4 big ideas for trust-led marketing

I’m just back from an action-packed trip to Las Vegas — and no, I wasn’t gambling or taking in shows. I was meeting some of the world’s most talented marketers and marketing technology (martech) professionals at the Adobe Summit, where I was honored to be one of the speakers.

I always love connecting with other marketers — especially this year given all the buzz around generative AI and other emerging technology. It was great to see how well PwC’s message resonated with other marketers and digital professionals, that trust has to be the foundation of marketing and customer experience.

That foundation — trust — is hard to win and easy to lose. You have to keep earning it with every single interaction. The good news is, we know how to do this. It starts with four big ideas.

1. Put the customer front and center (for real)

There’s nothing that inspires trust more than to know that you’re understood, respected and valued. With the help of martech, you can now do that for your customers — personalize marketing so that they really are at the center of everything you do.

But tech can’t do it all. It has to be a priority among all your people to delight and respect your customers. You also have to keep an eye on your tech, both through other tech tools and by having a human at the helm — a setup that we call human led, tech powered. If you’re using generative AI to help personalize content, for example, take measures (including human oversight) to help keep it from causing potential offense, breaking laws or spreading misinformation.

2. Don’t fake it, make it: purpose and values

You just can’t fake purpose and values. Customers will notice. My firm’s research, for example, found that while 84% of business leaders believe consumers highly trust their company, only 27% of consumers actually do. This gap is why it’s so important to work with the CEO on your brand’s purpose, and to collaborate with the CIO and CFO for data that proves that you’re living that purpose.

For some companies (especially those selling to certain consumer populations) this purpose may include ESG. For nearly every company, a great way to live your values (and boost productivity and recruitment) is to offer a great employee experience. In a recent survey, for example, 53% of CMOs were offering training for marketing employees on new technology.

3. Make trust a part of the journey

Are you engaging customers with multiple channels and touchpoints across a coherent, connected customer journey? If so, fabulous. But are you also working so that your customers will leave all those touchpoints trusting your brand more than before?

Increasing trust at every interaction requires a personalized journey, so that customers encounter what reflects their needs and values. It also requires trust by design — embedding cybersecurity and privacy controls into every stage of the journey to spot and stop potential trust violations before they cause damage. After all, the goal here is to deepen trust, not race to recover it after a breach or misuse.

4. Govern and protect

There’s no way around it. As a marketer, you need data that is accurate, detailed, bias-reduced, compliant and up to date. This is even more critical in the era of generative AI, which needs to be trained on huge databases in order to generate its creations.

For customers to trust you with their data, you’ll need to protect it thoroughly as you gather, use, store and distribute it. That requires technology, human oversight and collaboration with your company’s broader data governance and compliance work. It also requires that you offer your customers the privacy controls they want and that you pay close attention to how they want (or don’t want) their data used.