My initial answer to that question would be ‘no’. Trust can not be bought.
I agree with John Malone’s comment that trust is actually in vast amounts available. However, trust is something that is given from a customer or an individual to a brand (or another individual). So, although trust might be abundantly available, the relationship that emerges out of that is indeed very scarce these days. In reaction to John: sure there’s lots to go around from a customers perspective, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that from a companies perspective you will get this trust.
So the question becomes: how do you get that trust? Or: how do you engineer trust in an environment that’s relevant for your users. Zuboff sees eBay and Graigslist as the first examples in which trust is engineered. In those environments the means to ‘get trust‘ from an audience is achieved by a reputation system. And maybe Zuboff is correct in her observation that reputation is one of the elements that play an important role in trust. What do you think?
So yes, I agree that trust can be engineered. Or that there are ways to gain the trust of a group of people. The final question to be answered: can it be bought? From the companies perspective we should think of this as an investment that is being made to create trust among its customers. So it is not directly a payment that is being made to a customer, to gain his trust. But yes, if you link it to the creation of the means to gain trust (ie reputation), then I do think it can be bought. Building the tools or environments to allow the emergence of trust requires for companies to heavily invest in it.
So as it seems, trust can be bought indeed.
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Can we think of some examples where trust has been bought?
there is a growing market for buying and selling characters in online communities (games, second life.) so if there exists a trust broker (ebay? amazon?) it might be possible to buy and sell trusted identities.
So that would mean, that I buy my online identity at a trusted company. But what does that do to the trust from others to me? Part of the trust among gamers is that they are who they say they are, and have achieved there ’status’ by doing it themselves. Meaning: you can’t buy your way into it. That has to do with reputation, and with trust I think. Is selling trusted identities not mainly an act of creating distrust?
yes, probably.
but we might be talking about different kinds of trust. the trust like ‘credit rating’ is impersonal. the trust like in gaming, where you see each other more than you see your boyfriend is different.
Trust is related to genuineness (Genuine: “possessing the claimed or attributed character, quality, or origin; not counterfeit; authentic; real”). Buying Trust contradicts this.
Why do you think it is related to genuineness? Something ‘fake’ can’t be trusted? Even if you know it is fake?
If you refer to fake as in “product” it can have a certain value to a person, even if that person knows it is fake. If you refer to fake as in “people”, regardless if it is mischievous, a person will not trust such an individual - it is just human nature (how naive they might be). Therefore, if you interpret fake regarding “services” (human products), the value of a service is depleted when the one that acquires that service knows it is fake. Ignorance is bliss.
That’s an interesting thought and it ties in to what Arjan is suggesting below: are there different kinds of trust for different products? You make a distinction between product and services, very right so as it that fits the paradigm we are in right now. But I would like to add experiences and transformations to that. As Joseph Pine and others have illustrated we are moving right now from a service economy into an experience economy. And after that comes the transformation economy (true personal experiences, that actually change you inside). More and more there is less focus on the product itself.
So, I think in those ‘new’ economic models trust becomes increasingly important (you’d rather have a doctor you trust operate on you). And that trust can not be bought. I agree with you there.
To add to Arjan’s suggestion (below): as products are developing from luxuries to commodities (and eventually necessities) does the importance of trust grow? And if so, does trust become a necessity?
Could there be different kinds of trust for different kinds of products? For example, there is a segmentation of the amount of trouble I would be prepared to go through for certain categories of product-purchases (commodities vs luxury vs shopping vs impuls)….
Trusted identity I found a doubtful concept. At this moment it probably means that I’m credit worthy or that my email address isn’t fake… but what does it say about me… my identity is also about character, qualities, experiences, opinions I have. The other kind of trust you menation is TRUST equal to REPUTATION. That just means that their is a certain trend in my PAST BEHAVIOUR. Especially if you combine the two of them… it means the you can be sure that the person with the is email address has so far behaved in a certain way… is that really what TRUST is about? In this case it also looks like as if TRUST is verifyable… certainty of something begin true…. so oriented at past & present while TRUST for me means EXPECTATION FOR FUTURE BEHAVIOUR BASED ON MY JUDGEMENT.
True that corporations where the trusted party and that many of them have disappointed and will disappoint. It is true that if the (famous design example) that if a company has a ‘globe’ in its logo it is trusted more than without =) So trust was usually based on personal experiences, hear-say, my senses etc… all of the above are more manipulatable these days, making TRUST less TRUSTWORTHY.
So do we need to forbid manipulation (presenting as if you are different — like an avatar, nickname — already done in some forums), do we need verification agents to check my ‘identity’ like SXIP, do we need to change the way we deal with ‘trusting somebody’ or will trust delfate to something which is no longer that important… ‘who cares that my best friend in Second Life is a guy in real life’?
But what is that judgment for future behaviour based upon? Past behaviour? Or on experiences of others? Referrals of others?
I don’t think trust will deflate. No, we might not really care whether the guy is a guy in Second Life. But in another context, it might be very relevant (ie on dating sites). So, yes, I do think there are different kinds of trust for different kinds of contexts. I’m not sure about products, as within one of the categories a different kind of trust might be relevant, as illustrated in the above mentioned example. Furthermore, what Shoshana says on her blog, that people would want to know if they were talking to a guy, or to the fabrication of a character of a company.
I do think that it will become ever more important. In a world of abundance nobody can make the ‘best choice’ anymore (on his own). Increasingly, people will look for help in their choices. And they will be looking at trusted partners to help them with that, whether these relations of trust are virtual or real. Fred van Raaij talks about Virtual Guardian Angels as the mediators or filters to help us in making choices. The relationships these VGA’s make with you are very much based on trust I think.
A little spin-out of this discussion continous on:
http://www.experience-economy.com/2007/06/04/on-rod-beckstroms-starfish-and-the-spider-we-can-miss-leaders-as-tooth-ache-by-jaap-bloem/#comments
perhaps we should not focus on trust but on distrust?! would that change this discussion?
‘you can buy this product because you are discredited to this level. explain yourself!’ or ‘access to our community has be denied because you are severely discredited because of your flames regarding…’.
in this sense trust is a reward system, something you earn. distrust is a system of penalties, something you loose. it is interesting to see that online the talk is about ‘trust’ where offline we live in a society based on distrust. online you are under suspicion until you have earned a sufficient amount of ‘trust’ points. offline you are trusted until proven guilty.
That’s an interesting thought. However, it is completely based on past behaviour. Or is it?
i don’t know! is it?
if distrust is completely on past behaviour so is trust. or not? how would ‘future’ (dis)trust look like? interesting. does future trust have to do with instinct, gut feeling, blue eyes? or can we use mdl? (:P)
i think, though, that the distinction between a reward and a penalty system has to do with something in the future. in a penalty system you are innocent until proven guilty. you are trusted until proven untrustworthy. is this not ‘future trust’?
Hi (haven’t been on the freedomlab ‘meetingpoint’ for a while, nice upgrade!)
Thought I join in, very interesting discussion. My thoughts..:
Both trust and distrust are based on future and past behaviour. Every time we take action which requires trust we calculate how much harm it will inflict on failure. So logically the things that are most meaningful (relationships) and valuable (money) to us will require the most trust. We also try to asses the good others have toward us that might affect their efforts to protect us from harm. For example if a company treats us fair we may spread the word, if not…
Communities are depended on mutual trust if they want to cooperate successfully. Trust develops when a community shares a set of moral values in a way that normal and honest behaviour can be expected. I think trust did not change, so it can’t be bought or sold, what is changing are the moral values. If you look at the youtube/myspace/facebook generation, they don’t worry if their personal lives are all over the internet. Maybe it’s just youthful ignorance or do they have a different set of moral values!?
If read your comment correctly you see trust as part of the interactions within a community. Do you view ‘the company’ as an entity in that. And if so, can they ‘create’ or as Soshana calls it ‘engineer’ trust? How?
In response to your question: yes I absolutely think that younger generations have a different set of values. Especially if it comes to technology. Unlike us they don’t see it as technology, they simply use it. I wonder if that means that they are more likely to see ‘the people’ behind the technology and that they have a different approach to trusting that technology? Nevertheless, these young people are used to building relationships with people that they have never met and that they only know virtually. Does that mean that they are more trustworthy? Maybe, for them, they don’t have to translate the concept of trust to these new environments. And like Jurg said: they trust you/the brand/the system until proven guilty…
Trust I think is an emerging phenomena, it’s not something that is just spawns out of the blue. It’s something which develops step by step. It’s process of negotiation as Etienne Wenger calls it. Let’s take the eBay example again; it is not just because a person has a high recommendation factor he becomes trustworthy. It involves also the trust in the website eBay and maybe past experiences with selling and buying stuff online. When you go over to another medium, let’s say a marketplace on your mobile phone, which nobody you know is using and you have no experience with. Even though the sellers says: ‘he look how trustworthy I am, a 100 people said so..’, you may not have the same instant trust. Because there hasn’t been any negotiation between you and the new medium and you and people you trust who also used this new medium before. In this case the ‘engineered’ trust will not have the same effect you hoped for.
I think the company has to become a part of the community, maybe it’s not a full member but it’s somewhere out there in the periphery (In many ’web2.0’ company’s, the company is a full member of the community.) The more intense the relationship is with the company the more likely it will be part of your community, even if it is temporarily. So to cooperate successfully they need to build a trust relation which is based on the same principles as a standard human relationship. Which are the simple rules of doing what you have promised, honesty and how conflicts are managed which are almost inventible in a relationship..