Trust in business is not quite the same as trust in our personal lives. I think everyone recognizes that. You’ll never trust Salesforce or HubSpot the way you trust your family or your best friend, and I think the people at those companies would whole-heartedly agree on that point. When it comes to trust, the best a B2B tech vendor can hope for is to be where IBM stood when someone coined the phrase, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Trust, in this context, essentially boils down to: “The product is going to work and you aren’t going to get screwed over.” It’s not asking all that much. But we are, as a culture, wired to mistrust our institutions like, say, the government or Google. “Google?” you ask. “Google was one of the few tech brands that made the Morning Consult’s list of most trusted brands in 2024! You’re not wrong. Google did make a list dominated by CPG brands like Band-Aid, Kleenex, Lysol and Clorox. However, the top brands in Morning Consult’s report take a consumer perspective.
