Shortcut for Choice: If We Trust, We Buy

Consumers and citizens are demonstrating a growing need for trust, especially during the current moment of institutional uncertainty. This demand arises both as a result of the growing complexity of markets, and because of the increasingly dynamic pressure of external changes which frequently occur in the form of real shocks.In the mind of customers, trust is a cognitive synthesis, a kind of alternate route (a cognitive shortcut) used at an individual level to simply the increasingly complex decision making processes connected to the choice of goods and services. Trust is an expression of the company's ability to fulfill commitments made to demand, and this simplifies the customer's cognitive processes. In other words, trust means believing that the other party will keep their promises, that opportunistic behavior will not occur.
Trust is certainly an asset for businesses. If consumers trust a certain brand, changing to other products is more difficult, despite promises from other producers. If consumers trust a certain logo, and are certain that the service behind it is consistent, assortment is in line with their needs and promotions or prices are truly affordable, they are unlikely to turn to other distributors. If a country inspires confidence at an international level, it will certainly not be penalized by large spreads such as the ones to which we have been subjected recently. To recover from the period of economic crisis (and the crisis of confidence) that we are experiencing today, even stronger than before, it is therefore not enough to simply fulfill customers' needs, but trust must be earned over time. In short, it is about a tendency that we can define as "trust oriented marketing," or marketing aimed at earning a customer's trust in the long term.But in order to guarantee customer trust, it is important to be perceived as the best providers on the market, to distance competitors in the perception of demand and not be the object of comparison.
The effectiveness of trust has never been brought into question, not even during periods of uncertainty. In and of itself, this creates absolute value and is enough to drive operators to invest: using a play on words, trust can be trusted in the long-term. Or rather, trust is specifically a tool that is used to manage uncertainty and strengthen relations. This is true not only in relations between brands and consumers, but also in business channels with dealers and distributors, horizontal relations between partners, institutional relations and so on.
Moreover, the most interesting aspect in the effect of trust is its tangibility, since it is now the object of systematic measurement. An example is the research conducted by the Institute of Economic Studies and Analysis, which for some time has utilized indices to measure the trust of consumers both in general economic terms and in specific aspects and changes over time, also focusing on location. Trust in businesses and brands can also be measured. It is also interesting to measure the impact of trust on company performance: companies which have believed in and invested in the issue of trust boast experiences of creating a competitive advantage that is difficult to copy.
The challenge for the future, however, will be on the new frontier of trust management, which inverts several traditional management paradigms. The increasing number of customer advocacy initiatives, those situations in which companies place themselves with the customer and become their defender in a certain sense, are examples of how the world of market relations is quickly changing. These situations also exemplify how traditional management tools are often inadequate for handling a future of company-customer relations in which the latter also relates with the company in the role of inventor, provider and co-creator.