For a number of years now many of the projects we’ve worked on, conversations we’ve convened, ideas we’ve explored and challenges we’ve worked to understand have all led back to one place - trust. It’s a vital factor, and challenge, for our current age. What drives it? What disrupts and depletes it? And how do you cultivate and build it? Are questions we all need to ask. We’ve started this library of trust to give us different angles, perspectives, insights and inspiration that can help inform our efforts to build back trust.
🕸️ The trust omni-crisis Trust, in institutions, in brands and businesses, of each other, is at a historic low. This is not good. Trust is like the very powerful invisible glue that keeps our societies bound together and working, without it things fall apart. Why is this happening, and what can we do about it? It really is a key question of our age. At the heart of this omni-crisis are a series of disconnects, between what we’re told and what we experience, and then often what we’re told again.
Why We Don't Trust Each Other Anymore
For the First Time in 17 Years, People’s Trust Declined in Every Kind of Institution We Asked About
Revealed: how top PR firm uses ‘trust barometer’ to promote world’s autocrats
Public Trust in Government: 1958-2023
A Gentler, Better Way to Change Minds
™️ Brands and trust Infrastructural brands tend to change their core brand hardware (logo, logotype, colour) seldom, or very, very slowly over time. This doesn’t have to just be public or state bodies, but also private companies that hold this space. Whether it’s FedEx, or Gov.uk, or Swiss Air, or Harvard University, or Dublin City Council, their consistency and reliability, every day, but particularly over time, is central to our relationships with them, and the development of the most valuable asset that underpins them - trust.
For these types of organisations, navigating a brand update is really an exercise in navigating public trust. There’s therefore good reason that many brands going through such a process choose to change everything else while only changing the core assets in the most minimal way.
A spate of poorly navigated University rebrands over the last 5 years provides a more concrete glimpse of the actual negative impact. Universities hold this same infrastructural role, just in a way that’s more entwined with its communities emotional lives (see also football clubs). Logo changes at the University of California, Loughborough University and Leeds United all created an upswell of tangible and immediate anger, because these symbols that were thrown out were meaningful. Both in their symbolism, but also in their consistency (because symbolism is meaning built over time).