Episode Details

If you build or look after a brand, this is a practical half-hour on the one thing every marketing budget quietly rests on: earning trust and keeping it. Before you read a single word on a website or pick a product off the shelf, you've already decided whether you trust it — in about seven seconds, just from how it looks. So how do the smartest brands earn that trust? This week's guest is Margot Bloomstein, brand and content strategist, founder of the Boston consultancy Appropriate, Inc., and author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap. She distills trustworthiness into three words: voice, volume, and vulnerability - speaking consistently, sharing the right amount, and having the nerve to admit when you've got something wrong. Why a little healthy skepticism is good for us, and where it tips over into corrosive cynicism. The counterintuitive idea that giving customers more control wins their trust. Why saying less can sometimes say more, and what TED did when its own platform began to lose its way. They look at how a genuine apology actually works - and the weasel words that wreck it - and at the design principles, from the MAYA rule to the old idea that "things should look like what they are," that make us trust something on sight. Margot also names the one thing any organization could change on Monday morning to become more trustworthy. A conversation for anyone who builds a brand, writes for one, or simply wonders why we believe what we see.