The truth about trust

Few of us would argue that trust is important – it underpins marketing, communication, relationships, leadership and more. Yet do we really understand what is involved in trust?

What you’ll learn: 

• What it means to trust
• Different types of trust and how they develop
• Why we need better trust, not more trust
• How trust and communication depend on each other
• How relationships are underpinned by trust
• The ethics of trust in marketing

This webinar brings together a wealth of evidence alongside original research to uncover the truth about trust.

Justin Jackson and Francesca Granelli explain that, while we’re disposed to trust each other (otherwise we couldn’t live and work together), we quickly learn to trust some individuals and organisations more than others. These judgements are rapidly made and often rely on rules of thumb, so it’s important to understand what these rules are if we want to be trusted.

A whole group of heuristics exist – mental shortcuts that speed up our decision-making processes – which marketers are yet to embrace. However, our experiences affect who we trust in more fundamental ways. Emotions are a visceral repository of lessons we’ve learned, reminding us how to behave in comparable situations. Communication therefore has to harness these emotions – plus there’s a feedback loop: every message affects our future reactions.

Finally, there are conventions we rely on to guide us, drawn from our team, organisation and community. As with emotions, this is a two-way process: norms tell us who to trust, but also reflect whether our trust has been respected or betrayed in the past.

Marketers, as Justin and Francesca explain, must play the long game.

About the speakers:

Justin Jackson is a Lecturer in Politics at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of CIM, a Fellow of IDM, a Chartered Marketer and a Chartered PR Practitioner. Justin teaches for a number of universities, agencies and institutes. He is the owner of Digital Remit.

Francesca Granelli is a Teaching Fellow at King’s College, London in the King’s Centre for Strategic Communications. She received her PhD from KCL and is the author of Trust, Politics, and Revolution: a European History (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Justin and Francesca regularly present their research together, most recently at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas where they discussed ‘The Changing British Voter’.