Trust Creates
Momentum

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 would like to claim it was principle. 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. 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.

Chapter 5

The Kiosk

I was walking through a mall with Trent Lewis, both of us large men who do not blend into a crowd, and a kid at a kiosk stepped out in front of us.

He did not open with the product. He opened with me. Something to the effect of you smile all the time, I can tell, I bet everybody loves you. Which is a shameless line and also happens to be true, so I stopped.

Then he named the flaw, and he named it as a consequence of the good thing. You have very wrinkly eyes, because people love you a lot.

Note that I have still not heard what he is selling.

He asked permission before he touched my face, which mattered more than it sounds like it should. Then he put something under one eye and set a timer, and about sixty seconds later he showed me a mirror. It had worked. Not marketing worked. Visibly, obviously worked, in a way I could see with my own eyes on my own face in a mall.

Then he told me the price. Four hundred dollars.

I said no.

So he refused to do the other eye.

He was completely pleasant about it. He was not pushy at any point, before the no or after it, and he stayed kind the whole way through, which is the detail I always want people to notice. He just would not finish the job.

I walked around for two weeks with one smooth eye and one wrinkled one.

I have thought about that kid more than I have thought about most campaigns I have worked on. He never asked me to believe anything. He proved it on my face in sixty seconds, and then he let the unfinished half of the demonstration walk out of the store and work the mall for a fortnight on his behalf. Every person I saw for two weeks was looking at his product.

I did not buy the bottle. He still won that exchange, and I have never minded.

Chapter 6

Five Backpacks

The best message I ever gave used five backpacks and one very strong middle school student.

I picked him because he was strong. That was the whole casting decision. If I had put those bags on a small kid the room would have watched a small kid struggle, which is a different and worse thing to watch, and everybody would have spent the next twenty minutes feeling sorry for him instead of understanding what I was showing them.

The bags were heavy on their own. Not stage-heavy. Actually heavy, before anything was added to them.

I put them on him one at a time and named what each one was as it went on.

There are the consequences of things you did yourself, which is the one everybody expects and the only one anybody thinks they deserve. There is the brick somebody else made and put in your bag, which you are carrying and did not pack. There are the words: what was said to you, and what you said, and the guilt and the shame that come with both. There is what your body is doing to you, the physical and the mental, the parts that are not a choice. And there is the sickness and the pain that some people wake up with every day and will wake up with tomorrow.

Five bags. He took all five.

By the end he could hardly stand. He was miserable. He was a strong kid in front of a room of his friends and he was bent over, shifting his feet, trying to find a way to hold it, and there was nothing performative about any of it.

The room had gone completely quiet, which if you have ever stood in front of a room of middle schoolers you will know does not happen.

Then I asked him a question.

I asked him whether he would like to jump in the swimming pool like that.

Every kid in that room had been in that pool that afternoon. It was the best part of camp, it was right outside, and they all knew exactly what he would look like if he tried it.

That was the moment. Not the bags going on. The pool.

Because until then I was showing them weight, and everybody already knows that life is heavy. What the pool did was show them that the weight is not the worst of it. The worst of it is standing next to the thing everybody else is enjoying, understanding perfectly well that it is right there, and knowing that you cannot get in.

Then I talked to them about what depression can feel like.

Not the clinical version, and not the version where somebody is sad and needs cheering up. The version where you are still you, still strong, still standing in the same place as everybody else, and the thing they are all doing without thinking about it is not available to you. I am not a clinician and that was not a diagnosis. It was one picture of one part of it, offered to a room of twelve year olds who had no picture at all.

Those kids understood it. I watched them understand it. Some of them were carrying bags right then and had never had anybody put words on it.

I have given hundreds of talks. That one is near the top and I have never been able to reproduce it, because it does not work as a technique. You cannot decide to have a moment like that. You can only build the thing and then be paying enough attention to notice when the door opens.

I have thought about why it worked, and I think it is this. I did not explain the idea and then illustrate it. I loaded the idea onto a person in front of the room until everybody could see the weight, and only then said the thing I came to say.

That is also the only thing I know about proving anything. You can tell somebody what your product does. Or you can put it on them for sixty seconds and let them find out.

I should say where this instinct came from, because it is not a marketing instinct and I did not learn it in this industry.

I was a pastor. I have given hundreds of talks and preached for years.

I am proud of those years. I do not lead with them in business settings, because the moment they arrive in a business conversation they become the most interesting thing in the room, and everything after gets read through them.

What it gave me is not what people assume. It is not comfort in front of an audience, although there is that. It is a long and unglamorous apprenticeship in a set of things marketing keeps trying to buy and cannot.

Holding a room you have not earned yet. Being understood by somebody who did not arrive wanting to understand you. Saying the same true thing enough times, in enough different ways, that it finally lands, without getting bored of it or resentful that it took so long.

And the one that matters most here: attention is not authority.

You can have a room's complete attention and no permission whatsoever to change anything about how those people live. Getting attention is a skill you can learn in a month. Being trusted enough that the attention is worth something takes years and cannot be shortcut, and every marketer who has bought a viral moment and watched nothing happen afterward has hit the same wall.

I did not know I was learning anything transferable. I thought I was doing a job that had nothing to do with the one I have now.

Chapter 7

Why Almost Nobody Funds It

Trust compounds before revenue does, and the gap between the two is where most of the good intentions die.

The work that builds trust rarely pays back this quarter. Cleaning up positioning, fixing what the listings say, getting a real review system running, making the brand look the same in every place a person might check, answering faster. Do all of that in January and the revenue line in February will look exactly like it would have anyway.

So it gets deferred, and it gets deferred by sensible people for sensible reasons, in favor of something with a measurable return in thirty days.

The gap is not evidence that nothing is working. It is what compound growth looks like from the inside at the beginning, which is to say it looks like nothing at all.

The companies that invest here before they feel the pressure end up compounding from a surplus. The ones that wait until it hurts are rebuilding from a deficit, and rebuilding trust that has already eroded takes years, while maintaining it takes discipline. That is a trade I would take every time, and I have watched a lot of people not take it.

What I actually changed

Here is what changed in how I work.

I stopped treating reviews as a marketing task and started treating them as infrastructure, in the same category as the phone working. A business with real, recent, consistent reviews is legible to people and machines at the same time, and I have not found another signal that does both jobs as well.

I stopped assuming that being good at the work would be visible from outside. It is not. Quality is invisible until somebody has already bought, which means everything before the sale is running on evidence of quality rather than quality itself, and those are different things to invest in.

And I stopped launching things quietly. Not because announcing is important in itself, but because I have now watched, in my own company and in somebody else's, how much of change management is people needing to see that a decision has actually been made. A commitment nobody witnessed is not yet a commitment.

The one I am still bad at is patience. The trust work does not pay back this quarter, and I have caught myself several times reaching for something faster in a month where the numbers were flat. I do not have a clean solution to that. I just know what it is now, which helps slightly.

Chapter 8

The Smallest Version of This

If all of that sounds like a large program of work, here is the smallest true version of it, and it is the one I use when somebody asks me where to start.

Pick the single place where a stranger is most likely to check whether you are real, and make that place tell the truth clearly. For most local businesses that is the listing and the reviews. For most professional firms it is one page that explains what you do without requiring the reader to already know. For most companies selling something considered, it is whatever a prospect reads in the twenty minutes after somebody recommends you.

Then do the next one.

I have watched large trust programs stall because they were large, and I have watched a single honest page change how a business gets talked about. The compounding does not care whether you started with a strategy document. It only cares that the signals started agreeing with each other, and that you kept it up long enough for anybody to notice.

The reason to start small is not modesty. It is that a small thing gets finished, and an unfinished trust program sends worse signals than not having started one.