Can I Trust You? How to Build Trust.

What do coffee dates, hotel reviews and browsing tomato sauce options in the supermarket have in common? All 3 address the same fundamental question: “can I trust you?”

According to The Trust Outlook, this is the world’s number one question. When you meet someone for the first time and engage in small talk, when you go for after-work drinks with colleagues, when you read everything you can about an establishment before you visit, you seek a deeper answer to that question. Can I trust you?

What is trust?

The dictionary associates trust with safety, reliability, truthfulness, honesty, goodness and ability to deliver. “Can I trust you?” is the chameleon of all these. When I’m asking a hotel in a high-crime-rate city “can I trust you?” I am most concerned about safety and honesty. When I’m going for drinks with coworkers, “trust” means reliability, ability to deliver. On that coffee date, I’m looking for goodness and truthfulness.

What about tomato sauce? Brands are a shortcut to trust. If I’m a regular buyer, there’s a high chance I browse the shelf on autopilot and grab the usual (the brand I trust). If I’m new to the category, I look for a familiar brand name, as I am more likely to trust it. I say “tomato sauce” you say… Heinz? AI agrees. AI-generated visual representations of tomato sauce mimic the iconic Heinz bottle and label.

So what can Heinz tomato sauce teach us about trust?

Trust is Consistency

Like a reliable employee, Heinz shows up right place right time, no surprises. We all know the outcome of the infamous Pepsi Challenge, where Coca Cola changed their formula to resemble Pepsi’s sweeter variant after it came out on top in a taste test. 400,000 people wrote to ask Coca Cola to change it back. The great taste of Heinz isn’t going anywhere, and you can always count on it.

Similarly, showing up for your team again and again is a surefire way to earn yourself a reputation as a safe pair of hands — one of the best first steps when starting your career or building a reputation in a new workplace. Work is a giant marble run. When you’re at the bottom, be the safe pair of hands that picks up all the dropped balls and you will soon progress to the middle of the pile, where you earn the right to drop some balls yourself.

Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight…

Trust is Time

Heinz “catsup” 🐱 first hit the shelves in 1876. By maintaining a constant presence ever since, trust in Heinz has been built and strengthened over time. Like a good bottle of tomato sauce, Forbes describes longer-tenure employees as more “trustworthy and credible”. And that’s certainly the perception a lot of us have: the longer a relationship, the more solid it becomes. We expect our relationships to grow in-step with trust.

Yet increasingly, we’re short on time and need to go long on trust — what to do then?

Word of Mouth

Word spreads like wildfire.

Even if you never had Heinz at home growing up, you had probably heard of it before you tried it. When you came to buy tomato sauce for a BBQ, you bought it because you knew it’s the one everyone buys. Like Heinz ketchup, you need to build a reputation for yourself as the go-to person for whatever you bring to the party.

Where to start? Show, don’t tell. No one wants to hear about your expertise, but shared in a way that others can benefit, everyone wants a piece of it.

Imagine you want to establish a reputation for yourself as a culture champion within your new workplace. You might start by working with a couple of existing team members to organise a social or two. You follow up by talking with your manager about what worked well and less well, making small suggestions on what should be improved. You rinse and repeat and gradually, people start coming to you for ideas on how to improve the culture in their teams. Your reputation is largely established through showing your knowledge rather than telling people you’re great.

Reputation by Association

Ever thought you’d be taking inspiration from a tomato sauce brand about where to hang out? Hang in there. Heinz is in every quality restaurant and on the kitchen table of everyone who values its ‘superior quality’ and can stomach the premium price point.

If we want to build trust fast, we need to put ourselves out there so the people we care about know who we are. It fosters a “one of us” feeling. Seth Godin paraphrases culture as “people like us do things like this” and that’s where Heinz tomato sauce gets a foot in the door: people like us enjoy Heinz tomato sauce, not just any tomato sauce. Like Heinz, this is where you can get a foot in the door: people like us do things like this, so we can trust one another.

The True Taste of Heinz

People say the proof is in the pudding. And yet the Pepsi Challenge teaches us that Heinz would not win a blind taste test. So why is it the bottle people reach for time and time again?

The power of brand. It matters for tomato sauce and it matters for you. Imagine doing everything we talked about above (show don’t tell, show up in the right places) with a strong personal brand behind you. What changes when your story packs a punch before you enter the room?

What do you want to be known for? What will people say about you when you’re not in the room? Branding expert Lulu Raghavan has some top tips on the subject. She suggests finding your unique talent and motivation as the compass to steer you towards the right opportunities. Do so consistently, and people will trust you faster for the right things.

Whether you’re the go-to condiment or the go-to chief product officer, help people trust you by showing what they can trust you for.