Carnival of Trust - October 2007
Welcome to the fifth edition of the Carnival of Trust.
Published on the first Monday of every month, the Carnival of Trust is the brainchild of Charles Green, co-author of The Trusted Advisor, often referred to by professional service providers as the seminal work on the topic of building valued relationships with clients. By demonstrating trust at every opportunity, consultants may gain the confidence of their client, unlocking a priceless dialogue of mutual benefit.
It is a pleasure for Whisper to host this month’s edition of the Carnival of Trust. As readers of these pages know, we speak often of a brand as your promise, and how keeping your promise is everything. Brand and trust go hand-in-hand. Standing upon a well-defined promise and building a reputation worthy of repeated requests for a product or expertise, and the unsolicited recommendation and referral of others, is all about establishing the trust needed to push relationships beyond that of the project to one of iconic devotion.
A promise based on words alone is, of course, not a promise. The promise of a brand, to attract the respect and trust we each seek, must be demonstrated rather than explained, as in this discussion of branding vs. advertising. Or, as American author William Dean Howells expressed it, “An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.”
As we will see below in the offerings selected for this month’s Carnival, the concept of trust is also an issue of personal and organizational legacy, often seeking of us an investment without guarantee of return. Nelson Henderson had it right when he said, “the true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” The paradox, of course, is that consistently doing as Henderson suggests in fact creates substantial return, financial and otherwise.
Whether approaching the concept of trust from the viewpoint of brand, as a leadership question, or one of governance and politics, how we demonstrate our trustworthiness, and how we earn investment by those we seek to influence are the topics we seek to illuminate here. Let us turn to the excellent authors in this Carnival of Trust.
Facilitating Trust: What team leaders need to know
In this article, Jay Gordon Cone, of Interaction Associates, talks briefly about why it’s worthwhile to pay attention to trust and then describes a framework for understanding what people want in return for their trust. Here’s the money quote:
Regardless of how we define trust, the one common element that warrants the attention of leaders and organizations is this: whenever we choose to trust, we give something of inestimable value.
Greater Transparency Is the Key to Building Greater Trust
Katie Delahaye Paine, at KD Paine’s Measurement Standard, says trust and transparency go hand in hand, and points to new research by Dr. Brad Rawlins that shows that doing things right isn’t nearly as important as doing the right thing, and that being transparent is a driving factor in the fostering of trust.
The overall results of the study demonstrate that transparency and trust are highly correlated, and, “one could conclude that as organizations become more transparent they will also become more trusted.” Although the study was limited to employees, the results are strong enough to imply that the correlation between trust and transparency will hold for other stakeholder groups as well.
As we often share with our clients, the difference in doing things right vs. doing the right things is, in a nutshell, the difference in tactics vs. strategy. It is also the difference in efficiency vs. effectiveness. Understand this difference, and appreciate that brand strategy IS business strategy, and a topic for another day.
Branding Strategy - Brand Identity
Sam Allcock [an evocative moniker, of which our friends at Snark Hunting, the naming blog, might have something to say] has a serious point to make about brand identity and brand strategy for corporations.
To be successful, Smart Branding has to be seen as an important part of the corporate strategy, something that will deeply influence the entire organization. That’s why Smart Branding initiatives need to be aimed not only to the external costumer but also has to be directed to the inside of the organization, transforming the figure of the CEO into the brand champion who drives the brand and everyone in the organization; Think Howard Schultz, Steve Jobs or Richard Branson.
Or Martha Stewart, as an example of the risks to the trust relationship when the champion is the brand.
We always get a bit torqued when folks lump “sales and marketing” together, as the sales and marketing functions are different disciplines. Certainly one supports and can drive the other, but the skill sets and critical thinking abilities needed for each in most organizations are often not the same. That said, we offer our selections under this umbrella topic, the first two discussing trust in sales, and the third offering a provocative claim.
Ben Bradley, the managing director of The Bradley Wiltjer Marketing Group, on his blog about Marketing, Sales, Technology and Everything Else.
A trusted and loyal relationship is the holy grail for every channel marketing manager.
Yet, vendors/VAR relationships are wrought with distrust. Inevitably, there is conflict between the direct and the indirect sales force. Trust is difficult to establish, especially when the vendor’s executives don’t completely understand the value VARs or distributors bring to the table.
Personal Brands have a direct effect on corporate image
Personal Branding Gen-Y Expert Dan Schawbel on the Personal Branding Blog makes this point:
The people you deal with through companies can either break or make your perception of the company as a whole. If you are unhappy with a specific service or product that a person is either selling you or supporting you with, then you blame the company.
All of which places a premium on, for example, hiring practices that from the beginning seek personal values with those of the organization, and vice versa. For example, the best of retail companies know this, and focus on trust early in the recruiting and selection process.
Why there’s no such thing as a trusted brand
Stating the obvious, we don’t agree with everything we read about brands and branding—not even with everything included in every post in this Carnival of Trust. But there’s something of value in each of these selections, and we trust our readers to form their own judgments. Though I didn’t agree with the conclusion drawn by this writer, I include his provocative message, and this quote:
Occasional reminders that there’s no such thing as a brand you can trust the same way you’d trust an individual with whom you’ve established a good relationship are important.
We trust you to form your own conclusions, and offer your own opinions.
Proposal: A Politicians’ Reputation Management System
Spencer Critchley is an award-winning producer, writer, and composer with experience in digital media, film, broadcasting, and the music business. He has directed creative groups or led audio production at Beatnik, BeVocal, CCC/Viacom, Silicon Graphics, and Silicon Gaming. Among the projects he has worked on are web content for David Bowie, Moby, Britney Spears, and Yahoo!, the redesign of BeVocal’s voice applications interfaces, the multiple award-winning Choosing Success CDROM for CCC, and the SGI/Time Warner/ATT interactive TV system. He has also served as a freelance writer/broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, and others, winning awards for investigative journalism. So, when Spencer blogged about automated reputation-management for politicians, here and here, we listened carefully and wanted to share. The idea is to make the concept of honor meaningful again, by creating new social rewards and penalties for behavior that affects the rest of us.
Trust Me, I Speak For Washington …
David Henderson at Clear Voices In A Cluttered World says “Have no fear … America’s global imagine is in the hands of … well, hired guns. No, this isn’t a posting about Blackwater.”
Web trust? Brand rep more important than medium
Gerry McCusker, writing on PR Disasters dot com, a blogsite that tracks the real PR cock-ups—the gaffes and howlers made by spin doctors, PR firms and the client organizations they represent—reports on a recent study in England:
More than three-quarters of newspaper and magazine readers regard web publications as just as trustworthy and reliable as their print counterparts, according to research.
One conclusion we draw after reading this selection—readers and viewers are often ahead of the mainstream press, who by attempts to demonize the credibility of bloggers, implicitly and, we suggest, unknowingly, convey a lack of trust in the ability of their audiences to sift information for themselves. The implications are enormous, and we see them played out in, for example, decreasing print media subscriptions.
And finally, Michael Wade, writing commentary on Leadership, Ethics, Management, and Life at Execupundit.com puts us all to the test with this losing trust quiz. Click here to take the test, and let us know how you did in the comments below.
That’s our edition of Carnival of Trust. We hope you enjoyed reading our selections as much as we in presenting them. And if you enjoy tapping into the good thinking of others as much as we do, perhaps you will take a moment to point your readers to this Carnival of Trust, drawing their attention to one or more of our selections you think are especially interesting, thought provoking, bang-on, or dead wrong. We welcome your comments below, of course. So let us know what you think about trust and branding.
If you’d like to follow this new blog carnival from the beginning, you might check out previous editions of the Carnival of Trust. The first, second, third, and fourth, were hosted sequentially by Charles Green at Trust Matters, the anonymous but trusted Editor of Blawg Review, and David Maister at Passion, People and Principles. And be sure to check out Charlie’s weblog to see who’s hosting next month’s Carnival of Trust. We’re certainly looking forward to it.
[More posts about Brand Promise | More posts about Brand Trust | More posts about Brand Strategy | More posts about Blog Strategy | More posts about Online Brand Strategy | More posts about Brand Management | More blogs about Brand Trust]
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