Garvey gives it his full Lancastrian to emphasise the power of the word as he blasts out “I was born with a truuuuusssssed that didn’t survive the white noise of the lies”, which repeats as the chorus of the track.
Perhaps those words were still bumping around in my mind come January as, when I read American marketer Seth Godin’s first blog post of 2020, the subject of trust struck quite a chord with me.
In his post, Godin talks about how in this era of fake news, trust has been lost, and yet has more power than ever before.
Godin writes: “There are people and organisations that are racing to break the fabric of community we all depend on, either to make a short-term profit or to atomise/vaporise widespread trust to hide from accountability and
to slow change.
“Like all shifts, there will be a counter-shift. But keep your eyes open, because the rules are clearly changing. Remaining trusted and consistent will become ever more valuable as it becomes more scarce.”
It was the US election of 2016 that saw fake news become the news, and the struggle with what is true and can be believed really came to the fore.
On a wave of conspiracy theories and targeted social media campaigns, Trump whipped up a right-wing frenzy across the American heartlands that swept him into the White House.
And, as we have just experienced in our own recent general election, political campaigners of every persuasion continue to create mistrust and confusion via fake news and manipulation, all of which permeate to create a society that becomes less and less believing of what it sees and hears.
This is a problem, or an opportunity, depending on how a company chooses to go about its business.
When launching Holidaysplease as an online travel agency in the earlyish days of the internet, establishing trust with potential customers was key.
We achieved this by delivering the service we said we were going to, then automatically posting genuine customer reviews of their holidays directly onto our website (thankfully, most were good!).
Further down the line, we worked with third-party review site Trustpilot to showcase what our clients say about us.
Funnily enough, as people have become more cynical, having an excellent rating from 96% of the 3,400 customers who have reviewed Holidaysplease on Trustpilot can be a challenge. No one is that good, are they?
Our mission during 2020 will be to keep proving that we are – to keep mining that scarce resource of trust.
Despite the unpopularity of Trump around the world, data specialist Statista reports an increase of 9% in inbound US visitor numbers during his presidency.
It seems people continue to trust a holiday to America will be a great one – and so they should!
