Understanding Trust Signals — Scott Baradell // Idea Grove

Quotes

• "You know, there's a lot less trust in the media. It used to be that a small number of prominent media outlets, the extensive networks, the big newspapers, and the local newspaper in a community these were trusted by the vast majority of American citizens and people in local communities. If you could get those outlets to cover your client well, you would not only build awareness of your client that way, but it would confer the mantle of trust that media outlet had onto your client." - Scott Baradell

• "People think they come to PR people or come PR firms for awareness or visibility. That's what they say, but that's not what they want because nowadays, you can buy ads and follow people around on the internet. You'd bug the hell out of them, but you'd make them aware of you. What people want when they want media coverage is not awareness so much as the credibility and trust conferred by being in a credible outlet." - Scott Baradell

• "There are so much fragmented media. It's not like in the old days when the Sunday paper would be delivered, and you'd know who's on the front page, and everybody in town would know you're on the front page, who's, who even knows what a front page is anymore. If you're covered in any outlet, good luck having even a tiny fraction of the people you're trying to reach, seeing that it's just because things are so fragmented." - Scott Baradell

• "How people source information that people believe is so different from person to person that you have to think carefully about your audience and develop what I call cobbling together a continuum of influence, sources of trust that will appeal to your specific audience." - Scott Baradell

• "Because we work in B2B tech, we use a qualitative research method based on something developed by a woman named Adele Rava, who started the Buyer Persona Institute. She wrote a great book a few years ago called Buyer Personas that I highly recommend. And we just adopted her methodology, which involves doing journalistic-style phone interviews or Zoom interviews with wins and losses out of our clients' CRMs." - Scott Baradell

• "We use buyer persona research to help us understand our client's customers. But I realized that's an inadequate tool for today for two reasons. One is that there are audiences that matter to brands today besides their buyers." - Scott Baradell

• "There are two things that we're missing from the buyer personas. How do you factor in non-buyer audiences? Because buyer personas are for buyers. And then, how do you think about the buyers, the considerations that go into a purchase, or how they think about your brand that has nothing to do with the features and the benefits of the product?" - Scott Baradell

• "Edelman's trust barometer surveys have consistently shown that a very high percentage of people, particularly younger people, will buy a product based on their perception of that company's values. And they will buy it even if they don't think it's as good because the values and feeling like you are supporting companies that share your values has become so important." - Scott Baradell

• "We developed this concept of what we call a trust profile, where you can go to your combination of quantitative and qualitative research where you can go to your buyers and survey them and get a sense of, Hey, how do you feel about issues like sustainability, black lives matter, family values, what sources of information do you trust, do, do you watch, do you believe? And then you can get this data, and then you can make a decision based on that data rather than just shooting from the hip." - Scott Baradell

• "It's all about ensuring consistency, maintaining and building that brand. Equity is all about that. So having the same message you're using for employees that you're using for, uh, customers you're trying to reach, that you're using for the broader community makes it so much more effective today. And it's just necessary." - Scott Baradell