When you aren’t trusted, even your best communications won’t cut through.
Trust helps messages to travel farther, makes evidence more persuasive and causes leaders to be followed.
This article looks at why trust matters so much, why it is eroding across government, business and media, and what the evidence tells us about how it is actually built.
It also sets up a harder question: how do you build trust when almost every feature of today’s information environment works against you?
Trust matters
When citizens trust government, they are more likely to comply with laws and participate in the democratic process.
When governments trust business, they are more likely to listen to their concerns.
When consumers trust brands, they are more likely to buy goods or services.
Trust isn’t just a nice to have. It translates into real-world outcomes. For example, higher trust in government was associated with higher adoption of public health guidance during the pandemic.
And yet, we face a crisis of trust across the Western World.
According to the OECD Trust in Government Survey, just 27% of people in the UK said they trusted their national government in 2023. More than half said they did not.
This isn’t a problem confined to politics. 64% of Britons say they worry business leaders lie to them (+12pp since 2021); 62% worry that journalists do (an all-time high).
It seems likely that some of this lost trust is a result of the changed media environment I outlined in my recent series, but proving causation is difficult. And in any case, unless you’re a politician or media regulator your capacity to do anything about that is limited.
So as a communications leader, what can you do to build trust in your brand?
To start, we need to understand the drivers of trust.
The drivers of trust
It is a common misbelief (one often shared by Government Ministers) that trust is simply about delivery. While delivering on promises is critical, it is clearly insufficient to build trust by itself. People often don’t notice when conditions improve. For example, they overestimate crime rates. Building trust must therefore also involve bridging perception gaps.
When I was running UK Government Communications, I was responsible for the risk on the cross-government risk register called “Public trust in Government.” This always felt somewhat unfair, as I neither felt I controlled all the levers to build trust, nor could I be held wholly responsible for its absence.
Still, I took the responsibility seriously and so I spent some time asking academics about the drivers of trust. I wanted to understand the underlying factors that were most influential in building or destroying trust.
The most common refrain I received was one probably shared by most of the public:
“If Government wants to be trusted, then it should be more trustworthy!”
I found this a frustrating circular and unhelpful argument.
It was Professor Gerry Stoker who first introduced me to research that identified three main drivers of public trust in government:
First, competence/logic: do people have faith in a government’s ability and judgement?
Second, benevolence/empathy: do people believe a government cares about them and is acting in their interests rather than its own?
Third, integrity/authenticity: do people feel a government’s words match its actions, and does their experience of interacting with government match its promises?
Once I became aware of these three elements, I began to see the same pattern repeated everywhere - and not just for trust in government. A Harvard Business Review article on the drivers of trust in leaders (logic, empathy, authenticity). 5654 & Company research on the drivers of trust and support in business (quality of customer experience, a purpose beyond profit, authenticity). Open University research on the drivers of consumer trust in brands (product or service quality; benevolence; integrity).
Suddenly, I had clear evidence of what you needed to do to build trust. Of course, if an organisation fails to deliver, good communication can’t fix that. But good delivery can be let down by poor communication.
“Be more trustworthy!” had been a pretty unhelpful prescription. But “demonstrate excellence in your core role”, “show you care”, and “make sure your words match your actions”? Well, that’s something communicators can work with!
It allows you to start to map the drivers and draggers on trust for your organisation.
On competence: What are the ways to show you are surpassing public expectations for service excellence; and what are the shortfalls in service you need to fix before they damage reputation?
On benevolence: How can you demonstrate your commitment to a lasting legacy people care about through, for example, an apprenticeship programme; and where do you have workforce or environmental disputes that might be painted as putting profit before people or the planet?
On integrity: Which are the promises you have made where you must show delivery? And which are the promises you should avoid making because you risk not being able to follow through?
In each area, it is possible to map what matters most for groups of stakeholders and what are the drivers of support where you should seek to maximise visibility; and the drags on support you need to fix or mitigate.
Trust meets D-FACC
Of course, even if we know that the drivers of trust are competence, benevolence and integrity, we still need to work out how to apply these successfully in our changed world.
And it’s clear that some of the characteristics of our new information environment work against trust building. For example, people’s propensity to believe authentic information is reducing as falsehoods become more convincing. And algorithms optimised for engagement are rarely prioritising content that demonstrates competence.
In fact, every element of our D-FACC information environment makes earning trust harder today.
Democratised. Everyone can speak and so traditional authority is diluted. Competence is harder to signal and no longer assumed.
Fragmented. Algorithmic newsfeeds optimise for emotion, outrage and controversy, causing people to doubt your benevolence and integrity, and causing companies to shy away from purpose-driven communication.
Abundant. When there’s so much content, evidence of delivery is missed (although maybe the absence of evidence is missed too).
Corroded. Fakes and bad actors mean good intent and authenticity are doubted.
Concentrated. A handful of foundational AI models will increasingly shape what is seen as true, credible or settled.
So we need to merge together our knowledge of what drives trust (competence, benevolence and integrity) with our understanding of our changed environment (D-FACC). Only then, might we have a winning strategy for building trust.
Winning strategies for our changed world
That’s what I’m going to attempt to synthesise in a series of articles over the coming weeks.
How do you cut through today if you’re not trusted? What are the winning strategies for a low-trust, high-volume world?
I’ll explore five approaches with case studies of where each has worked:
Earn trust. When abundance obscures delivery, then build trust through authentic and relevant evidence. The delivery playbook.
Borrow trust. When institutional authority has weakened, work with those who enjoy high levels of trust from your audience. The partnership playbook.
Co-create trust. When top-down legitimacy is weak, include your audience in shaping products, services or policies. The participation playbook.
Demonstrate trust. When scepticism about motives is the default, be disarmingly, demonstrably and radically open. The transparency playbook.
Harness distrust. When people think the system is broken, think of distrust not as a problem to solve but as a fuel to burn. The challenger playbook.
The question for communication leaders is no longer just “how do we say this well?” It is “how do we earn the right to be heard at all?”. The next series looks at what that requires in practice.
That’s for next time.
Until then, thank you very much for reading. Please do share with other communicators who are trying to build trust.
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Simon
You can find my series on our changed information environment here:
