Part 2: Back To Our Future

In part 1 of this series of articles we began looking into the evolution of trust in brands and how changing environmental, societal and macroeconomic factors could be creating an erosion of trust in brands as symbols of quality and integrity.

Tereza Litsa is a marketing writer, trainer and strategist, who also runs the wonderful Reclaim Social community.  She analysed research into the components of brand trust and identified three categories where there is evidence consumer trust in leading brands has eroded:

• Product experience
• Customer experience
• Impact on society

Resolving product and customer experience issues are unequivocally within the realm of teams working across the marketing mix. Common complaints found across the research in these areas were perhaps unsurprising: the perception that companies are reducing the quality of their products to save costs and increase purchase frequency as well as predictable issues around cost and value are all featured. Though interestingly, trust in brands to deliver excellent customer experience showed more evidence of decline than with categories relating to product experience. Recurring concerns among consumers relating to customer experience included: a feeling that it's it harder to get a resolution to issues through customer service when things go wrong- companies closing shops and branches; hiding behind FAQ pages, annoying chatbots and the pain of contacting outsourced, understaffed call centres with long call wait times. Another area of customer experience eroding trust can be summarised as "slights of hand". These included hidden costs, the use of onerous-but not obvious- terms and conditions and a lack of transparency about future price rises beyond introductory offers- particularly with insurance products, subscription services and utilities, including mobile phone, broadband and energy contracts. The macroeconomic factors behind these complaints were described in Part 1, on the face of it they can be tied back to the corporate struggle to drive continuous growth in mature markets.

However, among the three categories of brand trust erosion identified, interestingly "Impact on Society" is the one where trust in brands appears to be falling the fastest in the UK. As one example of research findings, Edelman's 2019 Special Report "In Brands We Trust?" (sampled pre-pandemic therefore uninfluenced by lockdown bias) found that only 38%, of those sampled, trusted brands when it came to environmental and societal considerations. And nearly 50% of UK consumers, in a 2022 Deloitte study into attitudes towards sustainable purchasing, said they just didn't know what information to trust, amongst environmental claims from the businesses selling to them.

Naturally marketers will question whether this matters when it comes to purchasing consideration.  The short answer is that it appears so, but with some caveats. If we refer to the same study by Edelman, the top three self-reported drivers of purchase shortlisting for brands were quality, convenience and value.

Statements which laddered up to "I must be able to trust the brand to do what's right for society and the environment." came 5th in the list of consideration drivers in the Edelman research. 81% of respondents chose these among the factors with the most influence on their purchase decisions.

But when asked specifically about what made them distrust a brand, to the degree that they would avoid purchasing it, 55% of consumers surveyed identified issues relating to customer experience, 62% chose factors relating to product quality and experience and 69% claimed concerns about brands' societal impact, the category which received the highest level of response among reasons to distrust brands.

Societal Impact and Brand Trust

The Brand Pharmacists have worked on projects for a number of brands which put societal and environmental responsibility at the heart of their proposition. One thing that we've learnt is that there is frequently a "say vs do" gap between stated and actual behaviours, when it comes to what's been described as, the "rise of the conscious consumer", and how influential social and environmental issues really are when it comes to purchase decisions.  Often we've found the audience segments who actually prioritise such matters in their purchasing, vary enormously across categories and contexts. What's more they almost invariably have a different geodemographic profile from the audiences who claim they prioritise the environment and societal impact in their purchasing, within the surveys quoted for PR by agencies, trade journalists and conference presenters. 

Our investigations so far, into consumer attitudes to environmental and social issues, the consequences for brands and whether these attitudes are affecting changes in consumer buying behaviour are at an early stage. Though one thing is clear already: the reality is more nuanced than the binary debate we see in the marketing media (and indeed Unilever shareholder meetings) between champions of "brand purpose" and those who feel it is irrelevant virtue signalling.

Regrettably, whilst there are some companies affecting meaningful change, it has become fashionable for big brands to wash themselves of issues requiring greater focus beyond a short term sales forecast. Nonetheless, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting the issues consumers care about are becoming more influential in shaping their purchasing intent. Whilst it is undeniable there has been a lack of rigour, behind many public proclamations from marketing influencers about the (increasingly toxic) term "brand purpose",  it is also disingenuous to dismiss this whole field of debate, around the role of environmental and societal issues in influencing purchase consideration, as "irrelevant purpose marketing bullshit".

Several of the brand trust studies we've reviewed, including the Edelman data, show that whilst traditional parameters- like value, convenience and perception of quality- remain the key purchase drivers, consideration of the societal and environmental impact of firms, and a disinclination to believe they can be trusted to do the right thing, does seem to be lessening trust in brands among a significant number of British buyers and in some categories affecting purchase behaviour. Simultaneously we've started to see evidence of a significant rise in interest for, what might be broadly termed, ethical brands.

In 2012 Helena Martins Gonçalves of Universidade de Lisboa, along with professors Carolina Afonso and Gary Akehurst, wrote an academic paper, Re-examining green purchase behaviour and the green consumer profile to re-examine the determinants of ecologically conscious consumer behaviour (ECCB), building on a 1999 research paper by Straughan and Roberts. The study explored the determinants of effective green purchase behaviour (GPB) considering ECCB and green purchase intention (GPI). The results suggested that psychographic variables were more relevant than socio-demographics in explaining ECCB. Consumers with higher ECCB showed higher green purchase intention (GPI). ECCB had a higher positive impact on actual purchase behaviour than intent- i.e. whenever ecological consciousness is high, the gap between positive intent and actual purchasing behaviour is less evident. The authors concluded, with some caveats, that the study also showed evidence that the gap between what consumers believe and their actual buying behaviour, on environmental issues they believed in, was closing with time.

In 2021, a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit and World Wildlife Fund, "An Eco Awakening" also looked at real consumer behaviour. It revealed online searches for sustainable goods increased by 71 percent between 2016 and 2020. The Ethical Consumer Markets Report 2021 examined ethical consumer spending and finance in the UK. It stated there was a 24 percent increase in ethical consumer spending and finance from 2019 to 2020, with the size of the UK market reaching £122bn. Co-operative Group CEO, Steve Murrells, CEO of the Co-op Group which co-produced the report, said: "The report is a clear warning to brands that they must do business in a better way for workers, communities and the planet."

Deloitte's research in June 2022 found that, despite heightened concerns about inflation and a general economic downturn in the UK during the fieldwork phase, a rise in conscious purchasing decisions seen during the pandemic has largely been sustained. Deloitte's report also indicated that British consumers are most likely to make sustainable or ethical choices in the categories they deem essential and buy most frequently. This manifested most strongly when shopping for food and non-alcoholic beverages: with reported increases in purchasing local produce, limiting consumption of meat and animal products, more focus on recycling/reducing waste and cutting back on single-use plastic. Deloitte also noted signs of more socially conscious purchasing of clothing and footwear, reducing the number of new clothing items bought, fixing clothes, buying second hand/refurbished clothes, and choosing brands based on their sustainability and ethical practices.  However, the same report showed significant divisions amongst respondents, with near 50:50 splits between respondents on whether they cared about sustainability when purchasing, whether they had enough information to make more sustainable choices and whether they felt buying sustainable would increase their costs. Around 60%, of the 200 people sampled, said they would switch more of their purchases to more ethical choices, if sustainable products were more affordable. Aggregated data also suggested a majority would buy more sustainably if information provided to buyers was clearer or less confusing. Under 25% of consumers surveyed felt they could trust claims from brands around sustainability in their labelling and over 50% said that they didn't know which information to trust from companies or had such high levels of distrust that it wouldn't make any difference to their purchase decisions anyway.

Whilst the environment tends to dominate studies into conscious buying, a wider set of societal issues are clearly at play too, when it comes to the evolving expectations of brands and whether they're being met. Edelman's 2022 Trust barometer, surveying 36,000 respondents in November 2021, found that over 50% of respondents believed businesses were not doing enough when it came to wider societal issues in general, with climate (52%), economic inequality (49%) and workforce re-skilling (46%) being the headline topics within a more specific breakdown of the issues.

The report contextualised these numbers alongside dramatic falls in trust in government and media organisations and a general rise in consumer fearfulness. Fear of job loss (85% respondents concerned, up 1% YoY), fears about climate change (75% concerned/ +3% YoY), fears relating to the security of data/cyber attacks (71% concerned/+3% YoY), loss of freedoms as a citizen (65% concerned/+4% YoY) and fears around prejudice and racism (57% concerned/+6% YoY) were the most commonly cited issues of concern. In another 2022 study by ACA, in the United States, 45% of those surveyed felt companies should do more to address social issues affecting their customers. Whilst that's less than 50%, it was the highest figure identified by the annual study in the last 5 years.

Ed Williams, president and CEO of Edelman UK believes that individual brands can build and regain trust by meaningfully engaging with societal issues. He points out that, in the UK results from their Trust Barometer, more people trusted brands than the government: "Whilst only 20% believe the current economic system in the UK works for them, we see an increasing expectation for business to take a lead as trust in government continues to spiral...our 2022 survey found that 58% of respondents will buy or advocate for brands based on their beliefs and values, 60% will choose a place of work based on their beliefs and values and 64% say they will make investment decisions based on them."

Derrick Feldmann, a leading researcher and advisor on global social movements and issues offers a useful build on such statistics. He has run a series of "Corporate Social Mind" studies and worked with leading organisations in their approach to the challenges of engendering brand trust in a minefield of social agendas. His view is that, whilst there is a discernible shift in consumer attitudes, companies need to do their own research and to recognise that consumers behaviour and expectations of corporate social issue engagement can appear contradictory.  "Our research, tracking consumers who self-report that social issues influence their purchase behaviour, shows this isn't always so and they don't act as a monolith- it's important to understand the segmentation.  Of course acquiescence bias can come into play on any survey, but especially when it comes to those researching social issues, where people fear being judged as a bad person." He adds, "It's clear societal considerations are important factors in buying behaviour, but they sit alongside many other factors, such as affordability, quality and availability and the relative importance of each factor will be different for individuals and the situation they're in."

Feldmann's research suggests the societal issues, that can influence trust and purchase decisions, are highly fragmented and can be culturally, politically, geographically and demographically influenced, with variance across product categories too. For example, two consumers may both have strong feelings on buying food from sustainable sources, but have big differences on how the factors they use to define "sustainably sourced food".  Such issues can be personal and need to be researched and clustered by brands to determine the significant clusters at play for each context.

Quality and Brand Trust

So there is evidence that shifting attitudes to environmental issues are leading to changing customer expectations from brands, that are complex and not always being fulfilled. This is a hypothesis we are investigating and refining to find pragmatic recommendations that can help brands build greater trust.  We had also started a separate study, with the aim of better understanding the role of perceived quality as a component driving brand preference, in a world where trust in brands is being increasingly challenged. However we soon found that the relationship between quality as a variable and trust in brands to do the right thing, on societal and environmental issues, was closer than we first envisaged. This was particularly true amongst younger respondents we spoke to, among many of whom there was a strong sense of "brand hypocrisy". For example we've heard repondents talk at length about brands making empty claims about the environment, whilst making products more "disposable", using cheap chemicals with environmental impact as ingredients, using excess plastic in packaging and profiting from the use of "out of sight out of mind" sweatshops for manufacturing. Frequently this disappointment in the hypocrisy of brands was more tangible than specific views about environmental or societal responsibility. Furthermore those with these views made a clear link between quality and integrity, i.e. brands with integrity have a perception of quality since they can be trusted to do the right thing. We'll come back to this theme later.

Intrinsic to Philip Kotler's definition of how brands grow trust is the concept of brands as a mental shortcut for a perceived quality standard that is delivered against over time. i.e. Brands can't engender trust over the long term unless they are underwritten by quality. This perception of quality, delivered distinctively and at scale, is a significant reason why branded products can command a price premium and superior margins, whilst sustaining volume, in comparison to alternatives with weaker brand equity.  Therefore a fall in the perceived quality of a brand amongst a significant cohort of consumers may have serious commercial consequences. Let's not forget that brands are among the most valuable assets of many large companies.

Historically brands got themselves onto the shortlist for consumer selection by raising awareness, increasing distribution, pricing effectively and establishing strong, consistent associations between the brand name and its products. Successful brands have generally achieved mass market mental availability (they're recalled easily by the target audience), are easy to buy, with good physical availability, and have achieved perceptions of higher relative quality, distinctiveness and relevance versus most of their immediate competitor set.

This relationship between brands and quality appears to still be important: it's frequently named as the primary driver of brand purchase consideration in research, including the aforementioned Edelman report. A 2018 study by First Insight, using a demographic sample representative of the US population, found that 54 percent of men and 51 percent of women ranked quality as the most important factor when making a purchase and 71% ranked the brand name as "very important" in predicting the quality of an item being purchased.

Yet 49% of 7,000 consumers surveyed in the ASQ Global State of Quality research, with a comparably comprised sample, said that the quality of U.S. products had declined in the past five years. In addition, 59% expected quality to stay down or decline further in the upcoming five years.  It doesn't take long to find similar research findings in the UK. Research from YouGov commissioned in 2022, in partnership with Red Tractor, revealed a significant drop in consumer trust across almost all British institutions, with food and energy seeing the biggest deterioration since 2021. The main driver of the fall, in most categories was a perception of falling quality of both products and services.

Anecdotally, it appears we've seen a tangible shift away from quality as a driver of consumer behaviours in recent years, in many sectors, with flourishing demand for fast fashion, fast furniture and cheap electronic goods that are cheaper to throw away than repair.

Take a look on Amazon, the UK's most visited eCommerce marketplace, in many categories, the bestsellers aren't from household brand names anymore, but a new cohort of (strangely named) "brands" retailing products made in China, produced in batch drops aligned to current trends, then shipped to warehouses to be fulfilled by Amazon. Then there are the "virtual brands" on Amazon, frequently with consonant heavy names, doing significant volumes on products sourced from exactly the same wholesale manufacturers as their competitors, but have aced both sellers of the same product and more established players in mastering visibility, pricing and conversion on the Amazon platform.

In an article for Vox, called "Your stuff is actually worse now". Deputy Editor of Future Perfect, Izzie Ramirez found evidence that erosion of quality in fashion and electronics isn't just anecdotal. Companies are lowering the quality of products, shortening planned obsolescence and changing design elements, minor features and styles more regularly, so consumers feel the urge to buy more things, more frequently in order to fit in.

Of course, when it comes to style led items in particular, such as fast fashion, social media accelerates the trend even further. Consumers today buy 5 times more clothes than they did in the 1980s, much of which is designed to be cheap, fast and easy to manufacturer- meaning a rise in the use of plastic based textiles such as polyester, and an increase in the use of outsourced factories, frequently "sweatshops" with poor working standards, low wages and sometimes even workers ensnared in what amounts to modern slavery. Polyester is environmentally damaging and more clothes made from it are being discarded then buried or burned, sooner after they've been made, than ever before. It's not just fast fashion either, similar stories can be found within industries such as furniture manufacturing and small electrical goods.

Does Quality Matter For Brands?

So is quality still important? Whilst it's inseparable from the "P" of product within the classic "4Ps" of the marketing mix, it does seem to have dropped down the marketing agenda. Perhaps this is in part due to concepts like "brand trust" and quality have frequently (and I would argue incorrectly) been conflated with "brand love", a concept once en vogue with brand marketers and now desperately unfashionable, with many having converted to the church of Professor Byron Sharp. 

One of the core commandments of brand love is that, through powerful emotional differentiation, brands can achieve loyalty beyond reason from consumers. Whereas, Professor Byron's followers evangelise that brand love is a foolish notion. In his model, loyalty is driven by penetration. Brands create mental availability through maintaining a constant share of voice, making sure that they are easily found and bought and through their distinctive assets. Essentially the most available brand wins and frequently share gains are made by winning light buyers more frequently. Salience, distinctiveness, reach and penetration are the holy commandments to follow for sales redemption. 

Previously, over zealous brand love missionaries were probably responsible for misrepresenting the teachings of their beloved concept's high priest: When former Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts introduced the idea of "Lovemarks" in his 2004 book, that became a bible for brand love disciples, he intended it to refer to an elite subcategory of brands, and didn't advocate it was something every brand could or should aspire to.  Lovemarks lacked the scientific rigour of Professor Sharp's work, and whilst the pugnacious "Lord Byron" tends to dismiss the work of others, it's also worth remembering that, before and since Lovemarks there has been plenty of independent and scientific study into brands and purchase behaviour that aren't from Byron Sharp's Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.

That said, Sharp has only really said that pursuing higher quality as a singular strategy isn't necessarily going to make one brand grow over another, that it can eat into margins (as can price cuts) and that it's replicable by competitors, so gains can be temporary.  One can also deduce, from his comments about Microsoft and Unilever, that he sees differentiation (through products that solve problems and build physical and mental availability) as preferable to weak and replicable claims about brand purpose, where they are unrelated to the true purpose of a good product or service. For example, when he said: "Microsoft founder Bill Gates has become synonymous with philanthropy, he should be remembered for bringing productivity software to the world and transforming computing."

Analyst Victoria Sakal, in research for Morning Consult, suggested that any victory, in a war of principles between the aforementioned schools of thought, could be a pyrrhic one. Her analysis found that brands without mass awareness (mental availability) were inevitably going to underperform in mass markets. However within a cohort of brands with strong awareness, the core drivers of brand purchase performance were strongly interrelated, with quality (reliability), reputation for quality, accessibility (is available in the places I shop), availability (has the products available when I need them) and "is a brand I trust" being the most significant factors influencing purchase growth.

Morning Consult also ran a qualitative analysis on more than 13,000 open-end survey responses detailing reasons behind America's "most loved brands".  This was supplemented with quantitative research on 48 potential drivers of brand love. Sakal's  findings were that the drivers of brand love were brand trust, mental availability of a brand (as recommended implicitly or explicitly by others) and ease of access/purchase- a better buying experience or easy availability through wide distribution (physical availability).

As well as her research, Victoria Sakal also analysed the actual 2020 performance of the top 50 "most loved" US brands.  To summarise, she found that quality (experienced and perceived) is the main driver of brand trust, brand trust is the most important driver of brand love and that brands with the highest levels of brand love have also achieved growth through alignment with Byron' Sharps rules on how brands grow. 

"From early-stage consideration to later-stage usage and even loyalty, brand love demonstrates a strong relationship with important funnel metrics, and the concept actually aligns with Byron Sharp's rules  on how brands grow...(potentially) validating brand love’s viability as both an insightful window into consumer sentiment and an indicator of future growth. In this way, brand love becomes a critical complement to retrospective metrics often cited as optimistic proxies for future performance."

Sakal identifies both experienced quality (reliably meeting expectation) and perceived quality (reputation) as trust drivers.  Prolific marketing writer and academic Mark Ritson believes a strong brand perception can slyly alter human truth when it comes to perceived quality. One example he refers to relates to a time when he reviewed research clearly showing Virgin Mobile had a double digit lead over its rival T-Mobile, across a whole raft of UK customer perception data, including questions relating to signal clarity and call reliability. The irony being, in the UK, Virgin Mobile is a virtual mobile network operator and, at the time of the survey, they ran their service on T-Mobile's network infrastructure.

There was a further notable facet of Sakal's brand love analysis. As well as a match with Sharp’s marketing tenets, she found that positive feelings about "community impact" were also very strongly correlated to Brand Love (0.94), with sub-drivers of community impact being, local involvement, quality of service, supporting health and wellbeing among workers and the community and respect for the environment. In Ritson's example Virgin had gained a brand perception premium through an earned reputation for championing better quality of service than incumbents. Service has long been associated with the perceived quality and trust levels of brand, but what about the other factors Sakal identified within her definition of "community impact" ?

Brands Going Back For The Future

I recently met with two former colleagues, hard nosed business people with an understanding of both capital markets and sustainability, to discuss how brands may be losing trust, on environmental, societal and quality issues.  Elliott Aeschilmann Perales is a former asset management analyst, turned sustainable retail and marketplace entrepreneur. Massimiliano (Mana) Gritti was previously his co-founder at Bombinate Group, an ethical retail business and is now an advisor to sustainable sourcing platform, Sourceful. Neither are surprised to hear the consumer data regarding social and environmental issues or purchase consideration. They aren't sold on what Mana calls "contrived brand purpose" either.

Elliott told me, "It's not really surprising to find that if someone is buying detergent, they're more likely to buy one that's easy to find and affordable, from a brand they've heard of, which has a good enough reputation for them to be sure it won't destroy their clothes or give them a nasty rash. I doubt they would buy it because a big corporation tells them 'this  bottle of chemicals is going to save the polar bears'." Mana agrees, adding "This isn't a big company versus small company issue, Lever Brothers (forerunner of Unilever) became a huge company selling soap and I think most people would agree they were a responsible business. Making good quality cleaning products, in a responsible way, providing good quality jobs for thousands of workers and allowing millions of people to live in more hygienic conditions, that's a noble purpose in itself".

Nonetheless we all agree that it's a bit of a myth in the marketing industry are gods of consumer centricity, as Mana says,"Sodium laureth sulfate, high fructose corn syrup and plastics in clothing didn't end up there because they were good for consumers or because people were demanding them!  They ended up there because they're cheap solutions and easy to mass produce.  It's easier than ever to find out about how companies have acted, and health and environmental issues are better understood and higher up the agenda. So it's in some ways it's not really a surprise that trust in brands has fallen, as consumers find these things out. But there's also more misinformation out there too and some of these issues are complex, so there's a real opportunity for brands brave enough to own their pasts and simplify choice by standing up for doing the right thing and actually doing it." 

Elliott feels that quality, sustainability and social issues are often intertwined, and comes back to a tendency for companies to pursue excess profit, to satisfy short termist investors,  rather than fair profit that benefits a wider set of stakeholders. "When you speak to people, they want good quality for an affordable price, which can be at odds with companies who want to keep growing ever larger profits for a relatively small group of large shareholders."  He agrees with Colin Mayer's perspective, as outlined in his book Prosperity,  that pursuing excess profits can reach a point where the gains aren't actually profitable at all when looked at from the view of society as a whole: "If you attributed the huge costs involved with addressing plastic pollution, improving air quality or attending to the climate emergency back to the companies that caused these problems, even if it wasn't intentioned, then their profitability wouldn't be as strong. Now we know the damage being done it's hard to argue pursuing further damage isn't intentioned or that these firms should bear more of the cost. That's before you even get into the costs relating to boom-bust employment practices in the US and UK, the cost of a domestic mental health crisis in those countries or the clean up that at some point will have to take place in the developing countries they've outsourced their production and pollution to."

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Unilever, and Procter & Gamble have been named by Greenpeace as the top 5 creators of plastic pollution. (These companies, directly and indirectly are also notable sources of funding for the activities of some popular "rockstar" marketing professors...#justsaying). Greenpeace has named Coca-Cola as the biggest plastic polluter for four years in a row and says that in 2019 Coca-cola admitted to pumping out an estimated 200,000 single-use bottles every minute. Break Free From Plastic, in a plastic waste audit, found more Coca-Cola-branded waste than from the next two top polluters combined. They point out that marketers can't just say it's nothing to do with them, or that they're just providing what customers want, particularly when polling by City to Sea found that 91% of Brits are trying to reduce their use of single use plastic and 65% believe big brands aren't doing enough to help. 

Elliott Aeschilmann Perales believes it's ultimately in their financial interest to change: "79% of plastic waste is sent to landfills or ends up in the oceans and only 9% is actually recycled. 51 trillion microplastics litter our oceans and these particles have been found in the placentas of unborn babies. Consumers don't want that! And all this damage will need to be paid for one way or another. Company valuations and stock prices are based on investor sentiment about future earning potential and stock prices, not just on current sales. Inevitably, as environmental issues become even more acute, companies seen as big polluters are going to come under greater scrutiny from people and governments. We've already seen big, hard-nosed funds like Blackrock realise this and change their investment strategy." -  In 2022 Blackrock CEO Larry Fink wrote an open letter to CEOs of firms they had shareholdings, saying climate risk is investment risk and that,  "Our conviction at BlackRock is that companies perform better (in the long run) when they are deliberate about their role in society and act in the interests of their employees, customers, communities, and their shareholders....We focus on sustainability not because we're environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients."

Mana Gritti believes that Blackrock's letter to CEOs is a sign that quality of delivery and integrity of action are being seen as drivers of future prosperity: "I think it's a little bit like we need to be act now about our future whilst learning from how we acted in the past. We need better quality goods that last longer and less plastic products, like we used to have, but combined with modern safety standards and more sustainable manufacturing processes. If things are better quality then they're less likely to be returned or thrown away and, when they reach the end of their useful life, they are more likely to be reused, recycled or upcycled. If you take drinks packaging, as recently as the 1970s, most milk and many soft drinks in the UK came in glass bottles that were returned and reused. We used to use more aluminium instead of plastic too, which is lighter than glass, and can be constantly recycled with no change in properties, unlike plastic."  (Recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy used to make a new can, but the UK only recycles about half the aluminium packaging that's thrown away today.)

"I believe we also need more, better quality jobs with skills training in the UK, like we had before we saw things like mass outsourcing of manufacturing and zero-hour contracts. If we re-skill the UK workforce, making more people feel proud about what they've learned, whilst enriching their jobs, this will have positive indirect effects too, such as reducing the cost and burden on our mental health services and police forces. But at the same time we can't just go back to the past. The approaches to capitalism that have worked over the last 40 years and that have helped make people richer, won't work for the next 40 years because the planet and its population won't be able to support them- and it would be irresponsible to do so, now we've learnt the true cost of some of the things we did collectively, as people and businesses, over that period."

Brand Pharmacists

My conversation with Mana and Elliott prompted the Brand Pharmacists team and I to think more deeply about this idea: of going back to learn how best to move forward. So we decided to undertake our own research into the complex relationship between quality and trust in brands. We also want to explore whether the compelling moral case for businesses to act with greater responsibility, towards environmental and social issues, has the potential to translate into a distinctive commercial advantage for brands: growing sales whilst building trust and sustaining sufficient profitability.  And, as in the words of John Willshire, "Making things people want > Making people want things", we want to use the research to help refine our own proposition of helping good brands get better and to define the kinds of brands we want to nurture.

Our research is at a preliminary stage and currently focussed on the UK. The Brand Pharmacists team have reviewed existing quantitative research reports, such as the YouGov BrandIndex and Edelman Trust Barometer, to create a qualitative research plan with the objective of building hypotheses for further validation. At the moment, we're undertaking  a series of interviews, with groups of people representative of the demographic make up of the UK,  at  locations across the British nations and regions. Although we haven't finished, we're already excited to see some consistent themes emerging. Broadly speaking these fall into five areas:

Craft: A general feeling that whilst the world is seeing incredible progress in technology, there's also a decline in the quality of affordable clothing and many household goods.  We've certainly found consumers describing higher purchase intent for goods from brands that have been well made, by people they can relate to and who are treated fairly within a supply chain that can be identified. Affordability, availability and satisfactory quality are seen as givens for a purchase but there are signs, from our interviews to date, that a perceived craft premium can drive new purchase consideration, trial and switching to brands which deliver a premium to existing satisficers within a consideration set. Another emerging trait we've seen is that within the product and service sectors where craft is more highly valued, the premium placed on it can be very personal to individual consumers. Frequently there is a connection to family, friends or past experiences. 

Seth Godin once described hope and nostalgia as the two most powerful emotions sellers can evoke. It's inescapable that we've heard a lot of nostalgic feedback in interviews, relating to the craft category. Across the age groups we have spoken we have spoken so far, even younger ones, people displayed nostalgic feelings towards a (often non-specific) time when there were more UK manufacturing jobs, a "previous era" when things were made properly (perhaps they never owned an Austin Allegro) and a frustration, as one person put it with "cheap plastic crap shipped from the other side of the world."  Yet hope was frequently expressed that, at some point, there would be a trend back towards better things, made sustainably and widely available for a reasonable price. This may seem an obvious desire, who wouldn't want that, but few felt that was the status quo.  And responses linked to the theme of craft wasn't just about consumption. They were also strongly associated with better quality jobs, the societal benefits of greater job satisfaction across communities (e.g. less alcoholism, drug use and lower crime), better training provision and the collective growth of vocational craft skills, creating a positive legacy for communities.

Communities: So far we've found very little evidence, beyond a small cohort of niche interest brands, to support the concept that brands can create their own, viable, long term communities that engender loyalty. Nonetheless we have found some early evidence that brands may be losing connection with real world communities, with whom a stronger connection could drive more frequent purchase. Outsourcing, tax avoidance and even a disconnect caused by brands using "influencers", versus relatable peers from the community, are themes that have arisen in interviews.

Brands making a contribution to the collective good of communities is something many seem to yearn for, in a world where, as one person put it: "It feels like more people here are working harder, to make fewer people living somewhere else much richer." It's worth highlighting that we have heard positive feedback about brands taking well received steps towards engaging with and supporting local communities. There are also some brands which consumers we've spoken to expressed positive sentiment towards, through their engagement with "communities of shared interest", particularly in the sport, health and fitness categories.  As a consequence of the research completed so far we've already started discussing some interesting concepts around brands engendering greater trust in communities connected to issues such as shared workspaces, access to mental and physical healthcare, improving high-streets and the creation of more affordable living spaces. 

Colleagues:  An interesting observation has been that there seems to be a mental connection between companies that consumers would like to work for and companies which they'd like to buy from. Another subject that's come up is that consumers don't want to buy from companies that treat workers badly- low pay, poor working conditions, use of sweatshops, use of zero-hours contracts etc- but sometimes feel they don't have affordable or available alternatives. Were other viable options to exist, they would swap- at least they say they would, again more validation is required. Linked to this is an underlying anger about the lack of vocational skills training in the UK and the fact that jobs in many professions have moved overseas, reducing the diversity of skilled employment options in the UK. There are signs that a hypothesis may arise linking the creation of better quality jobs and training with higher brand purchase consideration, in some categories.

Customers:  Customer service has been the area we've heard the most emotional responses within. In short we're feeling the anger. There seems to be a sense that companies are dehumanising their service faster than customers want them to. Common themes are finding ways around the hurdles of chatbots and faqs, frustration at long waits to speak with poorly trained script driven call centre operatives and a feeling nobody in customer service actually cares about service anymore. Other sources of anger include companies still using staffing levels and Covid as excuses for poor service.

This all chimes with the Institute of Customer Service's survey which showed 2022 UK customer service satisfaction was at the lowest recorded level. Low service satisfaction certainly seems to be a trigger for switching and for rejection or blocking of advertising messages- potentially lowering effective share of voice for brands with serious service problems.
In fact all aspects of customer experience have been closely linked with perception of quality in our interviews, and again, we've heard the issue of brand hypocrisy emerging, to the detriment of perceived quality and trust.

We have heard examples of good service too, some which have engendered loyalty through delivering genuinely superior customer experience, rather than unmet platitudes. Some recent service innovations receiving notable mentions included some of the better customer service chat services (the ones with real people on the end); better apps for booking taxis, accommodation and managing holiday money; couriers offering more specific delivery estimates and tracking; the option to return goods through electronic lockers and self-service return stations in convenience stores.  Mining beneath the anger at poor service, we've unearthed several pragmatic suggestions, leading to some interesting concepts to test for companies to provide cost effective, human service interaction through collaboration, whilst keeping costs lower for everyone. 

Climate:  This has been the area where we've been finding the most insightful feedback so far. We're not going to go through all of it here but in summary, most people we have spoken to want to make a more positive contribution to addressing the climate crisis. However, their lives are busy and they feel confused as to who to trust. They need help in determining how they can make a tangible difference. We also heard several consumers express their belief  that some kind of sacrifice was typically required to be more ecologically positive. I.e. Environmentally friendly products weren't as effective, didn't taste as good, cost more or looked worse. Certainly there was a lot of confusion leading to inertia when it came to doing more for the planet. For example, several people we've spoken to feel let down that all the effort they've made to recycle their plastic over the years hasn't made much difference. 

We've also found signs of a latent desire for brands to do what brands should do: that consumers would love to buy brands that make it easier to quickly select products, from companies they trust to do the right thing for the environment- because doing the right thing makes people feel good.

Yet today they distrust many of the environmental claims of big brands, or find them confusing, whilst simultaneously feeling there are probably smaller brands out there they'd like to buy, doing the right thing, but they can't find them regularly or haven't heard of them- the classic jeopardy of low physical and mental availability.

There's another interesting trope emerging in our interviews too. It's probably not a fashionable one to draw attention to either. It seems a lot of the newer, often more environmentally focused, brands rely heavily on social media advertising. On one level you can see why, it's accessible for start-ups and there's plenty of authoritative sounding people out there telling them that Gen Z consumers both care more about the climate and spend all their time on social media. Yet what we're starting to hear warms the cockles of my ageing marketer's heart- a lot of consumers have less trust in advertising claims they've only heard in social media ads. They're regularly exposed to hucksters peddling get-rich-quick schemes and dubious beauty treatments. Consequently quite a few people have told us that they don't believe social media ads are as well regulated as those on radio, TV or posters. There are some influencers they trust for recommendations, but as with brands, it takes time to earn trust and they don't trust all influencers per se. In short, they're sceptical. So the sustainability claims of some "for good" brands could  be doubted, in part because they're young brands, promoting themselves within an environment where trust in brands, that aren't seen or heard beyond social platforms, is low.

Why We're Building Brand Pharmacists

We've got a lot further to go with our research and whilst we're childishly excited, by what we've heard so far, we'd strongly encourage you, dear reader, to treat the insights above as thought starters for further explanation and not definitive facts.  Nonetheless, the feedback we've received has given us the confidence to scale up Brand Pharmacists.

It's clear to us that the world is literally changing, not in a good way.  We can argue about the details, but there's plenty of evidence highlighting the plight of our planet- there's more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at anytime in recorded history, in the words of NASA, on their Vital Signs of the Planet website: "The Earth's climate has changed throughout history...The current warming trend is different because it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s and is proceeding at a rate not seen over many recent millennia."

The world is burning and simultaneously more people are experiencing mental challenges living on it.  Whilst life expectancy is historically high, data from the Office for National Statistics shows that recorded depression rates in Britain have doubled  between 2019 and 2022. At least 30% of the UK population are believed to have one or more long-term mental health conditions. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has investigated human wellbeing since 1938. Its leaders believe they have found the primary contributory factor to the mental health crisis: people are spending less time with fewer people that they care about. Whilst "social media" networks have grown and marketers talk about building communities, feelings of belonging and of playing a worthwhile role within the (real) community have eroded. As Robert Waldinger, who runs the Harvard Study puts it, "The healthiest are the people who have more social connections and warmer social connections. Connections of all kinds- not just intimate partners, but friends and work colleagues and casual relationships." 

Research published in The Cambridge Journal of Economics found that less people feel their jobs are meaningful and useful, whilst at the same time quality of work is a greater contributor to mental wellbeing than hours of work. Purchasing ethically and participation with organisations doing positive things for the environment and society have also been proven to have mental health benefits for consumers, beyond their direct environmental impact, as shown in multiple studies including those by Van der Weff (et al 2014) and for the European Commission by Leonie Venhoeven, Jan Willhem Bolderdijk and Linda Steg (2016). 

So when we talk about "good brands" we don't just mean those addressing the challenges of climate change, but those helping the people on it to, through better service and contribution to communities.

Today, there are many organisations, large and small, that are doing important work for people, in the five intrinsically interlinked areas we have identified, where good brands can make a difference to the world: Craft, communities, colleagues, customers and the climate. But they don't all have access to the knowledge and skills to help their brands grow.

Our team of Brand Pharmacists have all got experience with building brands and have helped make companies they've worked with successful household names. Now we want to use those skills to help good brands get better: Better at telling their stories. Better at building their mental and physical availability. Better at growing sustainably and profitably for the good of society.

Because we believe good brands can profitably create a positive impact for both people and the planet.

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