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Human-Centered Marketing

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The Trust Crisis is Real

Something has broken in how people relate to brands, leaders, and institutions. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer delivered a stark wake-up call: 68% of people now believe that government leaders, business leaders, and journalists deliberately lie and mislead them. That's an 11-point jump from the year before—a massive shift in how people view authority.

This isn't just a cultural problem. It's a business problem.

When trust erodes, everything gets harder. Sales cycles stretch longer. Customer acquisition costs climb. Employee retention drops. The old playbook of push marketing, gated content, and funnel optimization starts to feel tone-deaf in a world where people are actively suspicious of being manipulated.

While most marketers see this trust crisis as an obstacle, smart ones see it as an opportunity. When trust becomes scarce, it becomes valuable. Companies that figure out how to build genuine relationships with their audiences don't just survive—they thrive.

As Ashley Faus explains: "People trust people like themselves and people buy from people they trust." The solution isn't more sophisticated attribution models or better funnel optimization. It's human-centered marketing that treats people like humans, not leads. It's about giving value before asking for anything in return. It's about building trust as a core business strategy, not a nice-to-have.

The Business Case for Trust

Building trust isn't some fluffy, feel-good marketing exercise. It drives hard business results.

As Ashley Faus puts it: "This is not fluffy. It's not a nice to have. It's not something that just feels kind of nice and like, you know, wouldn't it be fun if people trusted us? That would be pleasant, right? No, this has significant financial ramifications."

Research from Edelman shows that 58% of people buy or advocate for brands based on values and beliefs. Sixty percent choose where to work based on whether they trust the company. Sixty-four percent make investment decisions through this lens. And 88% of institutional investors now look at environmental, social, and governance impact when making decisions.

These aren't soft metrics. They're revenue metrics. Talent metrics. Investment metrics.

When people trust your brand, they buy from you. When they don't trust you, they don't just avoid your products—they actively warn others away. In a world where a single tweet can reach millions of people, trust becomes your best insurance policy and your biggest competitive advantage.

The companies getting this right are seeing the results. They're attracting better talent because people want to work for organizations they respect. They're closing deals faster because trust shortens sales cycles. They're getting higher customer lifetime value because trusted relationships last longer.

Why the Traditional Funnel Breaks Trust

Most marketing frameworks weren't designed to build trust. They were designed to extract value from people as efficiently as possible. And that's exactly the problem.

The traditional marketing funnel treats people like they follow a predictable, linear path: awareness leads to consideration leads to conversion. But that's not how humans actually behave. It's not even how we make simple decisions, let alone complex B2B purchases that involve multiple stakeholders and months of evaluation.

Worse, the funnel is fundamentally company-centric. As Faus explains: "It only recognizes somebody once they're already in a buying process, which means it's retrospective, not forward-looking. And then it locks us into doing the activities that are easiest for us to measure in a dashboard instead of the activities that most resonate with the audience."

Think about it like dating. Yes, if you spend time with someone and get to know them well and share values and enjoy each other's company, you might fall in love and get married. But as Faus puts it: "You didn't get married because there was a proposal." The proposal was just the visible moment in a much longer, messier, more human process.

The funnel mindset makes us focus on the proposal—the moment someone converts—while ignoring all the relationship-building that had to happen first. It treats symptoms as causes and wonders why our marketing feels so transactional.

Meanwhile, our audiences feel the disconnect. They see through the manipulation. They recognize when we're more interested in their email address than their actual problems. And in a world where trust is already scarce, that approach backfires spectacularly.

The Content Playground: A Better Way Forward

Instead of forcing people through a linear funnel, what if we created a content playground where they could explore, learn, and engage on their own terms?

This starts with rethinking how we categorize content. Instead of awareness, consideration, and conversion content, think in terms of depth:

Conceptual content covers the what and the why. As Faus describes it: "It helps the audience think about and understand the problem space."

Strategic content gets into process, tools, and key knowledge components. "It equips the audience to do their own research and helps them think about the criteria for success."

Tactical content is where the rubber meets the road. "This is nitty gritty, prescriptive, where the rubber meets the road to implement the strategy."

Here's the key insight: people need all three levels, but not necessarily in order. Someone might discover you through a tactical piece, then go deeper into strategic thinking, then step back to understand the conceptual framework. Let them move around the playground naturally instead of forcing them down a predetermined path.

The second shift is thinking about intent—what people actually want to do next. Most marketers obsess over buy intent and use intent. But there are other valid intents that matter just as much: trust intent, learn intent, and help intent.

Take Atlassian's approach with their Agile microsite. They create conceptual content about the shift from waterfall to agile methodology. They offer strategic content about how to adopt agile practices. They provide tactical content about running standups and grooming backlogs.

As Faus explains: "You can choose Scrum or Kanban projects when you first start setting up your projects... However, that's pretty inefficient. Maybe let's show you how to do that with JIRA." Some of this content mentions Jira's features. Some doesn't. All of it helps people succeed with agile methodology whether they use Atlassian's products or not. That's trust-building in action.

Measurement That Builds Trust

This doesn't mean abandoning measurement. It means getting smarter about what we measure and when.

The problem isn't that marketers measure too much—it's that we measure the wrong things. We optimize for short-term revenue conversion as the only metric that matters. We default to digital touchpoints that are easy to track in a dashboard. We want one-to-one attribution for everything.

As Faus puts it: "Most of the time we don't actually have that discussion of like, here are the video metrics, here are the article metrics." We intuitively understand that watch time makes sense for videos but not for articles, yet we often apply the same success metrics to completely different types of content.

Social media perfectly captures this problem. "You'll get basically dichotomous or opposing views. We wanna optimize for in-feed engagement and CTR. Okay, well, you're not gonna get people commenting and liking and sharing on social media if the only thing you give them to do is to click a link."

The "Learn More" call-to-action perfectly captures this trust-breaking approach. As Faus explains: "I don't know what that is. Am I gonna watch a video? Am I contacting sales? Do I have to register an event? Am I making a purchase? Like what happens when I click that link, right?"

Be specific. Match your calls-to-action to your content intent. If someone is reading a tactical implementation guide, "Download the template" makes sense. If they're reading conceptual thought leadership, "Contact sales" probably doesn't.

The Long Game: Time Horizons Matter

The biggest trust-killer in marketing is short-term thinking. The pressure to close business this month, hit quotas this quarter, show immediate ROI on every campaign.

This shows up in tactical decisions that seem small but actually matter a lot. Do you put a human name on your content or just say "written by [company name]"? Do you invest in building up internal thought leaders or worry that they might leave someday?

As Faus points out: "There is a lot of pushback about employees building their personal brand... Because what if they leave, right? That is a very short term mindset."

Think about relationships that continue to create value long after the direct business relationship ends. Faus shares a perfect example: "I no longer have a need for their services and yet they keep in touch with me. We have a good relationship and I have referred multiple clients to them."

None of this shows up in last-touch attribution. You can't track exactly how many deals came from that conference conversation or that helpful email you sent six months ago. But the compound effect is real.

This applies to content strategy too. A tweet has a half-life of maybe eight seconds. An evergreen guide on your website might generate traffic and leads for years. Yet many marketers spend equal time on both, or even more time on the short-lived content because it feels more urgent.

Trust as Strategy

The fundamental shift here is moving from a pushing mindset to a helping mindset. Instead of trying to move people through your funnel, focus on genuinely helping them succeed.

This doesn't mean hiding the fact that you have products or services that could help. As Faus puts it: "If your product genuinely solves someone's problem, you're doing them a disservice by not saying this thing can help you in this way."

Her hot take on gating content perfectly captures this mindset: "If I had it my way, I would un-gate, like, I fundamentally don't believe in gated content at all." The philosophy is simple: "Showing, not telling, giving, not just receiving in a transactional way builds that trust, builds that long-term affinity, and it does ultimately turn into revenue."

Start small. Pick one piece of gated content and ungate it. Create one genuinely helpful resource with no strings attached. Put one employee's name and face on your thought leadership instead of hiding behind your company logo.

In an age of AI, human connection becomes more valuable, not less. People crave authenticity precisely because it's becoming harder to find. Companies that figure out how to build genuine trust won't just survive the current crisis—they'll emerge stronger on the other side.

Trust isn't just the fastest way to long-term ROI. In a world where trust is scarce, it might be the only way.