The Road to Consumer Distrust Is Paved with Brands’ Broken Promises

Statistically speaking, your customers don’t trust you. In fact, just 47% of brands are seen as trustworthy. Ouch. Despite how loudly you claim customers are ‘at the heart of everything we do’, it’s no surprise they don’t agree when brands have fallen into a vicious circle of overpromising and underdelivering.

The customer is always right – and according to new research^*, two-thirds of them now cite a gap between what most brands say they do and what they actually do. More than half are tired of broken promises made by brands using clever advertising and marketing, but which fail to deliver.

Agencies aren’t blameless – after all, we’re in the room producing the work, helping our clients make promises we know they can’t or won’t keep. We’ve helped create this monumental gap between brand promise and the actual lived experience customers encounter.

The result? Globally, bad customer experience is estimated to cost more than £2.7 trillion annually – with more than half of Brits having stopped buying from a brand based on poor experience or a broken promise in the past 12 months alone^*.

No one is waiting for your email

Delivering the brand promise across the entire lived experience means creating a journey that brings the brand to life, elevates the experience by dialling up attributes of the brand at key moments, changes behaviour, and of course sells. But what we are really shooting for is for customers to fall in love with your brand, even if just for a moment. And that all starts with trust.

It's not easy – brands have never been so scrutinised, so publicly, with any transgression liable to be amplified beyond their wildest nightmares, and it only takes one mistake, handled badly, for trust to be undermined.

And let’s be clear: no one is sitting waiting for your email or ad. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to enhance or degrade the reputation of your brand, yet we seem to have sleepwalked into a conversation with consumers where no one is listening. It’s a barrage of branded stuff hurled in the hope something sticks. Brands on broadcast with nothing interesting to say.

The impact of comms that waste people’s time is not benign. Pretending there is a compelling customer benefit when none exists is a fool’s game. It wastes money, erodes equity in the brand, and irritates busy customers.

We know this – but this is what happens when easily measurable, short-term campaign performance is prioritised at the expense of longer-term brand building, as marketers are under huge pressure to do. Here, agencies can play a valuable role – rather than propagating this tsunami of crap presented as ‘content’, they should support CMOs in being the voice of the customer, lobbying not to do something as often as they counsel on how to do something well, when the need is genuine.

Closing the expectation gap

If done well, the opportunity is huge. We know customers reward brands which keep their promises – with 89% making an active choice to buy that brand again, 79% recommending it to others, and more than half willing to pay a premium price^*. Brands that deliver what they promise perform 38% better than those that don't.

Capitalising on this opportunity means not just closing the expectation gap, but actively and consistently exceeding customers’ expectations. To do this, we must persuade our clients to be braver and push their business harder to drive meaning into the experience of that brand. This might sound scary; in essence, it’s as simple as ensuring they do what they promise, consistently, so increasingly demanding consumers stick with them – then adding a little magic from time to time.

At helia, we’re using a new proposition, ‘No broken promises’, to underpin these conversations and keep both us and our clients honest; politely holding their feet to the fire to drive improvements in the customer experience by ensuring relevance and resonance in what the brand does – not just what it says it does.

And yes, that means brands and their agencies must work harder than ever to deliver to market propositions that solve real customer problems, joined up data to enable relevance in relationship and communications that focus on the actual customer benefit of a product or service. 

Unashamedly, we make the case for investing less in customer acquisition and more in retention – by honouring the promises you’ve made to individual customers you have. Fixing that and keeping customers, increasing their value and building your brand with those that already know, trust and advocate for you is a no-brainer – yet we spend so little on this part of the marketing mix. Let’s fix the leaky bucket.

No more broken promises

Jerry Della Femina famously claimed “Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising”. The same is true here. There’s nothing like a bold promise to reveal weak behaviours.

The foundational principles of good advertising, good customer engagement campaigns and good creative ideas to sell or change behaviour have not changed. Neither has the fact that if you don’t deliver on your promises, you’ll erode trust and lose business. It’s that simple.

Agencies, blinded by the light of Salesforce or Adobe, Generative AI and the endless potential of connecting online and first-party data – all important enablers, for sure – need to rediscover their voice and their value. Backing CMOs as the ‘customer in the room’, we must push clients harder to refine their proposition and start delivering on the claims we amplify on their behalf.

It’s time to close the gap between brand promise and the lived experience – winning back consumers’ trust and with it, their business. No excuses, and no more broken promises.

David MacMillan is CEO of Havas CX helia

^*Havas CX helia and Prescient research, August 2024. Quantitative consumer study with a nationally representative sample of 2000 adults.