In Rob Walker’s book “Buying In,” along with espousing his thoughts on ‘murketing’ (look it up) he talks about how trust in authority is suffering even more than usual. A cursory Google dig will build a nice little stack of those we don’t trust anymore. Recently, the untrustworthy pile was as tall as a Malaysian skyscraper. We don’t trust CEO’s and branders, attorneys and the government, obviously. We don’t trust the church or business or politicians. We don’t trust even our own bosses and doctors and pharmacists anymore. Entrepreneurs and sports heroes have taken one for the team and celebrities are sliding off the tabloid covers replaced by real-life screw-ups. Only one group has gained our trust over the last few years: ourselves. In us we trust.
We want real. We want authentic. And sometimes it has an ugly side.
We don’t want to see famous people suffer, we want to see the guy in the 3rd cube from the window get his. We want to see that arrogant bagel maker get smacked down. We want the pain brought to a level that matches our pain. We are way past the DIY movement. We’re into the DTSE movement (Did They Suffer Enough). Nasty, hateful fear, that’s what replaces trust when it gets destroyed. We want payback.
We want to see investment bankers suffering like their investors. We want to see politicians suffer like taxpayers. We want oil company executives to suffer like we did when gas was half a ten-spot. We want payback for automakers that sold us gas-guzzlers and landau-roofed cars that fell apart in six months. When trust leaves, it gets replaced by some reptilian stuff hiding in our genetic code.
Because of greed and lies and malfeasance, we lost our trust long before the economic meltdown. If trust were a stock, it has been tanking for a while. Now the trust company is bankrupt.
Last night, a financial expert told me that our faith in the free market had let us down. Duh. He said our faith in corporate and government leadership had been completely misplaced. All the people around him nodded. He said capitalism needed to be examined deeply, and every banking law should be streamlined and restructured and stop-loss methods needed to be re-engineered into the system. He said financial people needed to take ethics training. He was a financial analyst.
“Should I trust you?” I asked him.
“Probably not,” he said. “Everything I thought I knew, everything I was taught, all of my training and education and experience are questionable in light of what is happening.”
“So are you saying that we’re in uncharted territory or that we’re totally screwed?” I asked.
“Yeah, kind of,” he said.
“Which one?” I asked.
“Both,” he said. “Hey, you think those guys in charge now have any idea what is happening? If they did, why can’t they fix it? They don’t know what is going on. The game has taken over the players. They went to the best schools, they’ve been working their entire professional lives in the very industry that is collapsing around them – the industry they created. They were the golden boys and they’re now riding the beast down like a beer’d up rodeo cowboy on a wounded bull. Are they experts? What happened to the market today?”
“Down nearly 700 points.” I said. “Again.”
“My point made,” he said.
There are trustworthy people out there. We just don’t trust them anymore. Perhaps it is because some are incompetent or others just don’t know how to get the lid back on Pandora’s safe deposit box.
“The people trying to fix this are like mosquitos in a nudist colony,” he said. “They sort of know what they need to do but they don’t know where to start.”
“So we’d rather trust ourselves,” I said.
“Look where trusting them got us,” he said and smiled.
“You are them,” I smiled.
“Exactly,” he said.
My parents trusted authority. In the 1960’s, The Man took a hit and by the end of the 1970’s we didn’t trust too many people over thirty, especially those wearing a suit. The Reagan years brought a slight amount of trust back but it was misguided and then abused. Soon the old cynicism was back and it’s been snowballing ever sense. The past year has pretty much extracted the word “trust” from the dictionary.
What can you do in this environment? You trust each other.
Start a conversation with your own people (our Vision in Action program helps companies do just that). Start one with your customers and potential customers (our People Believe People program does that). Even start one with your competition. The web is the perfect way to build connections. My old friend Connie Reece has a lot of great thinking at her blog Every Dot Connects (http://www.everydotconnects.com). Read Seth Godin. Read Rob Walker. Give us a call. Just do something audacious and uncomfortable in your branding. It may be the safest thing you can do these days.
If you are mailing coupons or running a radio or print campaign and yet your customers are on the web writing all kinds of things about you (good or bad), you better think of ways to get into that conversation. It’s going on without you. You won’t control it like old-school media, but if you create a solid brand strategy and a killer idea (the simple word “change” for Obama, for example), you can begin to build something real. People will converse. You can converse. It’s a conversation. You can start being authentic again. You may even get a little trust.
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