What does trust mean in the world of branding, business relationships and customer satisfaction? Today let’s take on trust and brands.

Brands simplify our world by giving us experiences, tastes and sounds that we can rely upon. Psychologists call this anchoring. You know how that non-fat soy latte at Starbucks will taste no matter if you bought it in Langley BC or Manhattan NY. You take comfort in knowing that Enya always sings soothing celtic music and each CD is about the same in mood. You also know that if you get that report completed FedEx will pick up the package and deliver it to your client by the next day. Brands offer consistency. Consistency that you can trust.

Things fall apart when that trust is broken. You thought your shoe was about making you into a superstar athlete. Turns out that little children in a small dark rooms in Asia, made the shoe, for next to no money. You thought your computer just cared about where you wanted to go today, but instead it just wants to make you go through wizards and menus to get simple tasks done. Your coffee is cold and that latest Enya CD is giving you a headache. She’s doing hip-hop duets with Kanye West! Jim the FedEx courier does not look like the picture of speed and efficiency, standing there, leaning against the counter and flirting with your office assistant.

Brands are a relationship of trust. Trust that comes from consistency and delivering on promises that are made. So don’t expect the logo that we design to be the end all and be all of your branding exercise.

Here are 3 easy steps to ensure that you have a meaningful, trusting brand relationship with your customer:

Step 1: What is your promise?
If the customer can’t easily decipher what is it that you do, and why you do it, you’ve lost the game before it even started. Make your message clear, concise and meaningful. Skip the marketing hoopla (there’s plenty of time for that later), make sure that you have first established a clear Unique Selling Proposition(USP) in the mind of your customer.

Step2: Do you communicate it well?
Your promise to your customer must be used as the basis for all your communication collateral. From your logo, to your website, to the print brochures and business cards that you hand out at tradeshows, make sure that they all communicate the core promise that you are making to your customer. Communicate the promise through words, color palette, typography, visual language and most importantly through your employees. The most beautiful piece of marketing collateral falls apart, if your team doesn’t “buy it”. You can only make an honest promise to your customer if you have the buy-in internally. Everyone from the CEO to the IT geek need to believe in what you want to deliver. Yes, FedEx delivers on time, but how? Their face is the Jim the FedEx guy and how he carries himself, becomes directly linked to the FedEx promise.

Step3: Deliver what you promise
Amazon’s success is frequently attributed to the fact that it was one of the few dot coms that actually took the time to establish an offline shipping system that could deliver the tight shipping dates that it promised its online shoppers. On the other hand why did eBay spend big moola in buying Skype, a seemingly unrelated business, but has done little to innovate on their online experience to make the tasks of the buyer and seller easier. The Gap has always been king at ensuring that it’s store experiences are freakishly consistent, going so far as to provide accurate measurements of the angles at which mannequins arms must be displayed in store windows around the world.

So in short, make sure your customer has clear expectations on what is it that your brand promises and then go ahead and meet (or ideally, beat) those expectations.

Is your brand reliable? Consistent? Ergo Trustworthy.