Trustworthy: How The Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism With Margot Bloomstein

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With competition getting tougher by the day, how can you make your brand stand out in the market? John Livesay has the perfect guest who can tell you which brands are doing it right and which ones are doing it wrong. He sits down with the creator of BrandSort, Margot Bloomstein. Bringing her book, Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap, she highlights the importance of regaining the trust of cynical consumers through empathy and authenticity. While having the ability to understand and share the feelings of your customers is key, understanding yourself should come first. Margot then dives into the importance of knowing who you are as a company and brand so you can be in a better position to engage with audiences.

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Listen to the podcast here

Trustworthy: How The Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism With Margot Bloomstein

Our guest is Margot Bloomstein, the author of Trustworthy. We get into conversations about which brands are doing it right, and which ones are doing it wrong, and why trust is so important as well as an interesting conversation around empathy. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Margot Bloomstein, who is one of the leading voices in the content strategy industry. She’s the author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap and Content Strategy, with real world stories to strengthen every interactive project, as well as being the Principal of Appropriate, Inc., which is a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. She’s a speaker and a strategic advisor. She works with marketing teams, leading organizations for the last several years. She’s the Creator of BrandSort where she developed the popular message, architecture-driven approach to content strategy. She teaches the content strategy graduate program at FH University in Austria, and lectures around the world about brand driven content strategy. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here.

I always like to ask my guests their own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, school. Where did you get interested in this concept of trust and content and all that good stuff?

I’ve been working in the content strategy industry for many years, and over that time, I’ve had the opportunity to work with organizations in a pretty broad variety of industries in healthcare, retail and financial services. The common thread that I always see between all of them is this interest in meeting unsolved problems and identifying the problems for their audiences and their customers, and then figuring out how to combine what they offer with what their audiences need. My background before content strategy was in design focused on problem solving. That’s where my interest has remained over time. Our problems and our client’s problems have become more and more complex, but still, some of the tools that we use to meet them around establishing personal relationships and trading and empathy and compassion to meet their needs, those things haven’t changed.

[bctt tweet=”What responsibility do businesses have to care about trust? Why do trust and credibility seem like they’re under attack?” username=”John_Livesay”]

I am all about empathy. I’m always telling audiences when I’m in front of them about the importance of putting on your empathy hat, and the better you can describe a problem, the better people think you have your solution. What are you seeing in your work around empathy?

It’s interesting because in design, in content strategy, in the web industry and how we make the modern web, empathy has become almost like a buzzword in our industry. We talk about empathy and authenticity and transparency, a lot of marketing departments throw around those terms. Over the past several years as we’ve seen different social issues and different social movements come more and more to the forefront. Businesses are trying to figure out how they fit into them if they should comment on them at all. Empathy has become more and more of the latch word. I want to push back on that and say that sometimes empathy demands a level of arrogance of saying that “I can understand exactly your needs, even if I don’t have your life experience.” What we’re realizing more and more is that empathy maybe is a big ask for a lot of organizations, but let’s start with compassion and respect for our audiences first.

How did you come up with the name of your book, Trustworthy?

As I was looking at this problem of trust and seeing how cynicism and gaslighting were undermining the marketing and sales cycles in so many industries, I was starting to notice the brands that were doing it right, that were rising above and saying, “We can still combat cynicism. We can still establish rapport with our audiences. We can still build trust.” I want it to look and see what were the brands that were doing it right, and then figure out why, what can we learn from them, what can we unpack. In Trustworthy, a lot of what I profile are the organizations, brands, campaigns that are doing it right. It’s easy for us to find bad examples of organizations that are destroying trust and we can pile on them, but we don’t necessarily learn from them either.

Smart Brands: Empathy is a big ask for a lot of organizations. Start with compassion and respect for your audiences first.

What’s an example of one that you like?

They’re all my favorites in the book, but one of the ones that keep it much where we all are now is Zoom. When we look at how they’ve faced different challenges over the past several years, it’s a model in how you build trust. Starting back in probably December of 2019, they were seeing maybe 10 million daily users, 10 million daily business users. It’s mostly people coming from within businesses, within marketing departments, having meetings that were all supported by IT teams that were teaching them how to follow security protocols and set passwords. Within a few months, that all changed. Now they have something like 90 million daily users. People are using it that don’t have the support of an IT team. Every schoolteacher or preschool teacher, everyone that wants to get together with a happy hour with their friends over Zoom or celebrate a holiday with family over Zoom.

They’re not doing it with the support of an IT team. That’s when we saw the rise of Zoom bombers pretty early on in the pandemic and all sorts of problems around that. Zoom could have responded by saying, “You’re seeing problems because you’re using it wrong.” They didn’t. Instead, last April 2020, the CEO wrote this open blog post that came out as an apology to say, “You’re having problems with this? That’s our problem. That’s our fault. Thank you for noticing some of these security issues. We appreciate our critics calling out these problems. Here’s what we’re going to do about it.”

He phrased it first in the first-person singular saying, “I’m sorry,” and pivoted to that plural saying, “Here’s what we’re going to do about it.” Calling out his team and giving them credit. He proceeded to say, “Here’s what you can expect to see as far as changes from us. Here’s how we’re going to shift a lot of our engineering resources to support improving security and privacy. We’re going to submit to third-party audits. You can expect to hear from me at this frequency.” He was accountable. That way of building trust when he was at such a point of vulnerability, when the company was at such a point of vulnerability and in the public eye to say, “We’re sorry. Here’s how you can hold us accountable and here’s why things are going to improve from here.” That’s a model in building trust.

[bctt tweet=”Know what your organization is, who you are, and how you are so you don’t lose yourself when engaging with the rest of the marketplace.” username=”John_Livesay”]

The concept of building trust also comes into play for those companies that are trying to win back customers they’ve lost for whatever reason. I was working with one and they had said they didn’t make some deadlines. They were then let go for a year, then they had an opportunity to come back in and convince them to work with them again. I said, “What are you going to say?” They said, “We have all this research we’re going to share on how things have changed.” I was like, “You need to own that you caused the problem, even if it was other vendors and even if it’s the new team, you still have to own it.” What you said is so valuable. That’s why I want to underline it. You have to say, “Here’s what we’re doing to make sure this never happens again.” If you don’t have those systems in place, don’t even bother taking the meeting.

It sounds like you’re describing where a client was saying, “Here’s our new research. Here’s how things have changed maybe in the industry.” When you need to apologize, when you need to demonstrate accountability and show how you are responsible and ethical as a company, it isn’t about pointing to external research. You need to point the mirror back on yourselves and say, “Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s how we are changing.”

Texas was out of electricity and water. People want answers and they want to know what are you doing to make sure this never happens again? It’s not just a business thing. It’s a personal thing. It’s a political governing thing. This concept of trust is in the news.

Texas is a wonderful example. I had the opportunity to speak with someone in their Department of Public Works because I saw him tweeting in a personal way. It was a thread where he was saying, “Yes, this is a problem. I want you to know what I’m experiencing too in this leadership position. Here’s what went wrong. Here’s why we think we’re experiencing this problem. Yes, I am experiencing it too. Customer, as well as a leader here. Here’s what we’re going to do to make sure that hopefully we can right this ship now so that we don’t have this problem in the future.” I reached out to him because I said, “That’s wonderful.” I would love to see that level of discourse and detail and vulnerability as well as voice speaking in a way that your audience can understand. I’d love to see that from more public officials. We can learn from that. That’s what I would love to see moving forward.

Smart Brands: When you need to apologize, demonstrate accountability, and show how you are responsible and ethical as a company. It isn’t about pointing to external research; you point the mirror back on yourself.

You brought up something that if you can explain someone’s problem or their pain points, because you’ve experienced it yourself, your trustworthy factor goes up big time because you’ve been in their shoes. You also talked about that we should double down on qualities that we find that make us unique if we want to increase our social media engagement. The first question I’m thinking our readers will have is, what’s the quality that makes me unique? Let’s start there. How do we even find that?

As you mentioned, a lot of my focus within content strategy has been around brand-driven content strategy, looking at how organizations do identify, what makes them unique so that they can establish that consistent, cohesive, persistent tone of voice. When an organization does that, it does a few things. This is digging into ancient history, but that idea of gnothi seauton. It was carved over the door of the temple in Delphi. Ancient Greece, they said, “First, gnothi seauton.” Know thy self. Before you engage with anybody else, know who you are. In modern branding and modern marketing, we need to embrace that idea, know what your organization is, know who you are and how you are so that you don’t lose yourself when you’re trying to engage with the rest of the marketplace and prospective customers, prospective clients.

That idea of first figuring out who you are, that’s what I dig into around message architecture. A message architecture is simply a hierarchy of communication goals. I developed a tool called BrandSort to help organizations figure out is it more important for us to project that we’re innovative or traditional? We’re maybe witty and polished or scrappier and more creative, because knowing that can then help you determine which platforms should you be using. Where should you be investing your time? What’s the right tone of voice as well as then visually and verbally?

What’s the right look and feel and the color scheme and the style of imagery that projects those qualities? When organizations can first prioritize understanding themselves, then they’re in a better position to engage their audiences, as well as then differentiate better from their competition. I would argue it is a service that we offer our users, our audiences. It’s a service that we provide in saying, “It’s a crowded marketplace. If everybody’s competing with similar products, here’s how we’re different. Here’s how that we aligned with what.”

[bctt tweet=”When organizations can first prioritize understanding themselves, then they’re in a better position to engage their audiences.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Do you have a story from your book of a brand that does that well?

It’s one of the first examples that I have in the book. Writing this book was such a wonderful opportunity to talk with lots of different brands, hear their stories and gather up those examples because we all love the stories. It’s always good to get new stories from brands. One of the first organizations that I spoke with was Mailchimp, because in marketing, small business owners know them well. When Mailchimp first started out, they were a small business serving other small businesses. They’ve grown tremendously over time. Something like 60% of the world’s email marketing now goes through Mailchimp. As they’ve grown over time, they’ve offered new services. They’ve rolled out new offerings to their audience. That was always with a little bit of risk, because for their legacy customers, there’s always that concern of like, “Are you going to forget about me as you’re rolling out new eCommerce offerings? Are you going to forget about what I need and stop servicing basic email marketing customers?”

They’ve made choices to, first, solidify and codify what their brand means and how they manifest their brand. Their voice and tone guidelines are a model in the industry, and they’ve published them publicly so that other organizations can also see the level of detail that they document in them. Their design system, as well, is becoming more and more codified so that their content creators internally know where the guardrails are and then how to be creative within them. It helps them become more efficient and more effective. It also ensures that all their communication is more consistent. It’s serving their different audiences as well, because as they’ve grown over time, they’ve realized that there are parts of their brand that don’t scale or don’t make sense anymore.

It used to be that you would hear error messaging and calls to action in the voice of Freddie, their Mailchimp monkey, their little mascot. You don’t get error messaging from a monkey anymore though, but they have maintained other aspects of their brands, still the same sunny yellow, a lot of the tone of voice is still similar and it’s still consistent. They’ve varied other things around their illustration style, some of their phrasing. They’ve also varied it depending on the different audiences they’re trying to reach. Their guidelines document all of that, both to make things easier for their internal users, their copywriters and any freelancers that they might engage, as well as then their external audience. They know who they are, and they know how they’ve had to change over time to maintain visibility, a familiar face as well as then reassure their audience that, “Yes, we’re still Mailchimp, still the organization you’ve known and trusted for years. You can still make sure and feel confident that you know who we are and how we are and where we’re going.”

Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap

You bring up a good point about the need to be evolutionary instead of revolutionary as you’re growing your business. If you’ve made your core customers feel they’re not seen and heard or appreciated trying to go after bigger ones, you can trip yourself up there.

Moreover, those customers need to feel both that they’re still important and that they still matter, but also that they know where you’re going. It can be as simple as strategically sharing your roadmap to build that buzz, but also so that people feel confident that, “This is a company I’ve known for a long time, and I know where they’re going in the future.” Also, by giving them hooks of familiarity so that you’re not relaunching your brand right now, you’re still maintaining elements of it that helps to maintain their confidence in themselves that they still know this brand. They feel like they can still trust this brand, that they made a good decision in going with this brand and investing with it. That’s especially important right now because there is so much upheaval in our world and in our economy. For organizations that say now is the time to relaunch, now is the time to completely overhaul our website, when I hear that, I shudder and my head and say, “No, now is not the time for revolution.” It’s more about evolution. Your audience needs to feel they still know you. If you can offer them that level of comfort and confidence in you and in themselves, that’s helping to ground them in a time that is so otherwise unsettled.

In your book, Trustworthy, you have a three-piece action plan. Can you give us the highlights of what that is?

The framework that I present in Trustworthy, it focuses on three parts, voice, volume and vulnerability. I present this as a framework for anybody that’s in professional communication. Designers, the CMO, copywriters, content strategists. If you’re the small business owner and you’re wearing all of those hats, great, this is something that you can take on. To build trust, you need to focus on those three areas. Voice, we’ve been talking about that a lot. Voice refers to the familiar and consistent way in which a brand engages with the world visually and verbally, so word, choice, the overall look and feel of the organization, the different content types you use across different platforms. That’s your voice. That’s what Mailchimp does so well. Some of the other examples I share like Banana Republic, the early days of that, they did so well.

[bctt tweet=”Be evolutionary instead of revolutionary.” username=”John_Livesay”]

The second section, volume, that refers to the volume of information that you’re publishing. The length and level of detail that you go into, in blog posts, in long form copy, if you’re deciding between long form copy and bulleted lists, as well as then, visually. Are you using images that maybe have a great level of detail in them, or are more streamlined to project the sense of simplicity? Do you have images that are maybe in 1 of 50 in a photo gallery or are things more streamlined so that people can get the gist more quickly? For some organizations, they feel like in order to build trust, they need to publish a lot. They need to have a lot of content marketing. That makes sense for some organizations. I profile in the book, Crutchfield Electronics, in order for their audience to feel good about a purchase, maybe it’s high-end audio equipment or camera equipment, they spend a lot of time on the site.

If you look at the pages on that site, they’re long. There’s a lot of different types of content there. You can make sure that you understand a product fully by the time you’re ready to buy because that’s what’s right for their audience. They know that it’s right. They can measure the success of that in the rate of product returns. They’re low because when people are finally ready to make that decision, they can make a decision with confidence. That’s how you know you’ve got enough content, when people can make good decisions and feel good about the decisions they make.

The third section, vulnerability, that focuses is, we were talking about on how organizations maybe prototype in public, come back from a big mistake, take that risk to say, “Do we double down on what we did that was maybe stupid? Maybe the CEO did something wrong or do we seize this opportunity to say we messed up. Here’s how we’re going to own it and here’s how we’re going to make sure it never happens again. Help us in this process, watch how we’re improving, keep giving us feedback.” It’s a tremendous opportunity to bring your audience closer.

The other way that I look at vulnerability in the book is also around how organizations make their values visible. One of the organizations that I profile there is Penzeys Spices. They’re a spice retail chain based in the Midwest. They’ve been bold talking about their politics, why they support immigration, why they oppose some of the other big intractable social problems that we’re facing now and their stance on it. When they first took to social media, sharing their politics, people pushed back. People said, “Stay in your lane there, spice boy. Why are you sharing this?” It was largely the CEO sharing his personal politics. He was pretty upfront about it. He said, “This is our lane. Not only are we a business that sees itself as part of a community, therefore issues in the community are important to us, but also the stuff that we trade in, spices, they come from war torn regions. Furthermore, cooking as an act of love, that’s not just our tagline. We believe that. Many of the recipes that we all love come here on the backs of immigrants. This is much our lane.” It was risky for him to take that position, but when organizations share their values in such a visible way, what usually happens is that people don’t look away. They respond loudly and they got a lot of headlines for that. They lost a lot of customers.

They expanded their audience. They gained a lot of customers, and they weren’t just people that were interested in cooking, they were people that said, “Your values align with my values. This is where I’m shopping next Christmas to get presents for my family. The people that I know that do cook, this is where I’m going to buy presents for them.” They saw something like 50% growth year over year in their profits after they got more political and made their values visible. It’s such an act of vulnerability, but more and more, what we hear is that people do want that level of insight into the organizations where they spend their money.

The book again is called Trustworthy. It’s available wherever you can buy a book. Any last thoughts or link you want to leave us with?

No, thank you so much. This was wonderful. If you want to learn more about it, please visit AppropriateInc.com/Trustworthy. You can follow me on Twitter @MBloomstein. I look forward to hearing how more people use the ideas in this book.

Thanks, Margot.

Important Links

• Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap
• Content Strategy
• Appropriate, Inc.
• BrandSort
• @MBloomstein – Twitter
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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