victim and counsellor alike seemed to think that wicked deception was somehow beyond a family business.

But ask anyone who's fallen foul of a family firm that goes by the name of Borges, Corleone, Kray or Soprano about family values and you'll likely hear some very unfamily-friendly language in return.

Now there's a lesson in there for any of us who are building brands at a distance (and not only for those of us who are inveigled into handing over our financial details to plausible strangers). In telling the truth to our customers, we can learn from the lies that crooks tell as they wangle their way into our confidence.

Clearly, a sense of permanent location helps; as does some reference to a shared landmark (the old school-network seems to work particularly well in this way). But the thing that seems to reassure us most of all when we're introduced to someone for the first time is that they have ties to the community. And what stronger ties than family ties?

When we buy from someone we don't know, we must be quickly able to situate them in our own landscape. Otherwise, their 'foreign-ness' gets in the way of our building trust and we turn instead to the angel we know or devil we think we know.

In Brand We Trust

Trust me...

So which brands do you put your faith in to do what they promise?

The Reader's Digest Trusted Brands survey of 2007 doesn't throw up too many surprises (Most Trusted Mobile Phone: Nokia; Credit Card: Visa; Cereal: Kellogg's etc) but I was intrigued to see that the Most Trusted Petrol Retailer in the UK is not one of the traditional oil company giants but one behometh that has wandered in from another category entirely: Tesco!

How can a relatively new entrant outperform players with track records going back, in some cases, well over a century? We tend to think of trust as being something that builds up only over time (which is one reason why antique brands are so keen to parade founding dates and fathers in front of customers) but the evidence from customers in the UK suggests to me that petrol retailers there with significant heritage to draw on have seriously botched the whole issue of trust.

Tesco, which doesn't make any grand claims about quality and is often a convenience or price choice, has somehow managed to take the trust it's built up through its supermarket business and elbow its way to the front of the line at the petrol pump.

I can't see Kellogg's allowing a blow-in brand from another category the same opportunity. At the same time, Tesco's trumping of the category incumbents suggests that customer trust is more fragile than we imagine.