Build Trust to Persuade
Persuasion is a double-edged sword. Used properly, it is a powerful tool to help you expand your reach, amplify your authority, and grow your business. However, persuasion success is short-lived if people do not trust you. You must build a foundation of trust to continually be able to attract sales. Otherwise, you are wasting your time and theirs. The size of your marketing budget won’t matter if you develop a reputation for being dishonest, explicitly or through omission.
I learned a harsh lesson about trust early in my financial career. I had verbally agreed to the terms of a $5 million interest rate swap with a trader at another bank. Within seconds, the bond market changed, making it more expensive for his employer to hedge its position. This led to him backing out of our deal and leaving my employer in a loss position. After repeated calls to his boss from mine, we settled on an unhappy compromise. I later discovered this trader had a bad reputation. He had cheated on others. Few people were still willing to transact with him. After this incident, his career took a further nose dive. Eventually I learned he quit the business, and not by his choice.
Communicate Your Brand Values
If you are a brand manager or sales team leader with responsibilities for increasing market share and adding profitability, you need individuals to trust what you say and what you do. You can persuade someone in the short run but generating a long-term connection with your customer requires trust. As Stephen R. Covey, the legendary author and speaker, said, “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.”
Building trust starts with being trustworthy. You must eat, live, and breathe your core principles and make sure others know what they are and why you have them.
Start with a well-written Value Statement that is clear about what drives your organization. Achievers, an award-winning software company, promotes one of its values as a respect for its employees. It provides an app for anyone to send an appreciation note to a colleague. This initiative is no surprise since Achievers sells a platform to HR departments that enables their organizations to recognize the efforts of their workers. Achievers publishes a list of suggested core company values such as adaptability, compassion, courage, honesty, innovation, and teamwork, inter alia.
Personalizing your brand story is another effective way to highlight your commitment to attributes associated with good corporate behavior. Founder stories, if perceived as authentic, can humanize a brand. In the late 2000’s, I raised $2 million from angel investors to build an online knowledge-sharing platform for institutional investors and their advisors. My founder’s story drew on my experience as a forensic economist, having worked on cases that led to massive pensioner and shareholder losses due to corporate or government fraud and mismanagement. I emphasized my desire to help investment fiduciaries develop excellent practices that could ideally prevent retirement plan beneficiaries from incurring monetary harm.
Demonstrate Your Brand Values
If potential buyers think they can depend on you to deliver a quality product, it’s easier to persuade them to buy. Reliability is a cornerstone of trust, not just at the point of sale but over time when a buyer has a problem or wants up-to-date information.
For the last two decades, I’ve bought Honda automobiles. The price fits my budget, and I’ve seldom had repair issues. When I do, the service representatives keep me informed about completion time, recommend preventative measures, and wash my car. Their actions convey their happy dedication to customer satisfaction.
Authenticity is another indicator of brand trust. Frontify, a global branding software company, describes authenticity as the confluence of factors such as consistency, differentiation, purpose, and transparency. Qualtrics, a technology-driven research and survey company, says nearly ninety percent of consumers want to engage with a brand seen as genuine. This concept of candor and authenticity extends to the use of influencers. According to a 2025 paper by Georgia State University professor Barbara Duffek, any collaboration with a cultural or social media star must reflect shared values at a minimum.
Empower Your Customers
Educational articles, blogs, webinars, and white papers are types of thought leadership that your brand can provide to your target audience. Sponsoring actionable and engaging content helps you prove your authority. It strengthens your pledge to work in good faith by being open and facilitative. Beyond that, you are conveying a major message that your business is not just about money. It’s about people.
As a former testifying investment expert witness, I often wondered why well-governed corporations didn’t shout their diligence and risk management policies from the rooftops. When companies don’t highlight what they are doing right, they are vulnerable to litigation and regulatory investigation. Companies can quickly become embroiled in a lawsuit as the result of incomplete or flawed messaging. In the last ten years, the plaintiff’s bar has busied itself by suing certain financial service companies that allegedly hid higher than reported fees from their customers. The result has been a pronounced awareness of the need for exact fee disclosures, something high-integrity companies have used to their advantage in their marketing and sales activities.
Summary
This overview of brand trust and its relationship to persuasion is a sliver of what companies need to know to bolster and preserve that most precious asset called reputation. Warren Buffet, the venerated Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, rightly quipped, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Without a solid reputation, your potential to persuade others will rapidly evaporate.
I welcome your topic suggestions. Feel free to check out my website, https://susanmangiero.com. (A new version of this website will launch by the end of May.)
