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Transcript
The relationship between a company and customers is quite similar to any other relations you might have like a friendship, right? You need to be able to trust the company that you are giving your information to, you need to be able to trust that you’re going to get what they say they’re going to give you. Especially since we’ve now seen a lot of companies breaking that trust, I am not going to name any names here but it’s more important than ever that you can build this overall persona for your brand about what your customers, what people are going to get from you. Can they trust you, can you deliver what you’re promising? I think this is important and there’s many ways that you can deliver and build a trustworthy company. But I think first you have to sit down and think about what are the values of your company. What is the mission of your company? What is the vision that you have? What are you bringing to the world? People need to understand what’s behind your company and what you’re going to bring or how you’re going to make impact. And they need to get behind that and they need to align with that. And that’s why you do have companies where maybe you don’t align with their mission, their vision. And it’s a company you might not want to interact with and then there are others that do align with units the same with people who resonate with you. And so you have to in a sense think of a brand as a person. And sometimes you’re going to be on that same level and sometimes you’re not. So it really has to come down to the foundation of what kind of company do you want to be. Who do you want to be? How do you want to change the world? How are you going to do it? And then target that towards the audience that you feel will align with that mission because you can’t speak to everybody and you need to choose who you want to be speaking with and then you shape that and build the trust for that specific audience.
Starting off as a new company it’s very difficult to build trust because no one knows who you are. No one knows what you stand for or what you do. So I think A) it’s important to really show that and be consistent with that in the messaging and the visuals that you create and that you put out into the world. But I think it’s also important, what we’ve done at Panion is we’ve really tried to create partnerships and collaborations with other brands that already have gained that trust they may have been around longer than we have. And if you see that this company that you already are aligned with or that you already trust is willing to partner with this other smaller company then immediately you start to trust that smaller company because you assume that they’ve done their due diligence and that they’re making a partnership for a reason. I think it can be really hard to start up and build trust as a new company. But I think a combination of being very transparent about what you stand for and making sure that you’re messaging and your tone and your visuals align with that, and then thinking of strategic ways to partner with people that are already trustworthy or brands that are already trustworthy. And that combination can help you jump off and start to build the initial trust and once you’ve gained momentum then as long as you behave according to the values that you say you believe in then you’re on your way to already having people or customers trust you.
At Panion, it’s been very important that we were building a platform that is about, connecting with people, building meaningful connections but also about being comfortable with yourself and being able to express yourself and be comfortable with being unique and knowing that there are other people out there that are maybe unique in a similar way so that you always can find someone who gets you. And I think, for example, I wouldn’t say a competitor is Facebook but I would say that a lot of people are leaving platforms like Facebook because they’ve lost trust in certain platforms because of how their privacy has been handled or data has been used. And we can see that there is this mistrust, and we feel it’s important to be that place that those people can go where they can find that trust again. And so,we have made it very clear in our branding and in the newsletters we send out and pretty much any sort of communication that privacy is important to us, that even when you enter our app we talk about your privacy. We talk about building a community where people can be themselves, where people respect each other. We have this kind of welcome to the community. These are the terms by which you need to agree to be part of this and it’s all about respect and valuing people for their differences and being so transparent, and we’ve tested it and honestly people are like ‘Wow I read those those terms and it made me feel ready to jump in because that’s what I’m looking for’. So I think sometimes it’s really important to be very transparent about what you believe in and the people who don’t align with it they’re not your customers, they’re not going to come but you can’t be all over the board, you really need to know who you are, and define what your company means, and what is important to your product and what you’re building and then stick with that and know that the right people will come because they will believe in what you’re giving off to the world, what you’re building what you’re trying to bring, and the impact that you’re trying to make.
