Design for Trust: Our Opportunity, Our Responsibility

Margot Bloomstein opened UX Camp Winter 2021 with the keynote “Design for Trust: Our Opportunity, Our Responsibility.” Enjoy!

Margot Bloomstein

​​Brand & Content Strategy Consultant, Appropriate, Inc.

Margot Bloomstein is a speaker, strategic adviser, and the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy. For two decades, she’s helped organizations improve communication through brand-driven content strategy. Her clients include Al Jazeera America, the American Montessori Society, the American Veterinary Medical Association, Harvard University, Lovehoney, Pitney Bowes, and Sallie Mae. She is the author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap and Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project and the creator of BrandSort™. Margot teaches in the content strategy graduate program at FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria, and lectures around the world about brand-driven content strategy and designing for trust.

​​​The following transcript very likely contains typographical errors. Please forgive any mistakes!

So now you’re in my house, because this is… That what this is all about, we’re coming into each other’s homes right now and saying, Hi, Meet me, meet my world, let me do you. And it’s kind of an interesting time, and I think when we consider that, there is an element of trust, because here’s the thing, you just invited me into your house, basically… This is creepy, right? I don’t trust you, and you shouldn’t take it personally, because you probably don’t trust me either, you don’t know me.

And that’s the thing, I don’t believe most of what I hear and neither do you. And that’s true for most people. We live in an age of needing to see proof before we trust most things.

A proof comes in different forms, authority comes in different forms. And I think there’s a real opportunity for us as designers and content strategists and researchers and professional communicators to look at what it means to trust, to look at what it means when we don’t have trust. And the thing is, if you work in retail or government or software or some other sector, you’ve probably noticed how a lot of marketing has been falling flat, certainly over the past year as we’ve seen sales cycles slow down for lots of reasons related to the pandemic, but also beyond that, a lot of messaging isn’t motivating action anymore, people just don’t trust big brands and sources of expertise the way they used to.

But I don’t think we can blame them either, because every day, and we’ve certainly seen this over the past year, our audiences are enduring failures of leadership, maybe it’s inconsistent messaging, where they just don’t know how to understand brands that they thought they knew or new sources that they thought they knew, maybe they’ve been seeing deceptive practices and outright misinformation and lies coming from the halls of government. I think as we’ve been all losing the brands that we thought we once knew and sort of losing the knowledge that we thought We once could kind of just take on unbelief.

Something has been happening where people just don’t trust these sources that they used to… And when people don’t trust or decide not to believe anything or say, everybody lies to you, that’s how they get you, that’s when they grow cynical, and in an age of fake news and hidden agendas, cynicism can see him safe. We put up this kind of wall, this sort of cooler than now Wall, and people turn away from experts, maybe we take refuge in our filter bubbles until we become aware of them and then start to pop them and eventually turn inward to say, Well, let me just go with my gut instincts.

If I can’t trust anything out there, if I don’t know what is right, let me go with what feels right, and that can be a scary place because that’s when people start to distrust even their own gut instincts, and that’s kind of the larger impact of gas lighting even if it’s in a far distant industry, even if it’s just in the political arena, when people have been exposed to a lot of gas lighting that says, Don’t trust the evidence of your own senses, just trust what you hear from me. Well.

They start to lose trust in their own gut instance, they lose confidence in their ability to make good decisions, or their ability to do good research and conduct it with high quality information sources and then make those good decisions, and that’s when they grow cynical, and I think that’s exactly where we need to meet them, it’s our responsibility to meet them there as people that work for users on behalf of different brands and organizations, but it’s also our opportunity to help people maybe learn how to trust themselves again, to help people make better decisions. We can meet our audiences where they are in this kind of cynical, skeptical place to regain audiences, to regain their trust, to help them rebuild their trust in themselves, and then the outside world, that’s where we need to first rebuild their confidence. Empower them with good information, teach them how to self-educate and determine good quality information. Yeah, we could just stoke their cynicism further, and we’ve certainly seen how different media outlets and politicians like to do that, we’ve even seen how different brands like to do that and to play to those base instincts.

So yeah, we could stoke their cynicism, but instead, I think we can do better work by affirming their hope, and that’s what I wanna talk about today, as we can affirm their hope, their interest in learning, as well as their enthusiasm for feeling knowledgeable, ’cause that’s the thing most of us do still approach the world with a sense that we can get smarter, we can read one more thing even if it’s doom scrolling late at night, but we can read one more thing, it becomes that much more savvy, that much more prepared, we have faith that we can keep learning. And that’s a powerful thing to tap into, because I think as a marketer or a designer or a writer, you already have the tools to do that, I think we can prioritize some of those tools. I wanna talk about the powerful combination of voice volume and vulnerability that you can use to empower your audience and regain their trust.

Because if you lose your users trust, you kind of have lost your users. So before we kind of focus more on the present day, I wanna take us back because this is not such a new problem, so I wanna actually take us back a few centuries, if you’ll let me… We’ll kind of all hop here into the way back machine and sit back to Commerce in pre-Renaissance Europe. So if that is cool, let us head now to the way of amazing… So when we look back, I think we can take a look at the stuff that we struggle with, and it’s pretty familiar with, so the stuff that we struggle with around trust and communication… People in the 1500s struggled with that too. Then the need for information, for trustworthy information was changing a lot, used to be the people who sold goods, maybe it was candles or cloth or salt, they would all their wares from talent town in a region to markets and fairs. But in the Renaissance, something started to change, treating families and empires began to grow as people realized that they could actually reap greater profits by just staying put and instead engaging in arbitrage maybe among multiple cities and countries.

The catch in that though, is that treating merchants needed good quality information that they could trust about those cities, so that brings us to this guy, and I know you’re looking at the wall behind him there, and you can see kind of those scraps of paper clearly their post-notes he’s some sort of early Ian, they’re actually letters. This is George as he was a renaissance era trading merchant, and he represents that emerging merchant class who ran export import businesses across all of Europe.

Something interesting is going on here, because the kind of work in which he engaged took specialized knowledge about the places, about the cities in which he wanted to do rises, so to make good decisions, he would rely on people who lived in those foreign cities to write him periodic updates about the economic conditions, maybe what competitors were doing, if there’s any sort of palace injury or talk of possible wars, you would rely on those foreign letter writers or correspondence, those far in correspondence. They were actually the earliest journalists, they were writing back to him and saying, Here’s the information you need to know, a journalist would empower merchants to make good decisions, they would offer them consistent details, so they would know what to expect, letter to letter in a consistent voice. They would offer them a unique perspective and authority, as well as this sense that the letter writers were open to learning, to constantly taking in new information, maybe adjusting their initial perspectives, revising information as they went, they didn’t over-promise with false bravado to know everything. Instead, they offered this sort of vulnerability to learning and listening and always growing because they were vulnerable and kind of smart in that way, confident in that way, the recipients of their letters could also be just as confident and evolving. And always growing and learning. They kept themselves open to new information, so they offer authority and consistency, and that’s something that we still value a lot from the people that bring us information, because it empowers us too, and the people that bring us information… Yeah, their journalists and news organizations, but they’re also the brands that we trust, every time we read a bit of marketing information, every time we’re reading over product details before making a purchase and looking through that bulleted list of features or comparing products, we’re taking in that kind of information to say, What do I need to know to make a good decision and feel confident about the decisions that I make, that kind of information empowers us because it helps us make better choices about how to vote and what to buy, and where to eat, all those kinds of information that all serves to keep us happy and healthy and safe.

And I think that there’s a powerful opportunity there for us, so those letter writers established authority by sharing a unique perspective with the right depth of context, and they were basically sharing their knowledge and you can kind of think of it as a unique voice with the right volume of detail, and then strength through vulnerability. Now, authority comes from being willing to go where your audience cannot.

So maybe because of the danger or the cost or the depth of expertise, because maybe you’re the copywriter that’s sitting down the hall from the engineering team, so you know more about the latest product release, so that’s why when Anderson Cooper talks to us from Haiti, we sit up and we listen, we trust his expertise. When David Chang talks to us maybe from… And he’s the owner and chef of the mob FoCo chain and now the star of ugly delicious. Which definitely worth it, if you’re binge watching, when He takes us to explore crawfish and maybe Asian cage infusion, we sit up and we listen, or when Baba CoStar in comes to us live from the car… In the scene with Anthony Borden to talk about Senegalese food, we listen to both of them, and that’s because we trust their respective authority, we trust their unique viewpoints and perspective, as well as the depth of knowledge that they have to offer us to empower us with information. They have the authority, and we also trust their vulnerability to… We trust that as they take in new information, that they’re willing to learn, revise their ideas, engage in new experiences, our behalf, and then maybe correct their own misconceptions and bring us along on that kind of journey as well.

And that’s because their authority empowers us, it educates us, it respects us, because they’re not speaking down, they’re not trying to guess light us and say, Only trust me, I’m your only source of information, they’re not demanding absolute loyalty in that way.

We reward that in the form of trust. I’ve been reading a lot from J. Rose in the press critic, and he talks a lot about authority, I think we can bring some of this thinking into our own work, because when people or institutions or brands have authority, when they’re willing to educate us about maybe their products or services or their entire category, we reward that then with trust, we see our interests and our values reflected in their focus and in their facts.

Now, I think we should be aware though that beyond that, there are problems because when a brand starts to break from what we know, when we start to see how they deviate from what we trust about their voice or their subject matter, are they staying in their lane? It can be hard to that with what we already know.

And similarly, if you don’t provide your audience with content that meets their needs in terms of the length and level of detail, you can become irrelevant, and those are the things, inconsistency and irrelevance, those are the issues that stoke our cynicism. And we know what that looks like. We know what that sounds like, and it’s painful to hear because those issues add up today across industries, people are suffering a crisis of trust. We see how that plays out. We see what that sounds like, and it’s pretty painful to hear because we see how even in our own lives as consumers and citizens and readers and shoppers, we have problems believing outside perspectives and marketing, and we used to place trust and familiar brands and established media, maybe it was the news organization that you grew up reading or hearing, and those organizations would reflect our reality, but we don’t place trust in those same institutions anymore. This is a big problem because once we lose trust there, where do we go.

And maybe those organizations have been inconsistent with what they promise, with what they claim and how they speak to us, the thing is those creeping inconsistencies are kind of a sneaky thing, they’re an insidious thing, because like us, our users look at the world around them now with more skepticism than trust.

And we can blame inconsistency in the media or in politics, and it used to be that, yeah, when the media called a politician in a lie, they would label it as flip-flopping and it would scuttle a campaign and that what happens? Well, we might laugh about it, these premiered several years ago, 30 bucks a pop, and they were really, really popular, they sold out, and we walk around in them, maybe now we’re working from home, you’re walking around in them today… And that’s great, the President became a punch line, but that’s not any better, they say, the time find us and… Yeah, today we live in a golden age of shower shoes, but are we getting any smarter because of it? That’s the thing.

Inconsistency, erode our ability to trust, is one of the institutions we once trusted tell us now not to believe the evidence of our own eyes, that’s gas lighting, and it affects our ability to trust the outside world and ourselves, our own perceptions. And that’s a dangerous thing, but I think it’s also something that we can… We can work on… We can uniquely address as designers.

When people don’t trust their own judgment anymore.

We need to start where they are, because yes, creeping cynicism is a problem that that undermines your work, it’s something that undermines our work, is designers as marketers, as content strategist. But I think it’s something that we are uniquely positioned to address as well, so that’s what I wanna look at today, how can we rebuild from this point? And I think this is the secret. So the problem statement for the future of our work, to regain trust, we must empower our audiences, and if you work in marketing or content design, you already have the tools to do that, whether your users are consumers or citizens or other businesses or donors or voters to regain their trust, empower them, teach them to self-educate and to feel good about the education they’re receiving, to put more faith in the education they’re receiving, because by educating them and re-building their confidence in themselves, we can also regain their trust in our organizations, so that gets us back to that idea of authority, because marketing is a form of authority, it’s saying, I’m here, you’re not… So let me tell you about it, and brands that can teach us about their product category, that comes from a position of authority, when product description speak to us, it’s coming from a position of authority when brands put a stake in the ground to share their values and say, This is who we are, but with your dollars, now you know more about us, do we align with what you value when they prototype in public or demonstrate accountability, maybe when they mess up, that’s all speaking to their authority.

It’s through voice, it’s through the volume of information, it’s through the vulnerability they offer… But that’s not a weakness, it’s a strength. Because yes, we are in a very difficult position right now, I don’t think anybody can look at certainly the last few weeks, in the last few years and think differently, the erosion of trust is crippling every industry that sells products or offer services or attempts to inform or persuade, but I think there’s hope that starts with empowering our audiences, because if people are looking inward for answers, I think that we do the right thing then by meeting them there, so to regain your audience’s trust, as I said, you have to empower them with useful information, so it has three components.

We’re going to look today at voice volume and vulnerability, and those are the same tools that those renaissance era letter writers used so well, and we can steal paid from that. So let’s start by looking now at voice, that’s the consistent distinct personality, the manifest both visually and verbally through everything that your brand does.

So do you project a sense of tradition or maybe of innovation, are you fun or are you more serious? Your brand’s voice helps your audience understand who you are as well as to you differentiate from the competition that maybe you can offer the exact same products and services, but in a very different way, it’s also what helps to humanize your brand and elevate what you think is most important, so to sort of say, This is what we think is important and worth your attention, here’s where we’re focusing our attention, and you should too tells your audience who you are and how you are and… If you’re someone that they can trust, you know what a brand changes over time, that can be good, you’re evolving, maybe you’re offering new services, maybe you’re expanding your platform, but you also run the risk of alienating your original audience by using a consistent voice to expose changes to say, basically, Here’s what’s new, but we’re still Jenny from the block, you still know us, you can still trust us, we’re not gonna leave you behind, that’s how your audience can remain comfortable and an onboard and loyal to what you’re doing, that’s how your users maintain their confidence, not just in the brand, but also in their own knowledge that they know where you’re going and that you are taking them along and not just leaving them behind, that’s something that MailChimp has explored a lot, but the email marketing platform that you’re probably quite familiar with, as they have helped their voice visually and verbally evolve over time, they had to remember, well, they started out as a small business serving plenty of other small businesses, and early on, Freddie, the Mail Chimp monkey, their mascot, he would serve up copy, he would appear throughout the platform, people would hear maybe error messaging in his voice and it was cute, it wasn’t always necessarily appropriate as they continue to grow though, because over time, they have matured, they’re no longer such a small business, they handle now more than…

I think it’s more than 60% of the world’s email marketing.

They’ve also added a lot of other services like e-commerce, and the thing is they never wanted to alienate their original customers, they wanted to make sure that people still felt comfortable, like they knew what to expect from the organization and from its interface, and like they were coming along for the ride.

So they’ve maintained certain aspects of their brand, even as they’ve retired others, even as they’ve said, we do need to leave that behind so that we can continue to grow and mature, so copy remains in first person.

Now though the tone is more robust.

They offer a broader editorial style guide for all of their different content creators, so that people can speak appropriately and write appropriately to their different audiences, maybe it’s people coming from other email marketing platforms, maybe it’s people that are new to marketing, or maybe it’s people that are like… Yeah, I get this, I know this system. I’m totally old hat, you don’t need to speak down to me, you don’t need to maybe invest so much in education, so that kind of expertise, how much they offer depends on the audience that they’re trying to serve.

All their audiences still see branding in the same familiar yellow, but now the illustration style has become more nuanced, sometimes more photography, sometimes more hand-drawn, and people trust that they know MailChimp, they trust their own confidence and knowledge, because they feel like they also know this platform, they know how to use it, and it’s… In part because their voice is familiar and consistent, it isn’t monolithic, but it’s maturing, it’s kind of more of a family opportunity now rather than just a single perspective in the voice, and you can think about how your style guidelines can evolve to… To allow for the growth and brand extension that maybe your writers and designers need to offer and support, because that’s probably something that your audience needs, but content creators do too.

You can see how here within their style guidelines, they’re not introducing big changes, but rather allowing for tailoring to fit the needs of different audiences as well, again, as the needs of different designers and content creators serving those audiences.

I wanna talk to about volume.

So if your brand’s voice addresses how you communicate, volume refers to how much you communicate in terms of length and level of detail.

So how do you know how much to say about a topic, how long should the blogpost be? How many bullets do you need in product details, how many images do you include in a product gallery to make sure that you’re telling a complete story that is representative and accurate, as well as being useful and usable. Is it useful to help people make good decisions, are you sharing enough information so that people can understand more about the product and what they’re supposed to do with it, or your services and how they’re supposed to interact with you, or you streamline things more… To leave them to either leave them wondering or do you share too much detail that makes them feel overwhelmed? I think we’ve all had those kinds of interactions with putting together IKEA furniture and looking at the details and seeing… Alright, looking at these diagrams, can I do this confidently? Can I feel good about it? And afterwards say, plan came together. Just right, ’cause that’s the thing, brevity and bullets have seated space to long form content, even on e-commerce sites.

So now we need new ways of determining how much content is enough.

It’s not quite so easy to prescribe to content creators, to designers and photographers. The answer for that though, comes through and use their research, you know you’ve offered enough detail when your users, when your audience can make good decisions, when they can feel good about the decisions that they make. And that’s something that you can measure in customer feedback and return to merchandise, what are people saying about the experience of getting information from you, was it good, or did it leave them scratching their heads, that’s something that the electronics retailer Crutchfield has had to explore and what they do really, really well. So they produce content throughout their site that is long pages, you can see there on the left side of your screen, what it looks like if you zoom out on one of those long long pages.

They offer a lot of content types. If you’re looking to buy a new camera lens or maybe home audio equipment, you can look through image galleries, see what this stuff looks like inside, test it out, maybe you get comparison data, all right there in these long articles… They see though, win those long articles, what happens, it turns out people tend to get to the end of them and then say, Show me more.

Let me spend more time sitting with this information, people tend to spend a lot of time getting comfortable before they make a purchase, and as a result, their return rate is very, very low, the rate of product returns, I should say, not the rate of people returning to the site, it trends out, people go back to the site a lot to do more research to kind of validate their ideas before they finally make that purchase decision, but then once they get the product, they’re good with it, they feel comfortable happy with the product, happy with the experience, and also happy with themselves that they made a good decision. I think that’s something that we all want. You always wanna feel confident about your choices that… Yeah. You feel good about this. You can tell all your friends, I made the right decision. Nobody likes regrets, and we shouldn’t have to… But that’s the thing, people are getting comfortable and confident there, and in a world where media and politicians gas-lit us maybe into the leaving that we shouldn’t trust ourselves, Smart brands can help us regain confidence in ourselves and in our ability to make good decisions in them.

And in the strength of our society, and that’s huge, because that might happen on Crutchfield site, but that sense of confidence then is something that people bring into other experiences as well. The same way that this issue with gas lighting may have started in the political arena, and now we’re seeing the effects throughout our economy, confidence and empowerment interest can also start in small sectors and then affect us across all of our other interactions and experiences.

And I wanna hold on this a second because I want you to tweet the heck out of it and sing it from the rooftops, because this is what organizations owe their users, this is what we as designers or users, we owe them confidence and empowerment and trust, because for too long. It’s been under attack. It’s Education though. That drives empowerment. And empowerment drives confidence, and confidence drives trust. I sat down with Julie, go in the brand manager Crutchfield, and she talked a bit about this, and you can call it customer loyalty if you need to sell this of the food chain internally, but this is also about more than just what’s right for your brand and customer loyalty and customer retention. It’s good for those things too, but it’s also about strengthening our society… That’s not a bad thing.

Let’s look at another example. Who else can cook up confidence here? So I do love that pun leading into this America’s Test Kitchen, the Test Kitchen is also known for producing a ton of content, and they offer all of that content in a bid to build loyalty and also build confidence because they do earn attention and love and loyalty because they empower their audiences by meeting them where they are, whether you’re a NATO chef or somebody that’s way more experienced in the kitchen, they’re offering the right level of detail, the right amount of content for your mindset, for your skill set, as well as for your channel and device.

So that means if you are not a chef, you can find definitions-savvy chefs can find way more advanced techniques, and the test, they do this through producing a television show, there are cooking school show is available through their website, reworked recipes, there’s Cooks Illustrated magazine and click country, lots and lots of cookbooks, the Twitter feed, the Instagram feed, and it’s all optimized with content that is right for that specific reading and use case, so that means if you’re standing in your kitchen and you’re trying to just get this recipe done right and you happen to grab your phone, that’s great, you can find slippage recipes with all of the information depicted as pictures with the steps of that recipe in the caption for the picture, you don’t need to get any more extraneous information and back story. But if you’re sitting down instead with the magazine and you’re getting ready to bake a cake, but first you wanna read about the history of flower production, you can do that too, or if you wanna see how different types of flower compare in their head-to-head test and how they tested 80 different types of flower…

That information is there too. I haven’t read the flower article in a while, but I’m pretty sure the 80 different types isn’t hyperbole in is they’re offering you paragraph after paragraph of wisdom mulling over the variables, so that you don’t have to do the research, you can take comfort and confidence in their research and they’re willing to share that volume of information with their audience for the segment of their audience that needs that to feel comfortable and confident about the organization about the quality of the recipe they’re about to use, but also comfortable and confident with their own skills. They don’t shy away from the details, but they also triage the information so that it is right for different users and different use cases. They do a lot to help you engage your senses through the content in a more immersive education, and this isn’t about hearing from one famous chef or one particular story to go in the kitchen, this isn’t about ego, it’s more about the science that is driving their publishing that is driving their choice of content types, their investment in those different content types, because they’re selling empowerment, not a cult of personality. Goes back to this idea that success for them breeds confidence.

And I think that that’s something that we can find in a lot of our work, because when we help our users do well, maybe it’s clicking through a wizard feeling like they did the right things with… Maybe rebalancing part of their 401K, or they got the information that they need to make the right kind of purchase decision for them, or maybe just that… Yeah, they did do everything that they needed to do to get the right delivery time for that shopping cart that they’ve been trying to fill to get groceries this week.

Some of those things can be daunting and we are facing so much change and social upheaval and just appeal to how we used to do things just a year ago in the before times.

Now is not the time to introduce big changes, now it’s not the time to overhaul our brands, but now is the time to offer consistency in how we speak to people and the right volume of information so they can feel confident in what they take from engaging with us, it’s this idea that success breeds confidence that can help people feel maybe proud or smart or accomplished, and that’s how they become more confident, both in themselves and in us as the organizations that are delivering more information to them and helping them feel good about that information.

And confident decisions do take a certain amount of content, but it doesn’t always mean that it’s more content, that’s something that… UK has just an amazing job kind of embracing, that’s something that they really had to resolve because it used to be that they did produce more content and more content and more content… Amore content in the UK, it used to be that citizens could get government service information from some nine different websites all produced and hopefully maintained by the government plus the Guardian, and in fact, what they understood through their user research was that for the official canonical information. People were turning to newspapers over the government websites, and the fact that they had to dig through multiple government websites and see multiple versions of official information didn’t help them at all.

So the government’s answer to this problem of volume and platform proliferation was refinement and edited re-embraced the idea that We as government should only talk about the things that only government can talk about, We should only produce content on only the things on which only we can produce content where only we would have that authority and all of those… Back to that idea of authority. Because the thing is not all topics need more content for people to trust the information, sometimes they just need it delivered in a consistent way that also signals that it’s complete, that you don’t need to go digging through this whole other portion of the internet, but instead just look at this one in tone page to get all the information you need to make a good decision. So by carrying things down to the essentials, by really embracing that idea that we should only write about the things that only we can write about, let’s focus on just how you deal with taxes and that around maybe important bees to this country, but… No, we don’t need to tell people all the nuances and details about beekeeping and about honey production by embracing that idea, the government design services team cut the amount of content they were producing from 75000 pages down to just 3000.

That’s a powerful thing.

So how do you know when you have enough content, how did they know when they had cut enough… It was through years of research, they sat people down, they brought them in, ask them to complete certain tasks, and people were again and again saying, Oh, that’s it. That was easy. So you know you have enough content when your audience can make decisions quickly, when they can make decisions and then feel confident that they need the right decisions. Now, this is a call for better content design and information to design to determine the right content types and the sort of content point of view in creative direction, such as what the UK GDS offered by saying, We will only produce content on the things on which only we can produce content. So now I wanna talk about vulnerability, that third part of the framework of voice and volume and vulnerability.

Now individually a consistent voice in the appropriate volume, those are characteristics, those are table stakes of glue-driven content strategy and design.

It’s now through vulnerability that the efforts in invoice and volume can unite and come together to foster trust, vulnerability is the risk that we take for connection, so you need to decide, are you willing to risk criticism and ridicule and maybe even rabid customers by revealing hard truths. Will your organization do that if it means that you can find greater loyalty from your customers or maybe even connect with more customers because you make your brand vulnerable by engaging in transparency. I don’t want us to mistake it though for weakness, because the smartest brands actually grow stronger when they’re willing to own their mistakes, when they’re willing to say, We will connect, we will be transparent, we’ll pay that cost for transparency.

We talk about transparency, we talk about authenticity, and we fling around those terms, but they have real meaning if our clients, if the organizations that we support are brave enough to embrace them.

Because as those smart brands grow stronger, they gain trust by owning their mistakes by prototyping, in public and acting on their values, one of my favorite examples of this, of acting on those… On those values is Penzey’s, you might be familiar with it. If you’re based in the midwest, you probably are because they’re a spice company, A spice retailer based there.

Vulnerability can mean putting a stake in the ground around your values and that’s what Penzey’s did.

So we say this like that, you’re putting yourself out there, and when you’re a company and you put yourself out there, you find your community, you find your most loyal supporters and you draw more supporters… More customers to you.

So in the wake of the 2016 election, bill pens, the owner of the pens spices chain, he took to Facebook, he wanted to make clear that what the then presidential candidate was offering didn’t align with their values, he said he’s stoking hatred for immigrants, and that runs counter to our company’s purpose.

We believe in bringing people together around cooking.

And the cooking is an act of love, and for anybody who might have said, Hey, stay in your lane, SPICE shop pipe down there, cinnamon boy, he doubled down on it through really a bit of authenticity, he said, This is our lane. Because cooking is political, many of the family favorites, many of the recipes that we all love, they represent the story of human migration and immigration, they’re flavored with spices sourced from regions that might be scarred by war. This very much is arley. Now, that’s risky. His little Facebook diatribe were pretty risky, they were vulnerable in his position, Drew headlines and criticism, and the company lost a lot of customers, but they also gained a lot of customers, they saw sales spike or record levels. And that occurred again and again. Every time they posted up a new Miss of sharing their political stance over the past few years, Pence has enjoyed a 50% increase in online sales, and you can say, Yeah, people are staying home cooking more. Now, that’s really just in the past year.

It turns out as people shared this post, as they said, Oh, this capture is what I think too, they grew to know the brand more, they grew to trust the brand more and more people found the brand and saw themselves as aligned with it, maybe as part of that kind of moment and that kind of movement, they wanted to support the company with orders as gifts, maybe because they didn’t themselves cook that much, but they knew somebody that did…

In contrast, Penny’s closest competitor, they took a different approach, the SPICE house based in Milwaukee, I think we saw some people on from there, they offered a discount code that was just all caps, no politics, and they said that they thought business should stay out of politics.

Now, that’s maybe a less risky perspective, but staying out of politics, that’s a stance that reflects privilege that isn’t shared by people who are affected by discriminatory policy, it is political in and of itself, we’ve certainly seen how that has played out over the past year as different organizations have have attempted to weigh into different social discussions or discussions about social issues, whether it was Black Lives Matter or the recent salt on our government, when businesses take a stand… It’s a chance for them to say this is who we are. They just need to be able to back it up with history and authenticity, because it is a risk, but that’s the thing, a vulnerability, like voice, it tells people a little bit more about who you are, it empowers them with information so that they can make more informed decisions about doing business with you, and that can be scary. And I think intimidating for some organizations that aren’t prepared to take that stance and it’s risky for a brand to put a stake in the ground, and maybe it takes even more vulnerability, not just saying their values, but even acknowledging deficiencies, talking about what they need to work on to better align their actions with their values, let’s talk about that though, that idea of how we acknowledge problems because maybe your company has screwed up in different ways, maybe employees and critics and customers are now demanding explanations or accountability. They wanna know what are you gonna do to clean up this mess, and if this sounds at all familiar, if your organization or a brand that you’re supporting has ever been in that kind of position, it’s important to realize that your organization is at its most vulnerable when you’re staggering away from mistakes, maybe you are wounded by errors in judgment or reeling from some sort of jaw-dropping calamity because the CEO did something stupid. Well, what matters next? That is what matters the most. Do you double down on the feet or do you try to embrace that opportunity to build trust.

If you’re familiar with these little gizmo, this is the fidget cube, the organization ANSI labs, they designed and produced the original fidget cube, a Kickstarter campaign. It was a few years ago, and it was a Kickstarter campaign that went off the rails, it was wildly successful. And that was a problem. There were 400 times more people that backed it than they ever anticipated, and as a result, the team had a really hard time keeping up with the demand for manufacturing and distribution, and those challenges that increased exponentially as they had problems in their factories, they had problems in their warehouse manufacturing problems cascaded into shipping problems, and then the product that they described as a perfect Christmas stocking stuff or it didn’t finish shipping until actually the following April. So what do they do about that, what can we learn from what they did about it? Well, they communicated all along the way, they frequently updated their audience in a tone that was consistent and cohesive, they explained what was happening with manufacturing and shipping, they offered a lot of detail around that so that they were empowering people with information and also demonstrating that they could respect their audience by offering them this level of detail when they had to start fielding more than 2000 incoming emails a day saying what’s going on, and they realized that they weren’t being responsive enough, they talked about it in an update, they acknowledged it and said, Here’s what we’re going to do to improve, we’re adding more people to our customer service team, we’re going to continue to respond to emails as best we can, please stay patient with us, and then as they started eventually shipping out the product, because it did get…

Finally get out to people, customer feedback started to become a lot more positive, they since launched other campaigns that build on that transparency, that open and consistent communication with that same high level of detail, and those campaigns build on those lessons and being vulnerable by offering transparency and respecting their audience. I wanna also take a look at another organization that felt with volume issues, let’s say that soon, because over the past year, Zoom has offered us a master class in vulnerability now in December 2019, in the before times, they had about 10 million daily meeting participants, most of them were business customers, most had IT departments, most of those IT departments had security protocols. Probably guess where this is going, because by March 2020, so as previous suddenly had reached pandemic proportions, those 10 million daily users, they jumped to more than 200 million daily users because businesses responded to covid 19 by mandating the employees work from home, schools also embraced remote learning, some 90000 schools across 20 different countries started using Zoom, they were all jumping on the platform.

Everybody had birthday celebrations on Zoom and virtual happy hours, and by everybody, I mean friends and pre-school teachers and university professors and book clubs. It was a great time to be on the platform. The thing is, more people than ever before now, 200 million daily users, they wanted the platform to perform in ways that it had not been designed, and often they were doing it without the support of an IT team or the guidance of the IT team that would have included guidance probably set a password to ensure that only people you invite can attend, enable the waiting room that we established about a year ago to screen your attendees to avoid problems with Zoom bombers.

People weren’t doing that, and it got a little bit crazy in there. So did the CEO, Eric WAN, did he call out those issues… No, he didn’t stoke anger, he didn’t call out the zoom bombers on April 1st, which was sort of an interesting date choice, he wrote a blog post, sort of an open letter that is a model and building trust through vulnerability.

He spoke in a Humble but confident voice, with a volume of detail that really respected the users, it didn’t overwhelm them with information, but it said, Here’s what happened, if you want more technical information on what’s going on, keep reading here, here’s what we’re gonna do about it. And he offered vulnerability to bring them into the process to share in the company’s evolution, and also to say, Okay, here’s how you can hold us accountable, and you can see he’s apologizing in the first person, he apologized in the first person, then shared credit for what the team would be doing, talking about them then in the plural, he explained what happened, he offered detail that really demonstrates his respect for the audience’s intelligence, and He pivots to make what could have easily been a, you’re using it wrong kind of thing. He pivoted to make that problem into an opportunity, and that’s not spin, that’s smart. And he moved on through that post to credit the community to say thank you for pointing these issues for us, and then he will do to offer a plan to hold him accountable for a resolution to say, First, we’re going to be enacting a feature freeze, we’re going to shift all of our engineering resources to focus on trust and safety and privacy issues, and by the following week after he released this post.

Zoom had already made those virtual waiting rooms now and meeting passport, the passwords as well, the default requirement on all new meetings.

Then he continued to detail how he would be holding weekly webinars, Publishing a transparency report and submitting to third-party audits all in a bid to say, Here’s why you can still count on us, we’re going to expose what’s going on here, so that you know what to expect, so you still feel comfortable here and confident that you can use us, you can use this platform, and confident that you’ve made a good decision in doing that too.

His response was swift, it was specific, it was transparent. All good things that make it a powerful case study and how you can earn trust even while confronting trouble, and I think that’s something that we can learn from, that’s what we can embrace in our work in the kind of ways that we support… Brand support different organizations, because voice and volume and vulnerability, those are the things that add up to empower people, renew their confidence and rebuild their trust, and as we stumble back from a few years of gas lighting and cynicism, that’s what people need more now than anything else, that’s what our society needs. We need ways to regain our confidence in our ability to make good decisions, in our ability to trust ourselves, the organizations around us, maybe even the people around us a little bit more, because we’ve lost trust in institutions, but as that has happened, smart organizations can step into that void, and regardless of your industry, I think that your brand can be a leader in how we move forward, in helping to move us forward, because it is easy to be cynical, and we have so many reasons to be cynical, sex, look at the world as it is and say, it’s worse, but designers and writers and builders and brands and brain storms, we look at the world as it is and say It can be better, let’s figure out how… Let’s make it better. We don’t just traffic in theory and anger, we do productive work to move things forward, and if you are hopeful that it can be better, let’s work so that it will be… Because despite all of our reasons to be cynical, deceitful politicians or deceptive business practices, people still act with hope, we all think that we can become smarter and better and kinder, and right now is the time to affirm that hope, so let’s design our way out of cynicism let’s design our way toward trust, do it for yourself, your organization, your users, and our society, because this is how we all move forward, these are the things that we can do together in the roles that we are in.

So let’s get to it. And if you are fired up, if you are as bullish about this as I am, I do believe this is our best path forward, and if we embrace the idea that we should all do the things that we can do, this is what we can do as designers, please do preorder trustworthy, as Russ mentioned before, because your pre-order does make such a difference, you can support your indie book store at the same time, it’ll be released March 2, but if you go pre-order now and email me the receipt, I will send you a PDF, so that you can actually start reading it right away, so thank you so much, and I look forward to all of us empowering our users together.

Thank You.