Why Consumers Don't Trust Businesses

May 5, 2010

Interview with Michael Maslansky, author of the book The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics

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Mike Carruthers:
As consumers we’re skeptical of businesses and organizations and we have good reason

Michael Maslansky:
We can all point to a big company, whether it’s our cable company or our telephone company where we feel like we’ve been screwed. And so there’s just not a lot of trust out there and it makes communicating that much more difficult.
 

Michael Maslansky, author of the book The Language of Trust, says as a result companies are doing something kind of weird – they’re telling us how much they care (as if that will help) and the perfect example is…

Your call is important to us. OK then why am I on the phone for 15 minutes? We care about our customers. There’s nobody in America today that believes a big company cares about its customers. Now there are a lot of people in big companies who really do care about their customers but there’s nobody who believes it – so you can’t say it.

Another example is when a company says, “We speak your language.”

Well if a company has to say “We speak your language” are they really speaking it? If they did speak it then we’d know because we’d be talking to them in our language. So it’s one of those things where a company’s trying too hard.

Michael says when these kinds of messages are tested on consumers they just ring hollow and businesses need to understand that using these kinds of phrases often backfires.

You can’t tell people what to think anymore. You can’t say, “We care or trust us” and expect people to believe you. What you can do is demonstrate it as opposed to trying to convince people by just saying it.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here