Why should anyone buy from you?

TRUST IN MARKETING? 45

government expenditure and MPs’ expenses to internal documents on a

whole range of policy issues. These new freedoms to demand information

combine with mass communications and the Internet to exponentially

increase not just access but also the magnication of ideas and stories into

the public consciousness.

The result is a profound shift in our assumptions of trust and our placing

of faith. Whereas before people assumed a sort of blind faith or trust in

people like MPs by wont of their position, this has now gone. Many have

called this a move from an age of deference to the age of reference.

In the past, we would have chosen the path of least eort by deferring to

those in positions of authority or power. Now, we often arm ourselves with

information about their performance, their credentials and learn about

the details of a particular issue. Doctors frequently bemoan the fact that

patients come armed with information gleaned from the Internet on their

range of real and imagined health problems. Something has changed.

Blink or think?

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink (2005), glories our human ability to

process many, many pieces of information, to divine a ‘gut feel’ almost

instantly that is usually accurate and can be trusted. Over thousands of

years of evolution, we have developed the ability to process a wide range

of social signals that we are swimming in to guide our judgements. Often

these are snap decisions about what and who to trust.

The trouble with these ‘blink’ decisions is that they can be easily

manipulated. Manipulators deliberately employ psychological and social

tricks to eect one outcome or another. Marketing is founded on these

abilities and uses them to get us to change our behaviour and buy. Almost

the rst thing you are taught as a young marketer is the power of the

‘single-minded benet’ and that this must be focused into advertising

that has one idea running through it. There is little room for complexity

or nuance. The well-crafted 30-second TV advert works to get us to buy