You may do all the right things in planning your marketing strategy - segment the market, develop a position, establish a balanced marketing mix - with the reasonable expectation that you'll succeed.

But have you built trust into your marketing plan?

Trust is one of the fundamental motivators for customers. Very often it is what keeps customers with you in the face of adversity. It sometimes convinces customers to try one of your newer, riskier products. And trust can mean the difference between a consumer choosing your product over a competitor's - even if that competing product is better.

In this article we define trust in a marketing context. Next, we briefly discuss the benefits of building trust with your customers. Finally, we cover ways in which you can build the kind of trust that may help propel your business.

WHAT EXACTLY IS TRUST?

Trust has myriad definitions. In a marketing context, we can think of trust as a firm belief or confidence in the honesty, integrity, and reliability of a product, service, brand, or person. In business, trust can take two forms, explicit trust and implicit trust.

Explicit Trust: Sometimes trust takes a very explicit form. For instance, most of us trust that the pilot of any reputable airline has been screened, tested and qualified to fly the plane. Or, we explicitly trust that our stockbroker will find the best price for our market order.

In these and many other cases of explicit trust, the customer is acutely aware that if the honesty, integrity or reliability of the agent is compromised, then the product or service purchased will fall apart.

Implicit Trust: Trust also takes an implicit form. For instance, every time we pick up a Diet Coke, we implicitly trust that it will taste as we expect. Or, when we log on to Yahoo, the web's biggest search engine, we implicitly trust that the site will load fast and function properly.

In these cases, trust is an unconscious point of reference from which the customer judges the quality of the service. In other words, he or she doesn't consciously question the reliability of the product unless that product fails to meet the customer's standards.

THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING TRUST

Building trust with your customers has at least three primary benefits:

Benefit 1: Customers that trust a brand are much more willing to try and adopt brand extensions.

Brand extensions allow a marketer to take a well-known brand with well-known quality perceptions and associations and put it on a brand in a new category. Consumers who trust a parent brand are more willing to try and adopt the brand extension than an unfamiliar brand in the same category. In this way, trust enables the brand extensions that make new product introductions less expensive.

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