Two recent articles highlight the impact trust has on effective marketing, creating identities and emotions for consumers to not only buy into, but also stylize their beliefs after. This creates friction due to the underlying belief that a better, moral, more valuable life can effectively be bought, instead of personally achieved.
This piece from The Atlantic reads:
And so, this moment of anxiety and creativity and cultural fracturing and political engagement and political apathy has brought a slight plot twist to the long and winding story of American advertising: It has gone and grown a conscience. The commercials that are ascendant at the moment are selling not just what ads so long have—power, prestige, beauty, glamour, sex—but also, more broadly, a vision of how those things can serve society. They are substituting claims about what is desirable for claims about what is right. They using their particular bully pulpit to moralize and sermonize and offer up, in the end, that most American of reassurances: that a better world can be achieved, because a better world can be bought.
And this piece from Axios states:
A new survey finds that 61% of people trust the advertising they see, an 11% jump from March 2014, according to eMarketer. In addition, 72% of respondents also said the ads are "honest," a 16% increase over the past two years.
Other studies have indicated that ad trustworthiness depends on the medium. Some studies show people are less likely to trust digital ads vs. traditional print or television ads.
Image courtesy of The Atlantic.
