How Brand Experience Impacts Brand Trust
We recently asked our team about the last truly great interaction they had with a brand.
One team member started speaking about the skincare brand Osea. We kept digging: How did you come across Osea? What was so appealing about the brand? What values do you share with the brand? How did the experience from awareness of the brand to delivery from the brand unfold? What stood out to you? How did the brand make you feel? Would you refer to them to a friend?
This discovery led to an insightful conversation around the importance of brand trust – what it is, why it matters, and how to foster it.
What is brand trust?
📌 Brand trust is the belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of a brand. It’s when your audience trusts that you do what you promise, and by doing so, solve some sort of pain point for them.
📌 You know it’s present when your consumers are confident in representing or recommending your business to family or friends. There’s no better test of brand trust than asking your consumer about the likelihood of a referral.
📌 Every touch point you have with your consumer is an opportunity to build or bruise brand trust. The sum of these touch points, from your packaging to customer service, is what creates your Brand Experience for your consumers.
📌 At Hoot Design Company, we think of Brand Experience as a circular ball. All you can see when looking at a ball is the skin around the ball, yet, we know many core components contribute to creating what we see on the surface. In this article, we’ll walk through some of those core components as it relates to building brand trust.
Why does brand trust matter?
Brand trust is an essential part of creating a resilient brand that can withstand technological, political, or environmental changes. Let’s break down why.
When brand trust is present, consumers feel a sense of belonging and connectedness to your brand. When this is shared across a large group of people, communities form. And when communities are present, brands have strength in numbers – they have advocates out in the world representing the brand and empowering the brand.
Think about a strong community in your life, maybe your family or friend group. What is at the core of these communities? How does trust fit in? What happens when trust is present or lacking?
When brand trust is present within a community, what becomes so empowering is that you get both support and accountability from the people that your brand serves. And when you can build and leverage this relationship, supporting your audience and seeking out their feedback, you create a mutually beneficial relationship.
And this sort of mutually beneficial relationship between a brand and its consumers, is what creates lifelong customers that can withstand the changes during challenging and prosperous times. It’s this level of resiliency that catapults your brand into the next level of success.
To sum it up, your brand is only as strong as the community of the people you’re serving.
How do I build brand trust?
Building and maintaining brand trust requires purposeful planning and high adaptability. In this article, we’ll walk you through 5 incremental steps to fine-tune your brand experience, so that it results in increased brand trust.
Identify your values.
Find your people.
Infuse your values into your brand experience.
Engage with your consumers.
Return to step 3 & repeat.
1) Identify your values.
Before you can build brand community, you must know what it is you stand for and what you care about most as a brand. When your values are clearly understood and articulated, you can keep them at the forefront of your brand, so you’re attracting the right people for your brand.
At Hoot, we do this in Brand Heart. You can think of this as developing the nucleus of your brand experience.
2) Find your people.
Once you know what your brand values most, you can begin the process of identifying who it is your brand shares values with and how your brand serves that group of people. Having a customer base rooted in shared values is a necessary foundation in building a brand experience where brand trust becomes a byproduct.
We do this in our Brand Identity process. Together, we identify who your brand serves and create a brand personality built to connect with that audience.
3) Infuse your brand experience with your values.
In this step, we infuse your brand experience with your brand’s values, so they are top of mind for your consumers.
You can start by outlining the touch points your brand has with your consumers. Then, strategically go through each one and evaluate what your brand is communicating. Is it in alignment with your values? Does it resonate with your audience? What can be fine-tuned? What needs an overhaul? What needs to be discarded? Where are new opportunities?
Further, it’s important to consider where your consumer is in the buying process at each touch point. Is this touch point serving its purpose? Has the consumer been primed for this conversation at this point of the brand experience?
At Hoot, we think of culture as a core component within the Brand Experience circular “ball” that we mentioned at the beginning of this article. Workplace cultures can make or break a brand. Taking the time to prioritize building a Brand Culture rooted in your values that serves your employees is another fundamental step in building a strong brand experience.
4) Engage with your consumers.
Once you’ve completed the step 3, engage with your consumers. Today, brands have easier access and more direct communication lines to their consumers than ever before. It’s up to you to take advantage of that.
Instead of hyper-focusing on your competitors, obsess over your consumers. Spend more time checking in with them, asking them questions. What are your current pain points? Are we delivering? What would you change? What do you like? What do you want more of? Less of? How are you?
Focusing on and engaging with the people you’re serving is the fastest and most effective way to gather qualitative data that will empower you to make necessary adjustments to stay relevant to them.
And great brands will apply this engagement with, not only their external consumers, but also their internal consumers – employees.
5) Return to step 3 & repeat.
Now that you’ve gathered invaluable insights from your consumers, return to step 3 and repeat. And then repeat again. And so on.
There’s a lot of noise out there. When you get clear on what you’re about and who you serve, obsess over it. It’s likely your people will form a community and that community will begin to obsess over you.
