Markets for trust |
 |
Barack Obama’s campaign stunned the country, and anyone else on the planet who was paying attention, when they announced last Friday that they had already raised $25 million. This apparently miraculous achievement shouldn’t surprise anyone who has read The Support Economy or is familiar with its argument.
The biggest market in the political or commercial world today is the market for trust.
People are starved for trust. THere is a desperate need to find leaders and companies that offer true trustworthiness– as measured by truthfullness, authenticity, accountability, and responsibility. Both politics and commerce have been engulfed by lies, corruption, narcissism, and indifference. This has accelerated the growing chasm between individuals and organizations.
THis crisis of trust is now epidemic. But this crisis has a flipside. All civilized humans need trust to feel sane. The crisis has therefore precipitated vast new markets for trust. If anyone in business or politics can find their way toward real trustworthiness, they will encounter an unlimited market ready to support them with money and allegiance.
The Bush regime has pushed institutionalized lying and corruption to new levels, with consequences that make Watergate and the Nixon sleazebags look like the good old days, when we were still innocent enough to feel outrage. A just released Observer poll shows that about half of Britons consider Blair to be out of touch and untrustworthy. Clearly, the manipulations of these regimes have pushed the trust crisis to a new level. But let’s not forget, this crisis was well underway before either man even took office. Consumers have registered alarmingly low levels of trust toward insurance companies, health maintenance organizations, telcos, airlines, and other key industries for many years. Ordinary folks have been abused by these industries, and that abuse has escalated dramatically over the last twenty years.
NExt time you are with a group of friends, just ask if anyone trusts their insurance company. It’s rare to find even one person in a group who does. In its essence, the argument of The Support Economy is this: Vast new markets for trust are languishing, as consumers and citizens anxiously sweep the horizon for political and commercial agents worthy of their trust. The standard enterprise logic in which today’s organizations operate is not designed to deliver this kind of trust, anymore than a Model T was designed for the Interstate. New competitors need to break out of that old logic, to embrace a new approach to commerce that is aligned with the needs of the individual. A new enterprise logic, engineered for trust, will encounter a massive virgin market.
Right now, Obama is trying to be a first mover in this new territory. Can he resist the old gravitational pull?
| Printable version | RSS feed |
2
|
Hi –
This post made me think of the enormous markets for trust’s close cousin, faith.
By far the largest, most coherent voting constituency today in the US political landscape is evangelical Christians. They are numbering about 30M, and a growing every day. They’ve had their boy in the White House for 6-years.
The evangelicals have a stunning federated support network that spans and masters all media. They are marketing faith. Their capacity and competence for raising money and influencing outcomes is unmatched, even by recent distributed accomplishments of candidates.
Authentic GoP conservatives, conservative Dems, classic liberals, the great center, have all inured the administration. They have long-since been abandoned by this frighteningly effective, faith-based, support network. This evangelical bamboozlement of the USA is akin to mass hypnosis and hijack.
For example, their ridiculous Iraq mantra, ‘Stay the Course,’ is equivalent to ‘Have Faith.’ (?) The faith markets are flourishing.
Sadly, the extreme far-left is learning from these great evangelical masters and using applied support networks to hold well-meaning Dems hostage.
The marketing of faith in support networks is nothing new. What is new are the media that make codification, coherence and diffusion so blindingly fast. The fringe has mastered these networks. There is a network vacuum in the political center.
Many federated support networks are adolescent. As a consequence, the staggering power of networks, of support networks, whether it is Al Qaida, the religious right, or the far left, has been discovered and adopted by extremists. The ONLY remedy, the counterattack, is more diverse, fast moving, fluid support networks with moderate and centrist origins. These federated support networks exist today as they always have. They simply have yet to reveal themselves. Recent developments are promising.
-j
Shoshana, although I am delighted to find your blog posting on trust and fully share your sentiments, my experience differs from your assertion “The biggest market in the political or commercial world today is the market for trust. People are starved for trust.”
I wish this were true, but even though there is a deficiency of trust, people are still not sufficiently sensitized to it. It’s a phenomenon analogous to putting a frog in boiling water. If you warm the water slowly the frog will never notice the danger and save itself by jump out. The erosion of trust we have become sensitized to recently is the result of a long-term trend highlighted from time to time (more so recently) with scandalous front-page stories. However, we accept it as the status quo, shaking our heads in disbelief, all-the-while resigned to accepting this reality as a law of (human) nature.
People may well be starved for trust, but they still don’t feel the hunger pains. As a result, the market for trust is still limited largely to early adopters. Organizations do not have a budget for trust. They do however invest huge sums managing risks, which only serves to perpetuate mistrust.
- Alex Todd
Trust Enabling Strategies
http://TrustEnablement.com