Your Customers Assume You’re Lying

There’s an uncomfortable question sitting at the heart of modern marketing: what if your customers approach your brand the same way they approach a phishing email?

Not because you’re doing anything wrong. But because the environment has changed, and the default setting for most consumers is now suspicion.

The numbers are stark

68% of people worry that brands purposely mislead them. 54% trust brands less when they discover AI-created content. More than half of lower-income households don’t trust business, government, NGOs or media. And in 2024, consumers worldwide lost more than a trillion dollars to scams, with more than half reporting they encountered fraudsters at least once a week.

The result is what you might call ambient scepticism. People no longer reserve distrust for obviously dodgy sources. They carry it everywhere: into ecommerce checkout flows, subscription sign-ups, email inboxes, social feeds, customer service chats. Every warm CTA, countdown timer and AI-assisted sentence now has to clear a higher bar than it used to.

Suspicion doesn’t stay in its lane

Here’s the problem for legitimate brands: people don’t neatly separate illegitimate scams from legal-but-coercive business behaviour. The suspicion bleeds.

When someone has been burned by a fake countdown timer on one site, a dishonest “only 3 left” message on another, and a subscription that was impossible to cancel on a third, they bring that accumulated wariness to your brand too. Even if you’ve never done any of those things.

Most buying journeys now feel less like research and more like self-defence. People aren’t only asking “is this good?” They’re asking “is this real?” and “what is this trying to do to me?”

Trust is a commercial metric

This isn’t a soft problem. Trust shapes every stage of the funnel:

• Consideration: people screen out dubious-feeling brands earlier and with less conscious deliberation than ever before.

• Conversion: in a mistrusted category, friction feels safer than pressure. Urgency that might once have worked now triggers alarm.

• Pricing power: credibility supports premium. Suspicion compresses it. When people aren’t sure they can believe you, they want a discount for the risk.

• Retention: trust compounds over time. Manipulative shortcuts don’t. Each breach accelerates switching.

• Reputation: once doubt enters the system, every signal gets read harder. A clumsy email that would previously have been ignored becomes evidence.

The total quantified value of brand and company reputations worldwide is estimated at $7 trillion. Trust isn’t a brand value. It’s infrastructure.

The real question

The instinct when faced with this landscape is to try to sound more authentic. More human. More real. But that instinct is part of the problem, because everyone has had the same instinct, and the result is a digital environment saturated with performed authenticity that paradoxically makes everything feel less real.

Good strategy here isn’t about sounding credible. It’s about giving people enough evidence to believe you.

That’s a different brief entirely. And it starts with understanding why the problem exists in the first place.