Chapter 4
It Belonged to a Professor
I thought I had found my territory.
I had been circling the same idea for years without a good name for it, and one afternoon I had it. Trust-Based Marketing. It said the thing. It was clean, it was mine, and I was already thinking about where it would live.
Then I looked it up.
Trust-Based Marketing is Glen Urban's. He is at MIT Sloan, he has a body of work behind it going back years, and it is a genuinely good body of work. I had not stumbled onto an unclaimed idea. I had rediscovered somebody else's, several decades late, and briefly congratulated myself for it.
There is a version of me that would have gone ahead anyway. The term was not trademarked in a way that stopped me, plenty of people use it loosely, and if I had spent three years pushing hard enough I could probably have muddied it up enough to get a share of it.
I want to be honest about why I did not do that, because I would like to claim it was principle and it was not, at least not entirely. Partly it was that the fight looked long and stupid. Partly it was that I could not work out how I would ever explain it if somebody asked me directly where the idea came from.
But the useful part came after. Being forced off the obvious name made me get precise about what I actually believed, and it turned out I did not believe quite the same thing he did.
What I believe is about sequence.
Everybody wants reach. Reach is measurable, it feels like progress, and you can buy it this afternoon. So the standard move is to build the reach and then try to earn trust from the people it drags in. Run the ads, then handle the objections. Publish everywhere, then hope some of it lands.
I think that is backwards, and I think it is more backwards every year. Build the conditions where trust can form first, and then amplify. Reach applied to a business people cannot yet make sense of just buys you more of the wrong first impression, faster.
Trust first. Then scale.
I did not invent that phrase and I am not going to pretend I did. Other people have used it. What I am trying to do is attach it to a specific claim about order of operations, which is a smaller and more defensible thing to want than owning a set of words.
What the sequence looks like in practice
The argument sounds abstract until you put it against a decision somebody is actually making this week.
A business has some money and two options. Spend it getting in front of more people, or spend it on being easier to believe: fixing what the listings say, getting the reviews moving, making the site answer the questions people actually ask, making the story the same everywhere.
The first option is measurable this month. The second is not, and that asymmetry decides most of these arguments before anybody debates the merits.
What I have watched happen, more than once, is that the money goes to reach, the reach works exactly as promised, and the additional people arrive at a business they cannot make sense of. The campaign reports beautifully. Almost nothing converts. And the conclusion drawn is that the channel does not work for us, which is the wrong conclusion, and it usually gets acted on by trying a different channel.
Reach applied to weak trust does not produce customers. It produces a larger sample of people who did not choose you, and it does it faster.
That is the entire argument for sequence. Not that reach is bad. Reach is fine, and eventually necessary. It just has to arrive second.