Chapter 8
TRUST – SMALL WORD, BIG IMPACT
We started this book with a comment that the last thing anyone now needed was another book on sustainability and branding; that new titles seem to be coming out on this combination of topics with alarming frequency. But if there’s one topic that seems to trump these in terms of corporate and management literature column inches, it has to be trust. That said, as was the case with combining sustainability and branding, we believe there are perspectives to the trust debate that deserve more attention. We hope we’ve still something to add to this part of the debate, especially considering the central importance of trust not only to social capital, but to brands themselves.
As we covered in the previous chapter, trust represents one of the three dimensions of social capital, and is the third stage in our process model of social capital development. Trust, we believe, develops and emerges as a result of the prolonged and consistent structural phase (dialogue) and the cognitive phase (thinking). Of course, each phase does not happen in isolation, and there are not clear breaks between each phase that mark the transition. But trust is essentially the end result of the previous two steps of the process, with the results then feeding back into the dialogue and thought phases (see Figure 27).
Figure 27: Social capital development process – feedback loops
The concept of a brand is well known if not consistent, and definitions abound as to what exactly ...
