Functional Trust

I have a Home Depot Rigid cordless drill older than my 26-year-old daughter. It has driven screws, drilled holes and done all manner of duties through three home renovations, countless handy jobs and big yard work including driving about 1,000 screws into the planks of a 68-foot suspension bridge. At times I have used it as a mallet. It has earned my trust. Original batteries too. It does a function it promises to do, over and over and so on. That steadfast functionality is the epitome of what I’m going to call “functional trust.”

That, as opposed to, let’s call it “marketing trust.” AKA almost always meaningless claims that never move the needle. Almost.

Here we are living in a post-truth world and the most sought-after commodity everyone is grasping for is something that they can depend on. News, politicians, major appliances; can you believe in any claims associated with those and an infinite number of other things we’d like to depend on? Not unless they do what they say! It’s a fine thing that weather apps have become the most trusted shard of what used to be news. They’re still usually wrong but at least they don’t try to fib about it.

Recently I talked about Agentic Endorsement. Agentic Endorsement is what you get when an AI — more specifically, the agent it sends — generates an answer to an AI enquiry by making a recommendation. It’s looking for verification outside of marketing and paid search. It’s not always right, but it is at least attempting to give a trustworthy recommendation. Having said that, Gemini and Chat both recommended Dewalt cordless drills. I don’t. The batteries are really unreliable. I speak from a lot of experience on this.

Now, almost every service brand on earth wants to be the most trusted. Here’s where things get tricky. It’s very hard to claim trust on something as subjective as a service, consultancy or brokerage. It’s almost impossible to do so as a clear, brand-differentiating point of difference. But not impossible if you focus on functional trust. So instead of a nine-point rundown on how to build a better drill, here’s…

How to create functional trust for a service

1. Stop looking at your service as that. Look at it as a product. Because that is how your consumer sees it. You are selling them, and they are buying, a thing. A thing called you.
2. Audit, audit, audit. Figure out what your customer defines as trust in your category, what matters to what segments — both product and audience — and design around what is relevant.
3. Build in trust-supporting product features. These are philosophies, policies, rules and SOPs that work to unequivocally back up the expectations, as wild as they might be, of your customers.
4. Get everybody on board. Your entire company culture must be completely built around point 3. Otherwise, you are trying to cross the ocean in a leaky canoe.
5. Be consistent forever. Don’t ever let your organization waver in the way it delivers the product.
6. Be patient. Build it over time.
7. Walk before you talk. Don’t make the claims until you have built the reputation, because if you don’t, Agentic Endorsement — never mind good old-fashioned angry people — will eat you alive.
8. Talk once you’ve walked. Once the functionality of your product has built trust, you can talk about it. First, monitor AI’s chats, industry and what’s left of press coverage to make sure you’re good to go. Only then, start to market the philosophies and product features that built functional trust.

There are all kinds of good things that come with taking these eight steps — your company will get better; your loyalty will get better. You’ll eat your competitors one tiny bite at a time.

Trust me.

Rob