Trust. A quality imperative to any good relationship, be it business or personal. A quality which can take years to build, but can be lost in a matter of seconds. Once lost, the process of regaining it can sometimes be impossible. Oh the importance of trust.
In terms of business trust, one could talk of brand loyalty. You buy something because you trust the quality and experience of it. But where does this trust come from? A friend or colleague? A magazine? Facebook? A newspaper? This is where PR can come in and help start and then build this trust to gain a market share of voice. But what happens when trust begins to fall?
Bankers. Do we trust bankers? What do we think of BP? The government? Nestle? Primark? The BBC? Well thanks to the recent launch of Edelman’s 2011 Trust Barometer; banks, financial Services and media are all stuck at the bottom of UK Industry Rankings. Are we surprised? Um probably not after the financial crisis and the ever-growing bonuses earned by the tax-payer’s money…cue RBS. Cuts here and cuts there and still graduate unemployment at its all time lowest – god society sounds so miserable! No wonder with the media headlining all things negative. According to the Barometer, in response to “How much do you trust media to do what is right?” The US is down to 27% and the UK 22%. How low can you go? But in contrast, and perhaps surprisingly so, trust in the CEO has significantly increased since last year’s survey.
All things aren’t as doom and gloom as society can sometimes make out. Trust is evidently an important issue because it can be detrimental to a business’s reputation, to a person’s reputation. Therefore transparency and honesty are becoming more widely practiced – that’s a good thing right?
Find out more at http://www.edelman.com/trust/2011/
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