10 Jun Why Your Brand Isn’t Rebuilding Trust with Consumers
Rebuilding Trust in a Low-Trust Consumer Environment
We are in a period of low consumer trust. A 2023 survey of Americans by Qualtrics XM Institute found that consumer trust crashed in 2020 and hasn’t yet recovered to pre-pandemic levels, with Gen-Z the least trusting of all. The nature of leaks, regulatory environments, and viral information means that when trust is broken it’s broken quickly, and reputational damage can snowball.
The Rise of the Vigilant Consumer
A 2023 Purdue study demonstrates how this low trust plays out in food purchases, where ingredients top the list of most trusted information. Rather than certifications that leverage trust in third-party sources, consumers want to evaluate trustworthiness, safety, and product quality for themselves. Ingredients lists are how we’re seeing that play out. Brands like Hailey Bieber’s Rhode that are winning the trust game are doing so by having a brand that centres on acknowledging the trust gap and leading with ingredients. Where ingredients are unfamiliar, they explain the science behind them, their purpose, and their efficacious levels
This tendency to scrutinise information is called epistemic vigilance , coined in 2010 (Sperger et al. 2010). More recent 2025 research into this phenomenon (Watson et al. 2025) looked at this phenomenon within a two-player experiment. It found that low-trust individuals were more likely to scrutinize the advice offered by other players, throwing out advice that might be advantageous to them, and high-trust individuals were more accepting of advice.
This is where we find ourselves, in an epoch of low consumer trust and therefore high epistemic vigilance.
Rebuilding Trust with Proactive Transparency
Transparency isn’t a switch, it’s a dial. While many brands claim transparency, there’s a chasmic distance between a brand that buries highly scrutinised information in the small print and a brand that leads with it. The difference is between passive and proactive transparency. The brands that are emerging and building trust with consumers are the ones that are meeting consumers where they are. They accept that trust is low, and consumers want to assess products for themselves.
This has a basis in our most important relationships; a recent systematic literature review of trust repair in romantic couples (Giacobbi, 2025) concluded that proactive transparency, not assurances, was essential to rebuilding trust. Instead of offering assurances, “trust me or trust this third party source or certification,” the brands that are thriving accept the high-scrutiny environment and empower consumers with the information they need to make an informed decision. When proactive scrutiny is met with proactive transparency: trust follows.
Every Brand Launch Begins Mid-Story
Brands entering the market today don’t even have the luxury of starting from zero. Brands that are being introduced for the first time to a consumer are having to operate from a place of consumer distrust, so early efforts, despite no prior brand relationship, are rebuilding trust.
There can be a tendency to perceive the launch of brands as telling a story from the beginning, but the reality is that brands are introduced midway through a story already in the telling. Consumers have narratives about your industry and product from experiences with other companies. Brands that are winning understand the pre-existing narratives that exist around their industry and tell their brand story in this context, offering a new path: “The industry has let you down in ______ way, we saw a need, so we created this brand which offers _________ alternative.”
In today’s climate, the brands that understand the narratives of disappointment and resulting pervasive distrust, and meet consumers where they are, are the brands of tomorrow.
The rest will be stuck offering messages of reassurance that might have worked in the past, but no longer.