Awareness is cheap and getting cheaper, whereas trust takes years to build and seconds to destroy. At Underscore we are seeing that the businesses that understand the difference are the ones positioning themselves to grow.
For most of the history of modern marketing, awareness was the primary objective. Get your brand in front of enough people, often enough, and the rest would follow. It was a model built for a world in which media was scarce, attention was relatively easy to purchase, and the gap between a brand’s promise and its reality was wide enough to survive without too much scrutiny.
That world is all but gone. Attention is now the most contested commodity on the planet, and the cost of buying it keeps rising while its value keeps falling. More significantly, the relationship between awareness and trust, which marketers spent decades treating as a natural progression, one leading automatically to the other, has broken down almost entirely. Consumers, business buyers, and investors have become significantly better at distinguishing between brands they have heard of and brands they actually believe in.
The businesses building for the next decade have understood this shift. They are not abandoning awareness, you still need to be known to be chosen, but they have stopped treating it as the goal. The goal is trust. And trust, it turns out, demands something entirely different from a brand.
Why awareness alone no longer converts
The mechanics of this shift are not difficult to understand. Two decades of digital media have given consumers an unprecedented ability to look behind the promise. A brand can spend millions building awareness of a set of values it does not actually practise, and a single credible piece of counter-evidence: a viral thread, a leaked internal document or an employee review on a public platform can dismantle years of that investment in hours.
This has changed the nature of brand risk fundamentally. The risk used to be obscurity: not being known, not being considered, not being in the room when the purchase decision was made. The risk now is inauthenticity: being known for something you cannot consistently deliver, or being seen to say one thing while doing another.
The data reflects this change. The Edelman Trust Barometer, one of the most comprehensive annual studies of trust across institutions and brands, has consistently shown that trust is now a primary driver of purchase intent, advocacy, and pricing power, particularly among younger consumer demographics and in B2B markets. Brands in the top quartile for trust consistently outperform their sector peers on revenue growth, customer retention, and employee satisfaction. The commercial case for treating trust as a strategic metric rather than a soft aspiration is no longer marginal. It is overwhelming.
What trust actually requires
The mistake many businesses make when they identify trust as a priority is to treat it as a communications challenge. If the brand is not trusted enough, the instinct is to commission research, refine the messaging, and tell a more compelling story about the values the business holds.
This approach almost always fails. Not because the communications are poor, but because trust is not built by what a brand says about itself. It is built by the accumulated experience of every interaction a customer, employee, or partner has with the business over time. It is built in the gap between promise and delivery, in the way a company behaves when things go wrong, in the consistency between what leadership says publicly and how decisions are actually made internally.
Three things consistently distinguish the brands that build genuine trust from those that merely pursue it.
The first is consistency over time. Trust is not a campaign. It is the residue of repeated experience that confirms a brand is what it says it is. This sounds straightforward, but it requires a discipline that most organisations struggle to maintain: the willingness to let the brand values shape operational decisions, not just marketing ones. A brand that claims to put customers first must make that real in its returns policy, its customer service resourcing, and its product development priorities, not just in its advertising.
The second is transparency under pressure. The brands that build the deepest trust are almost never the ones that have never made a mistake. They are the ones who have handled mistakes well, who have been honest about what went wrong, taken clear accountability, and demonstrated genuine change rather than managed apology. In an environment where everything is visible and everyone is watching, the ability to fail well is a significant brand asset.
The third is accountability with evidence. Increasingly, trust requires proof rather than assertion. Claims about sustainability, diversity, quality, and ethical practice are table stakes in many sectors, so common as to be nearly meaningless without the evidence to support them. The brands winning on trust are the ones that show their working: that publish data, invite scrutiny, and connect their stated values to measurable, verifiable commitments.
The brand implications
None of this makes the role of brand communications less important. It makes it more demanding. If trust is built through experience rather than messaging, then the brand’s job is to align every expression of the organisation: every touchpoint, every channel, every piece of communication, with what the business actually is and actually does. The work of brand strategy is not to craft a better story. It is to identify the most honest, distinctive, and compelling version of the truth and to build every expression of the brand from that foundation.
This is where many businesses find the trust agenda challenging. It requires a degree of internal honesty that is uncomfortable. It means being willing to look at the gap between the brand’s stated values and the reality of how it operates, and to close that gap through operational change rather than narrative management. Brands that try to shortcut this, that commission a new identity and a refined positioning without doing the underlying work, tend to produce communications that feel hollow to the people they most need to reach.
When we worked with Colorminium, a leading UK façade construction business that has been shaping the London skyline for almost fifty years, the brief was not simply to refresh a visual identity. It was to rethink how the business presented itself entirely, in a market where the difference between winning and losing contracts often comes down to which company a client trusts most with one of the most visible and consequential elements of a building project.
The starting point was not design. It was honesty: a rigorous examination of what Colorminium actually delivered and how they do this differently to their counterparts, what their clients consistently valued in the relationship, and what will make them genuinely different in future in a fiercely contested London market. From that foundation, we defined a clear set of brand pillars, a new brand story, positioning Colorminium as “London’s façade strategists” and a central promise of “finish happier” that reflected their distinctive approach to service delivery rather than just their technical capability.
The work was grounded in something the research made clear: 77% of construction professionals agree that a strong façade partner relationship is critical to project success. That is a trust statement, not a product statement. It meant the brand needed to communicate reliability, expertise, and genuine partnership as its primary values and then deliver on those values at every point in the client experience. The result was a brand that went on to win the RIBA London Awards, recognising outstanding architecture across London. As CEO, Roscoe Price noted, the work helped Colorminium represent its core business strengths through a strategy that matched its goals for the future. The brand credibility came first. The recognition followed.
The metrics that actually matter
If trust is the goal, then the metrics used to track brand performance need to change. Reach, impressions, and share of voice are not irrelevant, but they are incomplete. They measure how loud a brand is, not how credible it is. And in a market where noise is infinite and attention is scarce, credibility is the constraint that matters.
The brands we see building durable competitive advantage are tracking different things. Net Promoter Score as a signal of genuine advocacy rather than a satisfied transaction. Customer retention rates are evidence that the brand delivers on its promise consistently enough for people to return. Employee engagement is a leading indicator of whether the internal brand: the culture, the values in practice and the experience of working inside the business, is aligned with the external one. Increasingly, brand equity measures that capture the price premium, the share of preference, and the resilience to competitive pressure that genuine trust produces over time.
These metrics are harder to build than an impressions report. They require more time and a more honest interpretation but are the ones that correlate with true business performance over the next decade.
Building for the decade ahead
Awareness will always matter. But the question that defines brand strategy for the next decade is not ‘how do we reach more people?’ It is ‘how do we become the kind of brand that people genuinely believe in and keep believing in, over time, through everything the market throws at them and at us?’
That question does not have a communications answer. It has a strategic one. It requires businesses to look honestly at what they stand for, to build their brand from the truth of what they are rather than the aspiration of what they would like to be, and to hold themselves accountable to that standard in every decision they make.
The brands that do this consistently are the ones that will still be growing in ten years.
Not because they were the loudest but because they were the most trusted.
If you’re thinking about how your brand builds trust as well as awareness, we’d welcome the conversation.
Get in touch at hello@underscore.co.uk or uncover our world at underscore.co.uk.