Brand name awareness still matters. Nobody buys what they’ve never heard of. But awareness is no longer the scarce thing in marketing. Attention can be bought quickly, distributed widely, and inflated cheaply. Belief can’t. 

That distinction matters more now because the surrounding information environment has become harder to trust: Ofcom found that four in ten UK adults had encountered misinformation or deepfake content in the previous four weeks, while the Reuters Institute found that 58% of people across markets worry about what is real and fake online when it comes to news. Trust officially now sits alongside price and quality as a purchase consideration.

That’s the deeper shift behind modern marketing trust. Reach on social media is easier than ever to manufacture, but consumer trust is slower, messier, and much more commercially meaningful. PwC found that 46% of consumers spend more with companies they trust and 28% pay a premium, while Google’s consumer-confidence research found that highly confident buyers are six times more likely to say they would definitely buy again and 18 times more likely to recommend the brand to friends or family. 

The commercial prize is no longer just being seen. It’s being believed, chosen, and chosen time and time again

Why Consumer Trust Is Becoming Harder to Earn

Phoebe Stephenson

Consumers are becoming more sceptical of marketing messages because scepticism is now more of a survival skill than a specialist habit. Ofcom found that 77% of UK adults think it is important to check different news sources, and only 30% feel confident judging whether an image, audio clip or video has been generated by AI. 

Separate Ofcom research on deepfakes found that 43% of people aged 16 and over had seen at least one deepfake online in the previous six months, but fewer than one in ten felt confident identifying one. The FTC’s 2024 final rule against fake and false reviews shows the same pressure at the commercial end of the internet: even product feedback, one of the core trust signals in digital buying, is now contested enough to require stronger enforcement, including against AI-generated fake reviews.

scepticism is now more of a survival skill than a specialist habit

That trust problem is amplified by where people now spend time. Ofcom says 52% of UK adults use social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram to access news, but the same regulator found that online sources, and social media in particular, are rated much less favourably than television and radio for accuracy, trust and impartiality. 

Reuters adds a global dimension: more than half of respondents worry about real versus fake news online, and those concerns rise in environments where social media plays a bigger role in information discovery. When the media habit itself feels unstable, every brand communication enters the room already paying a credibility tax.

As Andy Howell, Founder at The Clearing, puts it:

“We’re in a trust recession. Here’s why we should all be investing in real photography.

I don’t know about you, but my “BS meter” is at an all-time high.

Lately, when I’m scrolling through a feed, I find myself squinting. I’m looking at the hands, the hair, the weirdly perfect smile. I’m asking a question I never used to have to ask: Is this real?

We’ve officially entered a Trust Recession. And for brands, the stakes have never been higher.

Look, we all love a bit of fiction. We go to the cinema specifically to be fooled. We want to believe a man can fly or that dinosaurs are back. We’re there to suspend our reality for two hours.

But that’s not what we want from brands.

When you’re buying a product or joining a community, you aren’t looking for escapism. You’re looking for a connection. You’re looking for something or someone to trust. And right now, using AI-generated people to sell things to real people feels… well, it feels a bit like a betrayal.

I’ve always felt that if illustration is about the soul – the way we imagine the world – then photography should be about truth.

A photograph is a receipt. It’s proof that a moment actually happened. It’s the sweat on a runner’s forehead, the messy crumbs on a kitchen table, the way light hits a face in the late afternoon. It’s imperfect. And because it’s imperfect, we believe it. AI is a calculation. Photography is an observation.

I get the temptation. AI is fast. It’s cheap. It doesn't need casting, a stylist or a weather contingency. But choosing a prompt over a person is a high-interest loan against your brand’s future. You save a few thousand today, but you lose the one thing you can’t buy back: your shortcut to the customer’s heart.

The brands that are going to win in the next five years aren’t the ones with the “perfect” imagery. They’re the ones brave enough to be raw. They’re the ones who still send a human being with a camera out into the world to capture something honest.

In a world of synthetic perfection, the most radical thing a brand can do is stay human. Don’t trade your credibility for a faster render. People are exhausted by the fake. They are craving the truth. Give it to them.”

The research supports Howell’s instinct. A 2026 study in Computers in Human Behavior found that product-related fake news on social media increases consumer cynicism and negative word-of-mouth, while trust in social media advertising and influencer advertising can mitigate those effects. In other words, consumer trust is not a soft afterthought layered on top of performance marketing, but one of the variables determining whether performance happens at all.

The Problem with Measuring Success Through Reach on Social Media

Gareth David

The problem with reach on social media is not that it is useless. It is that it is seductively incomplete. Reach tells you who had the opportunity to see the work. It does not tell you whether they believed it, remembered it, acted on it, or felt warmer toward the brand afterwards. 

Nielsen’s 2025 marketing analysis makes the wider point clearly: marketers continue to prioritise digital channels because they appear more measurable and more directly attributable, but ease of measurement does not necessarily mean greater effectiveness or better return on investment. A metric can be tidy and still be strategically misleading. 

social media remains huge, but the audience relationship is more passive

That matters even more in an environment where social media use is changing in quality, not just quantity. Ofcom says nine in ten adult internet users in the UK still use at least one social platform, yet the share who actively post, share or comment fell from 61% in 2024 to 49% in 2026. In the same research, the proportion saying the benefits of being online outweigh the risks dropped from 72% to 59%. Put simply, social media remains huge, but the audience relationship is more passive, more selective and more wary than many marketers’ dashboards imply.

Simon Manchipp, Founder at SomeOne, captures the issue neatly:

“You can buy a million eyeballs, but if none of them believe a word you say, you’ve wasted your budget. In a world of infinite deepfakes and automated spam, trust isn't some soft of soft marketing metric. It is quite possibly the most valuable metric of all. Annoyingly for the start up brand, it cannot be installed, it has to be earned, proven and topped up daily.”

That is why high social media reach cannot compensate for low customer trust for very long. Nielsen’s trust-in-advertising analysis argues that lack of trust means lack of action and can turn into active dislike if brands repeatedly push messages at unreceptive audiences. 

Google’s research on confidence in the “messy middle” reaches a similar conclusion from another angle: when consumers feel they found relevant information, purchase confidence rises sharply, and those confident customers become markedly more likely to buy again and recommend the brand. Reach can create exposure. Trust turns exposure into movement.

Why Brands Trust Long-Term Relationships More Than Short-Term Visibility

Egarcigu (Eduard Garcia)

If the classic model of marketing was a funnel, the emerging one looks much more like a loop. Edelman’s 2023 brand-trust work argues that purchase is often the starting point, not the end point, and that ongoing engagement builds attraction after the first transaction. Its 2025 research goes further, reporting that 80% of people trust the brands they use and that trust now stands alongside price and quality as a purchase consideration. That is a profound reordering of value. It means the best brands no longer treat trust as a halo effect around visibility; they treat it as one of the core competitive dimensions of the offer itself. 

Shagorika Heryani, Founder at Athina, puts the trade-off in sharper commercial language:

“Marketing got addicted to amplification. Chase the algorithm, maximise the reach, ride the virality. But algorithms evolve in a black box and none of that actually builds anything real with the consumer. Trust is different. It builds on behaviour not messaging, it compounds, and it is genuinely hard to replicate. Reach is a function of budgets and playbooks. If that is all you are optimising for, you are essentially paying to acquire and retain the same consumer over and over again. That is not growth. That is a treadmill.”

The phrase that matters there is “it compounds”. Trust compounds because each good interaction lowers the friction on the next one. It increases the odds of repeat purchase, referral, forgiveness, data sharing, and voluntary attention. It also recruits more credible messengers. 

Nielsen says recommendations from people consumers know are still the most trusted channel by a considerable margin, while Edelman’s trust-building principles show that expert voices and “people like me” remain the most trusted spokespeople for brands and issues alike. Long-term relationships matter because they turn customers, employees and communities into part of the media system around the brand. 

This is also why brand name awareness, on its own, is becoming less decisive than many marketers would like. Google’s latest work on consumer decision-making found that about a third of consumers globally were spending more time making decisions and considering more brands, stores and retailers. In a market with more options, more information, more review content and more synthetic noise, simply being known does not guarantee being chosen. Visibility gets you into the room. Credibility keeps you there.

How Building Customer Trust Creates Lasting Business Value

Simona De Leo

Building customer trust is often described like a communications brief, but it is much closer to an operating model. That is why Lee Nelson, VP of Global Marketing at DHL, makes such an important distinction between campaign language and lived experience:

“We’re entering an era where reach has never been easier to buy or generate. With LLMs and AI tools, content can be produced at scale, personalised endlessly, and distributed instantly. But conversely, the more content we create, the less people trust what they see. That’s why trust is becoming more valuable than reach—not less. For those of us in marketing, this shifts the job quite fundamentally. It’s no longer about amplifying messages—it’s about building emotional connections at scale. And that’s much harder. 

At DHL eCommerce, we see this every day. We don’t just deliver parcels—we’re part of people’s lives in small but meaningful moments. A package arriving on time isn’t just efficiency; it’s trust kept. Communication that’s clear and human isn’t just functional; it’s reassurance. These moments build emotional equity over time, far more than any campaign ever could. LLMs will undoubtedly change how we create and communicate. But they also raise the bar. They force brands to be clearer about who they are, what they stand for, and how they show up—consistently—across every interaction. 

So yes, reach still matters. But reach without trust is just noise. And in a world full of perfectly optimised, AI-generated content, the brands that win will be the ones that feel unmistakably human.”

That phrase, “trust kept”, is probably more useful than most marketing frameworks. Trust grows when the brand promise survives contact with reality. PwC’s 2025 customer experience research found that 53% of consumers think sharing personal information is worth it if it makes brand interactions smoother, but 93% say a brand will lose their trust if it mishandles that data. 

Edelman’s 2025 findings tell a parallel story: trust is not earned with abstract purpose statements but through relevance, responsiveness and visible action. Building customer trust, then, is not only about saying the right thing. It is about making the brand easier to believe in transaction by transaction.

The business effects are tangible. PwC found that 61% of consumers have recommended a company they trust to friends or family, 46% have purchased more from such a company, and 28% have paid a premium. Four in ten said they had stopped buying from a company because of a lack of trust. 

Google’s research on confident consumers adds another layer: the brands that reduce uncertainty and help people feel informed create customers who are much more likely to buy again and advocate. That combination matters because it improves efficiency and resilience at the same time. A trusted brand does not have to re-sell itself from zero on every interaction.

A trusted brand does not have to re-sell itself from zero on every interaction

Trust also changes what happens when something goes wrong. Edelman’s 2024 brand research found that consumers who fully trust a brand are more likely to purchase it, stay loyal to it, advocate for it, and protect it when it makes a mistake. 

That last point is easy to underestimate. Errors are inevitable in any business. The real strategic question is whether the brand has built enough trust equity for people to interpret the error as an exception rather than a revelation of bad character. Famous brands do not always survive mistakes. Trusted brands recover from them more often.

Brian Farkas, Creative Director at B&T Creative, makes the same case from both service and product angles:

“Trust has always been important. It’s at the foundation of every human relationship – and every brand relationship, for that matter. But trust is taking center stage as we’re living through a moment when it can be difficult to discern what’s real, and there are more reasons than ever NOT to trust what you see. When everything seems artificial, trust is the ultimate currency.

Two concrete examples from my own career:

1. My partner and I freelance with top creative agencies and brands, and when we do, it’s nearly always a referral from someone who has worked with us, or someone who knows someone who worked with us. As a freelance team, you’re coming in to solve a specific problem, quickly – maybe it’s a high-stakes pitch, or a stressful re-brief, or they’ve already gone through several rounds and the client hasn’t liked anything yet – whatever the situation, they’re not calling because everything is going smoothly. They can’t afford to gamble with an unknown. They need to know you can be counted on to deliver, and can help them solve their problem. Trust is why we’ve been fortunate enough to have the great freelance career we have.

2. I believe it’s never been more important for brands to lead with transparency and cultivate trust. So much so that we started a brand with trust and transparency at the center: Nose of Justice. Our product is single ingredient dog treats, but the brand is about much more than that – we’re in business to do right by dogs, and bring realness, truth, and transparency to the pet food industry. Advocacy is built into the brand DNA. We’ve launched initiatives from sending man meat to the FDA to protest unexpected meat in dog food, to publishing an instructional guide for DNA-testing Big Dog Food treats, to exposing the underreported issue of unlicensed pet food sales in our state. The brand was built in response to a lack of trustworthiness in the pet food industry.”

Farkas’s example points to two of the most reliable routes to lasting value: referral and transparency. Referral matters because trust travels best through people, and transparency matters because proof reduces perceived risk. The implication is simple: the brands that invest in building customer trust are not just improving sentiment. They are building a more efficient route to future demand.

Why Marketing Trust Compounds While Reach Declines

Andre Elliott

Reach declines because it is rented. It belongs to platforms, algorithms, trends, paid budgets and timing. Trust compounds because it accumulates inside memory, habit, recommendation and reputation. One strong campaign can create a spike. Trust creates a base. That distinction becomes even more important as the discovery journey becomes more filtered, more summarised and less linear. 

Reuters Institute’s 2025 research on AI-generated search answers found that only about a third of users who see those answers always or often click through to source links. Trust in those answers is only moderate, and in high-stakes areas many users verify against traditional sources. In other words, users may increasingly arrive with less patience, fewer clicks and a deeper need for confidence. 

Paul Aitkenhead, Head of Brand PR at Gamma, connects that behavioural shift directly to brand strategy:

“AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to creating content, which means the internet is now filling up with material at a scale we have never seen before. The problem is that volume does not equal value. In fact, I think the rise of AI-generated content is making trust one of the most commercially important assets a brand can build.

Buyers are becoming far more sceptical about what they read online. They are validating information across multiple sources, looking for consistency, credibility and proof that the people behind the content genuinely understand their subject matter. They are paying attention to who is being quoted, which brands appear repeatedly in respected publications, which experts are being invited onto podcasts and which companies are being recommended by peers.

What is interesting is that AI systems are increasingly rewarding those same signals. Large language models look for authoritative, trusted and widely referenced sources when generating responses. That means the brands investing in thought leadership, expert commentary, customer proof points and meaningful media presence are far more likely to appear in AI-generated answers.

In B2B especially, most purchasing decisions still come down to confidence. Buyers want reassurance that a company can genuinely deliver. In that environment, trust becomes more valuable than simple reach or impression numbers. The brands that win will not necessarily be the loudest. They will be the ones that feel the most credible.”

The data points in that quote line up with what the platforms themselves are signalling. Google says its ranking systems are designed to prioritise content that is helpful, reliable and created for people, and that signals connected to experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness help determine what is surfaced. 

Edelman’s 2025 brand-trust work adds an AI-era marketing layer: among the people using generative AI platforms, 91% say they use them for shopping in some way, including researching brands, comparing products and summarising reviews. If discovery is being mediated by systems that compress the web into answers, then marketing trust stops being only a persuasion issue. It becomes a visibility issue too.

Accenture pushes the point further, warning that brands may lose awareness and search traffic if AI agents bypass traditional media and established search habits. Its advice is telling: brands need to differentiate through direct consumer engagement, distinctive experience and loyalty-building value, otherwise they risk competing on price alone. 

The future is not post-reach. It is post-reach-as-a-sufficient-metric

This is where old assumptions about brand name awareness start to wobble. If an AI assistant narrows the choice set before the consumer even reaches the category page, then the real moat is not just how often the brand appears. It is whether the brand has built enough reputation, clarity and proof to be selected in the first place.

That’s why marketing trust compounds while reach declines. Reach can still trigger discovery. But trust improves every layer underneath discovery: the odds of being selected, the odds of being believed, the odds of being recommended, the odds of surviving scrutiny, and the odds of showing up again through earned channels.

Even on social media, original, human-centric content and more personalised one-to-one engagement are what help brands break through the saturation. The future is not post-reach. It is post-reach-as-a-sufficient-metric.

What Brands Should Measure Instead of Reach

Michelle Bettinson

If reach is no longer enough, what should marketers measure instead? 

The first answer is repeat behaviour

A trust-building strategy should show up in re-purchase rates, retention, renewal, churn reduction and share of category over time. 

Google’s confidence research and PwC’s trust survey both suggest the same pattern: when people feel confident in or trusting of a company, they do more business with it and are more likely to come back. If the numbers stop at impressions, the scorecard is probably too shallow. 

The second answer is recommendation

Referral rates, review quality, review credibility, direct traffic, branded search growth and earned mentions from customers, employees and experts all matter because trusted brands recruit other people to help carry the message. 

Nielsen continues to show that recommendations from known people are the most trusted form of advertising, while Edelman’s trust-building research shows that experts and “people like myself” are the most trusted spokespeople, and that personal experience is the top source for learning about product performance. In a skeptical market, recommendation is not a fluffy by-product. It is evidence that the trust has escaped the brand’s own channels and entered culture.

The third answer is confidence and consent

Brands should watch how willingly people opt into first-party relationships, share data, use customer care channels, accept recommendations and stick through service recovery moments. PwC’s customer-experience research makes the stakes obvious: consumers will share data when the value exchange is clear, but trust collapses quickly when that bargain is mishandled. 

That means operational metrics such as resolution speed, transparency around errors, delivery reliability and clarity of communication are not just service metrics. They are trust metrics.

The fourth answer is credible discoverability

In an AI-shaped search environment, brands should care about whether their information is original, useful, cited, discussed and linked to expert or peer validation. 

Google’s people-first guidance, Reuters’ AI-answer research, Edelman’s AI-shopping findings and Accenture’s warning about agentic discovery all point in the same direction: visibility is increasingly downstream of credibility. The brands that win will not only be the ones with the biggest media budgets. They will be the ones with the strongest proof systems around them.

Reach as an Amplifier

Matthew Broughton

Reach still matters, of course. Obscurity is not a strategy. But reach is now best understood as an amplifier, not an asset in its own right. Trust is the asset. Trust turns attention into preference, preference into purchase, purchase into loyalty, loyalty into advocacy, and advocacy into future demand. 

In a media environment crowded by misinformation, deepfakes, automation and AI summaries, that sequence is becoming the central commercial logic of marketing. The brands that win will not simply be the ones that shout loudest. They will be the ones that make belief feel easiest.

Header image by Maggie Stephenson