Social Control

05 February 10

Effective brands communicate an emotion to the consumers who use and interact with them. The more effectively that emotion is communicated, the better. In this regular series, we'll be looking at various emotions and how a brand can communicate those emotions in the marketing they do.

Today's emotion: Trust

You might not immediately think of trust as an emotion. But it is something we feel and it is something that compels us to respond. So, it may not seem to be a richly felt emotion like love or hate, but from a marketing perspective it is still an authentic emotion. Trust is about building credibility and authenticity so that consumers believe that you will deliver on your promise. Trust is always serious, although not necessarily somber; that's an important distinction.

So, how can you embed trust in your marketing?

Use rich colors and trend towards deeper, darker colors. Hunter green, for example, feels far more trustworthy than lime green. Navy blue feels far more trustworthy than baby blue. Lake red feels far more trustworthy than pink. These colors are rich and should be slightly subdued. You don’t see many browns in marketing but when you want to build trust, stir in some brown. (Hello UPS).

Trust is also traditional. So the shapes that you might use in your brand development should be fairly conventional shapes – squares, triangles, circles – with clean lines. Nothing weird and flowery (unless you're a flower shop).

Images should be kept to a minimum. That's not to say that you shouldn't use images (good golly what a boring world that would be) but rather, the images should be clean and uncluttered and a single image as a focal point will generate a sense of trust far more than a bunch of great pictures altogether. If the image is a photograph, black and white works well. Color does, too, but there's something about black and white. People who are pictured in the photo should be calm, poised, well-dressed, and well-mannered. They don't have to be older, but let's face it: You'd rather buy life insurance from a guy in his sixties than a kid who looks like he got his GED yesterday.

An example we really like is Schneiders, a food producer in Canada. This brand is all about promoting trust in their marketing. In particular, their sepia-tinted commercials and website photos make them seem even more of a trusted food source. (http://www.schneiders.ca/aboutUs.aspx).

An example of trust in brand building that we worked on was the Browser for the Better project.

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