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New year means new changes, right?
Here’s what you should know about building trust—and it’s a key lesson from Trustworthy:
Change doesn’t breed trust.
Consistency does.
Stay the course and stay familiar
Build trust not by changing, but by finding new ways to stay the course. Think about it: we’re living through the maelstrom of the election and a violent coup, evolving science of the pandemic, and social change driven by the Black Lives Matter movement. People want growth, but no one enjoys upheaval, especially when there’s little benefit. (And to them, there’s little benefit to your rebranding right now. No, really.) Your audience craves the comfort of consistency. Offer them a familiar voice, cohesive visual language, and expected volume of detail.
Schools offer this comfort when they work to maintain schedules and classroom continuity. In successful hybrid learning programs, students find the same teachers and lesson plans as they shift between remote and in-person instruction. After a year full of surprises, students can trust that they know what to expect.
History professor Heather Cox Richardson offers this comfort when she pens her daily letter to some 350,000 readers. She puts the day’s chaos into enduring historical context with a calm tone and forthright style, detailed with footnotes. Readers can trust that they know what to expect. Like so many others, they can best contend with change against the backdrop of consistency: from the brands, educational institutions, and media outlets that form a foundation for their day-to-day lives.
If you’re a marketer, creative director, or content strategist, know that now is not the time to foist big changes on your audience. Don’t make them learn a new interface or new terminology.
Want to turn over new leaves in the new year? Build trust by investing in new tools to sustain a consistent voice.
Make your editorial style guide more robust. Socialize it across more teams in your organization and gain buy-in from customer service, product management, and design operations.
What about your brand guidelines? Ensure they’re useful and usable with clear guardrails for how your brand needs to evolve through new platforms or an omnichannel content strategy.
This new year is a time to build trust not by investing in change, but by offering consistency.
Build trust through familiarity
This past week you may have seen a post shared on Facebook or Instagram. A warm, Millennial pink color palette, some swirly typography, and energetic Bitmoji combine in the visual language favored by a largely female demographic cross-section of homemakers and vaccine skeptics. It looks familiar, like yet another post exhorting moms to challenge vaccination mandates.
But it doesn’t promote debunked claims or disinformation.
It doesn’t even take the more innocuous approach of encouraging a population with low scientific literacy to “do your own research” rather than seek out the guidance of their trained physicians.
Image credits: AmandaHowellHealth
Instead, it delivers tested and widely supported scientific guidance about vaccines for COVID-19. Familiar visual and verbal language welcomes readers at all levels of science literacy with points and counterpoints of frequently asked questions and links to supporting evidence. Amid those pink headings and pretty graphics, the post delivers guidance like an information-laden Trojan horse.
Public health expert Amanda Howell, MPH, published the post to differentiate between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and offer concrete guidance on vaccination. Her post is a rebuttal to misinformation and troubling gaps in thought leadership around vaccination. It earns trust by speaking in a familiar voice, by offering a level of detail that respects both the subject matter and readers, and engaging in a warm and humanizing way. Science doesn’t need to be shrouded in passive voice and the arrogance of unearned confidence if you can present information in an accessible, consistent way.
That combination—a familiar voice, appropriate volume of detail, and personable engagement—can help any brand can earn trust and gain visibility for its thought leadership.
“If I’m going to go viral, a post encouraging people to vaccinate is definitely the way to do it,” Howell commented on Twitter.
Balance novelty with consistency
New year or not, the work of Amanda Howell, Heather Cox Richardson, and many others are helping people maintain focus and stay resilient for the year ahead. Calm, consistent voices, from individuals, governments, or brands, also help true calls for change and action stand out. We know that messaging that always operates in a state of alarm tends to lose attention over time. The opposite also holds true: brands that build trust through calm and consistency gain attention when they finally do ring the alarm. Don’t make the mistake of creating noise by spinning up change for no reason. Stay the course to maintain your audience. In a time of chaos, they’re trusting you to handle them with care.
This post was originally published as a newsletter to fans of Trustworthy. Not on the list? Sign up now!
