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Back in April 2019, we argued most brands suffer from a credibility gap of one form or another. And nothing that’s happened since (namely a huge Covid-19 pandemic that put businesses’ and brands’ roles in society into sharp focus!) has really changed that.
We know this because we documented credible brand responses throughout the pandemic. And although we featured some brilliantly credible brand actions that genuinely put the safety and wellbeing of people first, for every one of those there was a slew of thinly-veiled PR grabs and flagrant acts of virtue signalling.
And anyway, while the pandemic was a recent predominant context, the fundamental issues remain: Brands are desperate for our attention, and they continue to focus on winning that attention at all costs, too often driving an “all promise, no delivery” approach.
But critique is easy
It’s all very well for Nonsense to climb aboard our high horse and holler at everyone saying we skilfully avoid this pitfall… but it begs the question, what are we actually doing instead? What is it about how we work that ensures we build credibility? And, a more nuanced line of enquiry, how can we be confident that we’re focussing not just on doing credibility-building work but building credibility in the areas our clients need most?
The truth is, you can’t answer those questions without defining what it is that makes a brand credible in the first place. We’ve spent lots of time looking at that, which hopefully puts us on our own trajectory towards greater credibility as well as answering both why you should trust us and what we stand for.
The short answer
Brands are promises. Credible brands don’t make promises they can’t keep. Ta-da! Thank you and goodni-…
The actual, more detailed, harder to pull-off answer
First let’s acknowledge that brands NEED to continually make promises in order to survive. Big, brand-level ones. Smaller, product-level ones. Teeny feature/experience-level ones. Explicit ones, implicit ones, etc etc.
So you can’t dispense with promise-making. Promises drive attention and provoke consumers to find out more about you. And, as for keeping promises, as you might expect, that’s an extra-value trade-sized can of worms… Every single time a brand speaks or acts is an opportunity to deliver on a promise. Promises mean different things to different cultures. How people learn about and experience a brand’s products and services is vital to them feeling/believing that the promise that hooked them in has been kept. And finally, brands aren’t abstract constructs, separate from companies (where company = group of real people) that steward them… they are, in an increasingly real sense, badges worn by the owners and employees of those businesses — whether they hide them under their jackets or stick them on their Macbooks. Those people are still responsible for keeping the brand’s promises; their buy-in matters.
Oof… fixing all that’s going to be slooooowwwwww, right?
Yes, and no. If credibility is built by brands keeping their promises, then in one sense consistency over time IS vital; the more promises you keep, the more credibility you build. But we’d argue this is actually about building trust. Building trust takes time because you have to cement an idea in the public’s consciousness that you will always deliver on your promises… that’s what trust is.
To share feedback or to discuss brand credibility in more detail, get in touch
However, brands CAN build a lot of credibility, FAST. Here’s two key ways we’ve noticed:
1.Making more meaningful, more interesting promises and instantly delivering on them. Most often done through really connected journeys that prospects/customers/users can move through quickly, getting a promise-fulfilling experience.
- We Buy Any Car — have a brand promise of “Selling Made Simple” and their latest hyperbolic ads depict people dancing with joy because of how easy it is. A high bar! So do they deliver? Yes… try it. The homepage even tells you how far you have to drive to your nearest sales place before you type anything in.
2. Taking the time to explain how you actually are delivering on your promise. Most often done through in-depth content that is well thought-out, robustly evidenced and capable of surviving fact checks by the small percentage of EVERY audience that wants to check.
- Southampton FC — use personalised video tech (from our mates at Idomoo) to send season ticket holders an end of season review reminding them of all the amazing moments they experienced, by using actual data from the turnstiles to pick match footage from games they know you went to! The whole thing makes customers realise how important their support is to the team… right when it’s time to renew!
We believe both of these tactics can build a disproportionate amount of credibility without requiring years and years of consistency*. (Of course, we should 1000% be aiming for years and years of consistency!)
*BIG CLAIM ALERT! This of course begs a question about measuring credibility over time. More on that later…
OK, so what actually makes a credible brand?
Some brands ooze credibility. Others don’t. By looking at the ones who do, we identified 6 pillars of credibility — Meaningful Promises, Authentic Storytelling, Magnetic Personality, Cultural Contribution, Satisfying Experiences and A Team That Believes
We talked this through with the brightest minds in our team and from across our community, who’ve challenged and helped strengthen this — cheers all, you know who you are 😉
Over the last few years, this has become a vital tool to help us identify areas to concentrate on when we meet new brands. And we regularly use it with our closest clients to assess their creative output, to find strategic and creative opportunities and, ultimately, to generate trust and customer value. Hopefully you’ll find it helpful too…
To share feedback or to discuss brand credibility in more detail, get in touch
The most credible brands make promises that they can deliver, but that also challenge the wider business to be better. It means really listening to and understanding customers, so that we can shape ambitious promises we can evidence now, while committing to actions to deliver on them better in future (otherwise they’re not much of a promise; I promised myself I’d brush my teeth this morning… nailed it!).
Brands have the power to deliver a compelling point of view, document missions, get people to question their choices, explain complexity and, most importantly, elicit emotion. Credible brands do this from a place of authenticity, respecting that each story is just one point on a customer’s journey. If we do this, we will be set for long-term success, building trust as we go.
Credible brands know that their visuals and voice need to be more than “human” (a concept so broad it practically guarantees blandness). Instead we must choose a personality that the brand’s tribe will gravitate towards, happy in the knowledge that, inevitably, that will alienate others. (Just like any actual human with a magnetic personality.
Culture is fabric. Even great brands are merely threads. Credible brands know this. That’s why they take time to truly appreciate the cultures and subcultures their audiences exist in. Doing that always reveals that we must then commit, long term, to being part of — and weaving ourselves into — that culture through the actions our brand takes.
The one place you don’t want to “leave them wanting more”. Credible brands learn to look at themselves through their customers’ eyes, to use their own products and services like a new customer would, so they can be honest with themselves about how good the experience truly was. From there, we build, or augment, experiences that deliver on the brand promise with style.
The biggest advocates for credible brands are their team. In all of our collective experience, it’s clear that invested, engaged teams — that extend beyond the walls of the marketing department — build brands in a way that those going through the motions simply do not. That starts with absolute clarity of vision and inspiring leadership. From there it’s about empowering teams to work together to build that vision.
Using the 6 pillars practically.
Presented like this, these are 6 principles that we believe any practitioner of marketing can use to critique what they’re doing. Think of them as lenses through which you can view any aspect of brand; comms, experiences, design, etc. Very quickly you can identify areas in which your brand should be more credible, where you are wasting money creating future customer disappointment, or paying lip-service to things that require genuine commitment, etc. There’s no hiding from them. Use them dispassionately and look at what you are doing with real honesty and the gaps will present themselves.
You can also use them as provocations to develop new thinking. “What if we were living by [pillar X] perfectly? What would we be doing/saying differently?” We find doing this is a great way to generate proactive ideas for clients. You don’t have to use all 6 either; whichever combo of the six you go for — Meaningful Promises, Authentic Storytelling, Magnetic Personality, Cultural Contribution, Satisfying Experiences and A Team That Believes— you can pick a few and use them as triggers to brainstorm.
WARNING: Sales-y bit!
Of course, we’ll happily come and talk to any brand that wants to hear more about how you go about using these 6 pillars of credibility. We even offer Credibility Audits where we can assess your brand against these pillars and offer some proactive and provocative thinking.
To request a Credibility Audit, please get in touch
P.S. What’s next?
For us at Nonsense, these 6 pillars had two huge implications…
- We completely reassessed our Products and Services offering and asked ourselves if they really helped brands strengthen these 6 pillars. We realised that we were offering some services that were only really incidental to building credibility, so we should stop doing them. And, we recognised we were going to have to seriously up our game in a couple of areas — cultural insight, CX and Employer brand to name a few. More on that in a follow-up post soon!
- We needed to be able to measure our efficacy in these 6 areas! So we’re developing a scoring model to measure brand credibility, using this framework as our basis. We don’t want to dispense with established metrics like brand trackers, engagement rates and conversion metrics — we just see them as part of the overall credibility picture. And, eventually, we want to prove the link between improving your credibility scores and shifting stubborn metrics like Brand Trust or Customer Lifetime Value. We’ll also have to follow-up on that soon!
To share feedback or to discuss brand credibility in more detail, get in touch
To request a Credibility Audit, please get in touch
