"Life can only be understood backwards;
but it must be lived forwards." 
Søren Kierkegaard

It has been fifty years since my father and I regularly went to a toy store in our small village on weekends to score a Matchbox car. Even larger distant cities were visited to complete our car collection. As a six-year-old boy, I would walk with my little brother into the wide world. This was completely natural in the presence of my father, blindly following our father. It was nice and familiar.

Trust comes on foot and goes on horseback, as the saying goes, but how do you improve (brand) trust? Trust is about being familiar with something or someone. Know, like and trust is a simple formula to ensure that people get to know you or your product, want to connect with you. There is scientific research done by the University of Twente that shows that there is a relationship between familiarity and trust. But we actually have known this for a long time! As children, we already had a blind trust in our parents or grandparents.

I once worked at Randstad Interim Kader (later Yacht) and learned there that you have to work systematically to build trust among your clients and employees, it is the core to doing business with each other. Frits Goldschmeding built Randstad with his distinctive DNA values: Know, serve, trust. Never forget that creating trust goes beyond simply increasing your brand awareness. Marketers too often think that trust goes one-to-one with brand awareness. Throw in an advertising campaign and voila. 

Time and again they fall into the trap of thinking that building brand awareness will also increase trust among their customers. Because doesn't the old saying go: unknown makes unloved? Well not quite. While there is indeed a connection between knowing and trust, trust goes beyond the concept of knowing. Knowing is more like being familiar with the product or person. The concept of trust goes further, it also includes believing as an important component. Believing is partly intangible, and according to the Van Dale, this involves believing in someone's good faith and honesty. 

As an organization, really work less on your brand awareness but more on trust among your customers. This does require a consistent interpretation of values in the areas of serve, may and know over a longer period of time, but if you take the right steps, you will be amazed at what it brings in terms of lasting relationships.