GRANDMASTER

The importance of brand trust is clearly overrated. Building trust is costly, the process of building trust is very long, hard to measure and even harder to influence.

However, this is the most popular method of all in the marketer's arsenal. Last year, half of all advertising budgets were spent on advertising, not direct mail or promotion. This advertisement was mainly aimed at building a brand.

Trust leads to the expansion of the boundaries of brand use. If people trust Ivory soap, by analogy, they will trust the same brand of dishwashing liquid. Over the past few years, marketers have spent a huge amount of money leveraging those brands that were created during the last century.

When a new product enhances the credibility of the original brand, then resolution also increases. If I am completely satisfied with three or four new products of a proven brand, then there is a very high probability that I will allow me to show the fifth. damage to trust. If a marketer has abused a customer's permission, the latter will not let it happen again.

The Apple computer company lost a huge amount of trust in its brand when it launched its Newton project to the market with great fanfare. Microsoft puts its long-established, colossal brand trust at risk every time it releases a new operating system to the market. This tipping point is costing Microsoft billions of dollars, and Microsoft understands it very well.

The power of brand trust is truly powerful. A new product that competes with an established one has almost no chance of capturing the same market segment. When we hear that a new Mazda Miata has arrived, or learn about the return of the Volkswagen bug, we take note of this information. On the other hand, if an unknown Korean company wants to launch a new sports car on the market, it is unlikely that we will snatch this message from a huge stream of advertising.

The concept of brand trust does not only apply to prepackaged goods and cars. It matters to retailers, restaurants, and even individuals. A new book by Tom Peters will instantly attract the attention of hundreds of thousands of people. If the book is interesting, then everyone will buy it. But if he writes two or three disastrous things in a row, the approval of customers collapses before his eyes, as the consumer is unlikely to be interested in his book. for short term gain. A few years ago, in a letter received from the company, there was a telephone bill. You opened the envelope, examined the bill, and then paid it.

Then, some overly enterprising marketer discovered that putting the offer in an envelope that looked like a phone bill led to more people opening the letter .

The offer boosts response rates, but this is only a short-term effect. Thanks to the envelope in the form of an invoice, the company gets two to three times more subscribers. But only for a while.

Certainly, Bell Atlantic does not use trust in its brand. She destroys him. The strong association of the envelope with the bill has been destroyed. Clients do not understand that the envelope should be opened. This will result in the envelopes with receipts not being opened quickly enough, and, consequently, there will be delays in paying bills. And next time, customers will not rush to listen to the company's proposals.

This issue is of extreme importance. After all, it is so easy to exchange trust for coppers. ISP AOL does this every day with distracting screensavers that annoy customers. In the beginning, AOL wasn't overloaded with ads. He was completely subordinate to one company, and employees could balance the number of ads shown. The user figured they could trust everything they saw on AOL, and it was worth their attention.

AOL then figured that by stopping the user from moving around the Web site and interfering with their experience, they could sell several books at once, remote services and so on. At that point, they made the second mistake of allowing the dozens of professionals from various fields working at AOL to use their distracting screensavers whenever they wanted to advertise their products.

Because this most effective distraction tool does not requires no internal costs, then screensavers flooded the entire virtual space. Many products and services were sold, but customer permission was wasted day by day.

As you might expect, response rates to distracting screensavers began to plummet. Trust in AOL has plummeted. The loss of trust has gradually led AOL to lose its mil