Rayan Karaky, Managing Director – International Expansion EMEA & SEAWhat a time to be alive … if I was to give a headline to the world today, it would probably be “The erosion of trust”. This erosion stems from multiple facets, but perhaps the most evident one is that everyone, despite opposing opinions, is a 100 per cent right.
No matter what your opinion is, informed or ill-informed, fact or fiction, real or generated by your favourite AI tool, you are bound to find a mainstream media article, a social media post, a video or even a politician validating what you believe is the truth.
Never has the question “is this real or fake” been used as much as it is today. There has never been a time in the world where information was so abundant, yet truth so scarce.
At first glance this may seem like a media or technology challenge, but in reality this is an existential threat to humanity. We have long lived under the assumption that, in a broad sense everyone has a pretty fair idea of what is truth, and that the unspoken baseline that humanity operates in, is generally honest; when that falls apart, it has a domino effect on every aspect of life, it becomes impossible to resolve debates due to extreme polarisation, the vacuum between the opposite ends of the opinion spectrum gets filled with either conspiracy theories or with cynicism, as evident in the thousands memes your friends send you on a daily basis.
Fundamentally, truth creates trust, perhaps the most crucial pillar of an operating economy; consumers run on trust, markets run on trust, Investors run on trust; Ironically this erosion starts really small, an exaggerated headline, an influencer getting the right money to say the wrong things, a political spin here and there, truth dies with a thousand papercuts.
The economic cost to even attempt to correct such behaviour is unsurmountable, imagine every narrative needing validation, verification or worse regulation; the real cost is undoubtedly progress.
Now what does that have to do with marketing? Since you asked, historically we used to optimise marketing to capture attention, because attention was scarce, it was always about how do we get audience to listen; when trust is broken, consumers’ attention becomes infinite when there’s hunger for truth.
We shifted from how we grab attention to how we earn credibility. In the past 10 years, we have witnessed marketing move from the periphery of organisations to sitting at the heart of it.
With Covid, the proliferation of adtech and the emergence of generative AI; the role of a CMO has become central to everything from product design to pricing strategy, reputation management, revenue growth architecture and channel management all the way to tech decision making.
The CMO role now overlaps with every C-level role within the organisation, and marketing sits at the intersection of all the different functions with consumer data taking centre stage.
With marketing becoming so central, the slightest exaggeration in the brand promise, the slightest deviation in pricing, becomes dangerous, if marketing as much as bends the truth, the entire organisation eventually must pay the price. Make no mistake, when trust is scarce, every claim is subject to the internet lie detection test, and bad news spreads like wildfire.
I believe the most successful brands in the coming few years are going to be ones who adopt truth as a strategic infrastructure pillar for the way they communicate and even the way they behave. The environment where marketing is about aspirational storytelling or narrative framing can no longer exist.
With the baseline moving from universal truth to universal doubt, marketers need to adopt three basic rules:
- Think of credibility as operating capital.
- Think of advertising as an amplification to reality not as perception shaping.
- Marketing commits the entire organisation to the promise it makes.
These three rules are heavily interdependent; we are in an era where no amount of perception shaping is going to plug a product experience gap. The minute a product faulters, trust is lost, and no amount of advertising is going to restore that trust; Nothing can be swept under the rug anymore because the internet doesn’t forget.
However, when the product experience matches the brand promise, truth becomes a compounding factor and future claims become faster truth, you no longer have consumers, you have advocates, believers & a trust bond that brings predictability to your entire business from financial projections to amplification channels.
Why is this relevant today? We live in a region where the public sector leads the promise of a better future, I have seen communities advocate on behalf of countries they live in, protect, defend, correct false claims; perhaps Dubai is a perfect example of a brand that understood that truth compounding as capital; For more than two decades the city has marketed itself as a global hub for tourism, business and innovation.
But what makes that narrative credible is not the campaigns, it is the lived experience. Naturally when infrastructure, safety, efficiency and economic opportunity combine through lived experiences residents turn into advocates.
During moments of global uncertainty from the pandemic to regional tensions the most powerful voices defending the city were not government accounts or advertising campaigns, but the people living there sharing their daily reality.
As a marketer, ask yourself, am I going to spend the years as a truth-teller, or are am I going to feed the beast of distrust the world has become accustomed to?
By Rayan Karaky, Managing Director – International Expansion EMEA & SEA
