Another Tom Asacker quote from our call:
“Customers don’t trust businesses or the people running them, and I think that any kind of business that somehow has fooled themselves into believing that they have earned customers’ trust — they’re deluded. And that will affect how they approach their customer base. They need to understand that people are skeptical of everything that they say and they do. Because we’ve been conditioned that way over the past ten years, with everything from Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Adelphia, Arthur Andersen, Xerox, to Catholic priests, Major League Baseball steroids, Martha Stewart – everywhere we look we see this kind of thing. We’re conditioned to distrust. So that’s what’s gone on. We have been conditioned by the activities in the marketplace over the past 50 or 60 years, which makes today’s mindset of the customer much much different than the mindset of 1940’s and 50’s people.”

What this means to me is that the marketer must relearn how to have a real conversation. By this I mean that they must allow for different opinions, instead of acting like a dictatorship where dissenting voices are hidden or silenced. This, along with listening, is the only way they can earn trust back. Companies no longer enjoy implicit authority. Those days are over, thanks to endless product choices (crumbling monopolies), the burnt bridges Tom mentions, and the amplifying power the Internet gives to word of mouth.