There’s something slightly unnerving happening in marketing right now.
We have never had more tools to create good content. Give me half a day and the right AI tools, and I could probably create a perfectly respectable-looking new marketing agency. A smart website, a point of view, a library of content and a founder who appears to know what they’re talking about.
The problem is, so could almost anyone else.
For years, marketers have talked about building trust. But I think we need to go one step further now.
The real question is whether people actually believe you.
Do they believe you have the expertise you claim to have? Do they believe your point of view comes from experience rather than a prompt? And when ten competitors look and sound equally polished, what gives someone a reason to believe you?
That was the conversation Dave McMullen and I recently had on The Media Frenzy Podcast. And I believe there are five things brands need to think about.
1. Stop Trying to Be an Expert in Everything
AI is brilliant at breadth. Ask it about almost any subject and within seconds you have a perfectly reasonable point of view.
Which means breadth isn’t particularly impressive anymore.
What is harder to replicate is depth: the specific experience, nuance and pattern recognition that comes from having actually done the work.
For me, one example is market disruption. Much of my career has involved helping brands explain something genuinely new, from Expedia and online travel booking, to Motorola and the smartphone, to Vlingo and voice recognition before Siri.
The common thread has always been the same: if you are asking people to change the way they behave, you need a compelling message, a clear reason to believe, and absolute consistency in how that story is told.
That is the kind of depth brands need to demonstrate now. Not generic commentary on everything happening in their industry, but the specific knowledge and experience they have genuinely earned.
2. Consistency Beats Volume
Once you know what you want to be known for, keep showing up around it.
That doesn’t mean posting on LinkedIn five days a week. Please don’t. We have enough digital exhaust already.
It means building a recognizable body of thinking over time.
Simon Sinek is a great example. His famous TED Talk about starting with “why” dates back to 2009. His thinking has evolved considerably since then, but there is still a consistent thread running through his work around purpose, leadership and culture.
That consistency builds authority.
I’ve been talking about communications and market disruption throughout my career because it’s a subject I genuinely care about and know. I can talk about it through the lens of Expedia in the 1990s or AI today because the underlying challenge is surprisingly similar.
The channels will keep changing. Your core expertise shouldn’t need reinventing every six months to keep up with the content calendar.
3. Let Other People Prove You’re Good
This one is particularly close to my heart because I started my career in PR.
There is a fundamental difference between telling the world you’re brilliant and having somebody else say it for you.
Media coverage, customer reviews, analyst commentary, awards, case studies, podcasts and recommendations from respected peers all create something incredibly valuable: third-party validation.
I recently found myself explaining this through Shakespeare — as you do.
I’d just finished Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, and it struck me that the principle hasn’t really changed in hundreds of years. If someone buys a beautiful pair of leather gloves from you, loves them and tells the next customer walking into your shop that they’re excellent, that person is immediately more inclined to believe you make excellent gloves.
Today we have LinkedIn, Google reviews, podcasts and media coverage. Human behavior hasn’t changed nearly as much.
We believe other people.
4. Get Out From Behind the Screen
For all the attention we give digital marketing, some of the most valuable opportunities in my career have happened because I was physically in the room.
I met Dave, my business partner at FRENZY, through EO Atlanta. He is someone I have enormous respect for, I love working with him, and I’ve learned a huge amount from him. That relationship didn’t come from a lead-generation campaign. It came from being actively involved in a community.
Then there are the more immediately commercial examples.
Years ago, I spoke at a digital marketing event. Afterwards, the Head of Marketing at Verizon came up to speak to me.
We ultimately won the business.
I certainly wasn’t standing on that stage thinking, “Excellent, this should move nicely through the funnel.”
I was sharing something I knew and cared about. The business opportunity followed.
So go to the event. Speak on the panel. Join the association. Be interviewed on the podcast. Comment intelligently on somebody else’s ideas. Participate rather than constantly broadcasting.
Your reputation is being built in all of those places too.
5. Leaders Need to Lead From the Front
Finally, brands need visible leadership.
And no, I don’t mean every CEO suddenly needs to become a LinkedIn influencer.
I saw the power of leadership visibility very clearly during my time at Motorola. The company fared much better when there was a strong, vocal leader at the helm.
A credible leader could drive confidence in the market even when the numbers weren’t necessarily where everyone wanted them to be. Internally, employees wanted to work for those leaders. Great people followed them. Their presence created belief in where the company was going, not simply where it happened to be at that particular moment.
That is an incredibly important distinction.
When leaders don’t communicate, people fill in the blanks themselves. Customers do it. Employees do it. Investors do it.
A strong leadership voice gives people something to believe in.
So, What Are You Giving People to Believe?
AI hasn’t made expertise, reputation or trust less important. I think it has made them considerably more valuable.
Because when everyone can create polished content, polished content stops being the differentiator.
The brands that stand out will build something much harder to manufacture: evidence.
Depth demonstrates that you know your subject. Consistency shows that your expertise isn’t fleeting. Third-party validation tells people that others believe you too. Community makes your reputation visible in the real world. And leadership gives people a human being and a point of view to believe in.
We spent years asking: How do we get people to see us?
Then we started asking: How do we get people to trust us?
I think the question for marketers now is slightly different:
What are we giving people to believe?
Because in a world where almost anyone can look credible, actually being credible is going to matter a hell of a lot more.
