Why should anyone buy from you?

WHY TRUST MATTERS 21

Thick versus thin

The human ability for managing relationships is limited. Network

theory has revealed that the optimum number of relationships we can

meaningfully hold is somewhere around 150. There are many examples

of how this has been a natural threshold. Armies, religious communities,

villages, businesses – all have found that groups of around this number

are most eective. Surely, though, with tools like Facebook or Twitter this

number is now defunct? Well, the evidence would tell us, not really, with

the vast majority of users of Facebook having somewhere between 100

and 200 connections.

If anything, what’s changing is not our ability to hold 150 deep or thick

relationships, but our ability to maintain many more thin relationships.

‘Thin relationships’ are, in many ways, at the heart of a society’s store

of social capital. Francis Fukuyama, in his masterful book Trust (1995),

‘No, far from it,’ Dr Kohn replied, surprisingly emphatic. ‘I can’t see an

overwhelming reason why this should be a one-way ratchet. Human

societies have operated around communitarian or family or other

forms of collectivism for hundreds of years. The rise of the individual

is a relatively novel phenomenon, but, clearly, capitalism in its

current form is too focused on the narrow.’

‘How does business start to regain the trust that has been lost and

become a greater net contributor to social capital then?’ I asked.

‘Well, I am persuaded that some people in particular businesses

have a genuine moral vision over and above their focus on

shareholders and, of course, there have been moral visions for

business in the past, such as the great philanthropists and the

model paternalistic employers. Clearly you can wield capital for

purposes that are self-evidently more than just returning value to

shareholders or yourself.’

22 WHY SHOULD ANYONE BUY FROM YOU?

described how those societies with a greater ability to create generalised

social trust through the spontaneous sociability of associations like

churches or clubs create a higher level of social capital that can be drawn

on in the creation of prosperity. The USA, Germany and Japan, for example,

have rich traditions and processes that bind

people together and, in doing so, mould and

change behaviour, making it more predictable

and, ultimately, more easily trusted. This has

been fundamental to their economic success

over the past century.

What’s happened over the past 20 years as our consumer society has grown

is that brands have attained a deeper, thicker cultural context. We now feel

comfortable sharing and interacting through and about brands. We talk,

argue and desire brands. We use them to personify companies in a way that

would have been bizarre to people even only 100 years ago. They form a

narrative that changes our lives and relationships and moulds our behaviour.

The realisation that brands, the businesses that underlie them and the

marketing that propels them into our collective and individual consciousness

are a part of social capital is, for me, profound. This changes the rules and

puts a greater level of responsibility on us. We shouldn’t just adhere to a

broad denition of the ‘truth’ in marketing but

we must now also care about the individual and

collective impact of our actions and messages

on society as a whole. Getting our heads round

this will be the only way to sustainably regain

the trust in our brands, our businesses and our industry that we so badly

crave. Trust is a complex and many layered thing. Brands are a big part of

our trusting lives and recapturing trust in them is both a competitive and,

when seen in the context of social capital, a societal problem.

In this chapter, we’ve looked at the basics of trust and how this often

nebulous concept works to create trusted businesses and brands. We are

all living through a period of huge change in the landscape of who, what

and why we trust. In Chapter 2, we examine how trust is changing.

what’s changing

is . . . our ability

to maintain

many more thin

relationships

brands . . . are

a part of social

capital