The tech-forward brand that assumes its audience will trust it because the technology is impressive has misunderstood what produces trust. Technology is a reason to pay attention. It is not a reason to trust.
What trust actually requires
Trust requires consistency over time. The brand that behaves the same way in difficult situations as it does in easy ones earns trust. The brand that behaves differently when the stakes are high reveals something about its values that the audience remembers.
For tech-forward brands, the consistency question is particularly important because the technology changes quickly. The brand that is defined by its technology has to rebuild its identity every time the technology changes. The brand that is defined by its values can change its technology without changing what the audience trusts it for.
The transparency factor
Transparency is a trust-building tool that tech-forward brands underuse. The audience that understands how a technology works is more likely to trust it than the audience that does not. The brand that explains its technology in terms the audience can understand is doing something that most tech-forward brands do not do, which is treating the audience as capable of understanding.
The transparency does not have to be technical. It can be about the decisions the brand makes. Why did the brand choose this approach rather than that one? What are the limitations of the technology? What does the brand do when the technology fails? The answers to these questions build trust in a way that the technology itself does not.
The community dimension
The tech-forward brands that are building trust most effectively tend to be the ones that have built communities around their product. The community is not a marketing channel. It is a trust mechanism. The potential customer who can talk to existing customers before making a decision is more likely to trust the brand than the potential customer who can only talk to the brand’s marketing materials.
The community also provides the brand with information it cannot get from its own data. The questions the community asks reveal what the audience does not understand. The problems the community reports reveal what the product does not do well. The brands that listen to their communities tend to build better products and more trust than the brands that do not.
What new audiences need
New audiences for tech-forward brands tend to need something different from the brand’s existing audience. The existing audience has already decided to trust the brand. The new audience has not. The content, the community, and the transparency that built trust with the existing audience may not be sufficient for the new audience, which has different starting assumptions and different questions.
The brands that expand their audience successfully tend to be the ones that have done the work of understanding what the new audience needs to believe before they trust the brand, and have built the content and the community to address those specific beliefs. The technology is the same. The trust-building work is different.
Related from Impulsblog: How your morning routine shapes the rest of your day
