nielsenandcompany.com | the blog

Trust comes in many flavours, and in a developed market economy trust should in the best of worlds be an unambiguous concept. It isn’t. The most obvious difference between ‘trust’ and ‘trust’ in a developed market economy is the one you find in the number of connections or degrees between you as a consumer and the product/provider.

1st degree trust can be defined as direct contact with the provider. You know the provider, and you trust them. This makes you buy their product.

2nd degree trust is contact via referral. You know the referrer and you trust him/her, hence you trust the provider. This makes you buy their product. Not as willingly as a 1st degree, but a buy is a buy.

But a regulated market economy put forth more complex trust scenarios since you may also get additional sets of 1st degrees, which is what we at nielsenandcompany.com calls the marketer’s wet dream. The most common example is when the provider needs to follow a set of rules and regulations that confirm the quality of the goods you buy, rules and regulations that the customer is aware of - rules and regulations that reinforce the actual sales of the goods. If you when using this 1st degree trust as a provider, you will get a doubled 1st degree trust. But if you end up in a critical situation, this may become a double-edged sword.

In Sweden we have an interesting sequence dealing with minced meat where a provider’s representatives have created new best before-dates in order to sell out-dated minced meat one more day. The sequence consists of stressful, extraordinary as well as critical situations since now the customers don’t trust the provider (1st degree) due to the fact that they’ve actually broken the law (broken their second 1st degree).

In order to deal with this, the company in question started out blaming it all on their processes and not on the behaviour of their management and their employees. Major mistake, because they by doing so didn’t address both sides of the double-edged sword. The sword in this case consists of rules/regulations and behaviour non-supportive of the rules/regulations as well as non-supportive of the company brand.

In this case, it all boils down to behaviour.

If you erase your trust with your customer due to behaviour, you need to rebuild trust with new behaviour. Forget all you’ve read about communication strategies, repeated corrected behaviour is what it takes. When repeated behaviour has been established, you can start communicating it e.g. by engaging your advertising agency or you PR-agency.

For more info from a multi-disciplinary consultancy on how to solve it, feel free to contact us.

Yes, what’s up with Carnegie?

The last couple of weeks they have been accused for a lot of issues dealing with how their organization execute the company mission (or to be more specific: how specific roles have executed their own mission which was in conflict with the company mission). Now Carnegie has decided to dig deep in order to clean up their act and get results. The company will probably dig deep in its wallet, but will the company dig deep in itself?

According to an article in Dagens Media, the leading Swedish media on communications issues, the Swedish PR-agency JKL is commissioned to clean up the Carnegie Brand. In the very same article, the agency presents the fact that it will take time. Guess it is billable time, so congrats JKL. Well done. You deserve it.

But the time factor or the billable hours are not the most interesting fact with this news story, it is the use of Carnegie’s organization and extended organization - read: consultants. In fact JKL and Carnegie have according to both parties been working together for a long time. As an innocent bystander it is impossible to know or evaluate what they’ve done together. It must have been good, if not they wouldn’t have been working together. But when comparing the offer JKL puts forth on their website with the mess Carnegie actually experienced, shouldn’t it have been expected that also JKL knew something about the mess before it went public? To put it in plain English, if they were aware of it, what did they do?

Normally, the best company healing process is where the turmoil-maker or the one knowing about the turmoil is participating in the clean-up, but is this a normal case?