Trust
We’ve encountered the same problem for almost every business we’ve worked with: while we can clearly see they do good actions and create good products, customers are not. Not even a little bit. It’s not a case of how good the business is, or ‘good vs great.’ It’s a case of complete non-connection, taking the form of customer indifference. Consumers may even openly admit the business sounds and looks good (or even great), but it doesn’t mean anything to them. We’ve found that the root of this mystery is just one thing: trust.
As human beings we have a hardwired need to trust, and without trust we don’t engage. The conversation just stops. Like a rickety board on a bridge, we don’t put a foot on it, we stop walking forward.
Trust is derived from the intent of another human being’s actions. This means there is only one way to win trust - by being a human with integrity. Businesses struggle with trust because they aren’t humans, they’re entities that act differently and have different goals to human beings. Unfortunately this has no bearing on the way the human brain works to deduce and form trust. Our brains only work the way they’re built.
So is this where the discussion ends - businesses can only try to act as human as they can (or not bother) and consumers accept the shortfall?
We observe this to be a hard no, because today’s consumers overwhelmingly do not accept the shortfall.
Today’s consumers are increasingly unwilling to see the actions of a business as different from the actions of a human. They don’t accept decisions made in the interests of business to be disconnected from human intent. This means modern consumers now see profit-centric businesses not as faceless entities, but as self interested humans making self interested decisions, and self interested humans are not trustworthy.
We see this paradigm shift giving most businesses more opportunity, not less. Every business we’ve worked with has an incredible treasure trove of human action hidden away because they felt consumers might not care. They felt consumers only cared about the products or services they provided. They thought a lack of consumer interest was down to their products being average, or their marketing not cutting through.
Trust is built in the interaction between businesses and their customers. You can see this happening in real time in town squares all over the world. Photo credit: MA-13 Coffee
They felt the actions of individuals within their organisation - founders, visionaries, brilliant staff - didn’t matter to consumers. But the source of consumer indifference was not being able to see these human actions in the first place!
In Hardwired founder’s experience a business is just humans working together, and human action is the only thing another human will trust. Businesses build trust when they celebrate the actions of the people that bring their good (no, great!) products to life.