Consumers today are becoming more empowered, demanding and raising the bar. As they peer behind the messages into the companies generating them they are rapidly concluding that they can’t trust businesses, their brands, their advertising and above all their motivations. Marketers in turn will have to take on the responsibility not just for driving sales but commit their brands to building positive social capital and through this finally regain trust.

Financial advertising has continued to be dominated by the ‘people dancing down the beach happily,’ or happy-go-lucky sort of creative. Focusing overly on the positive means that the realities of life are largely denied in marketing. The risk is that brands become even more fantastic and less about solving day-to-day issues.

Trust matters because it is trust that is at the heart of every brand. Here we give you 5 reasons on why trust matters in for an organization, business and brand.

Rory Sutherland, Chairman, Ogilvy and Mather on the value of consumers, employees and shareholders in the business and why trust takes a backseat in businesses today.

Toshio Yamagishi from the University of Japan created a series of experiments to examine the question: Are people who trust dumb?Through thousands of questions asked to students and several experiments conducted with them, he found that far from being an irrational thing to do, trust is in fact a skill honed by the highly intelligent.

“All institutions, but especially financial services ignore a lack of trust at their peril. There is often a dichotomy between what companies say they are about and what they actually do – their actions and their words are different. Organisations need to be more forensic about their activities, the impact of their actions and how they are perceived.”

The picture of who we trust: Over the 16 years between 1993 and 2009 Ipsos MORI in its ‘Trust in Doctor: Annual Survey of public trust in professions (2009)’ measured a 22% decrease in the trust held in business leaders and a 10% decline in the trust held in politicians. Even the trust ascribed to the ordinary man or woman in the street saw a 16% fall.

From Lehman brothers to BP to Toyota to British politicians’ expenses to global warming science and even the global financial meltdown, brands and their consumers have suffered from serious, catastrophic collapses in trust.Through a series of blog posts and excerpts from my new book Why Should Anyone Buy from You? we will create insights around strategy, brands, marketing and communication that will help you create trust in brands and understand the twenty-first century mission for marketing: the re-humanization of business.

Fear is the ‘lower order’ stick and the brand is the ‘higher order’ carrot. Think of all the ads which claim that if you don’t buy this or that brand you are running mortal risk. The soap and detergent ads that destroy our invisible enemies – bacteria – and protect our children. One ad campaign or another may not have effect on the overall level of fear in society but, combined with the media and all other fear-based messages from other brands, it does contribute to the overall negative impact.

We are so much smarter than the average business or marketer gives us credit for. We are also so much smarter than a brand or segmentation analysis.People know.They know where a business “is” and whether it should be trusted.

There are many serious issues facing us as a world. Brands and their marketing have a big responsibility to contribute solutions. Marketing departments are, or should be, at the heart of understanding the external, human aspects of a business in the context of the market. Marketing teams, whether they know it or not, use the tools of the psychologist to change perceptions and behaviours. Fun is a powerful tool for creating trustful human relationships.

The 5th August launch date of my up-and-coming book WHY SHOULD ANYONE BUY FROM YOU? is fast approaching.My book is about the collapse of trust in business and brands and what you can do about it for the good of society, your customer and your business. We developed this 1 minutes video to introduce the book.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.What we have witnessed over the past few days with the closure of the News Of The World and the fast creep of the flames to other newspapers is proof that this aphorism is true.And let's be clear despite the best efforts of the Murdochs' to stem the blood loss what we are witnessing is a fundamental reshaping of the balance of power in the British media.

I contributed an interview to an article published by Marketing Week on Marketing Moving Beyond the Boardroom. There are many challenges for marketing how we respond to these will determine whether marketing prospers.

My from the 3rd CMO Conference in Zurich on the challenges for marketing as we move from shareholders to stakeholders. The pressures to change the marketing model are huge and this is both a threat and an opportunity for marketing.

What is the Future of Marketing? Marketing is on a collision course with the future. Our current marketing paradigm is inextricably linked to the driving of consumption and the creation of habits of consumption. Economic growth has been the single minded outcome upon which we have built our brands, our marketing models and our rasion d'etre. But unabated growth cannot continue. My hunch is that the future of marketing is not merely, or even, a "more consumer focused / digital / growth oriented / sustainable" (delete as appropriate) future but a complete reversal of the current paradigm.

This morning MBNA sent me a mailer to extol the virtues of their card proclaiming:"We're changing your credit card to offer even better value"How are they doing this? They are changing my terms so that payments pay of the highest interest rate balance first.

Yesterday I followed Lord Currie's keynote speech at the Reputation in Financial Services Conference 2010, in London, with some reflections on Trust in Financial Services.

This week Natwest and Royal Bank of Scotland rolled out their Customer Charter and lots of marketing in support. Full page ads in papers up and down the country. According to these adverts they are now making 14 commitments to help them become "Britain's most helpful bank".

I've talked frequently on this blog about banking and how financial services companies should be engaging with their specific customer groups rather than broadcasting to the masses (see Engaging with the Web 2.0 consumer or Just how special and different are financial services brands?).We saw First Direct making a foray into the space when it started to externalise its social media commentary through First Direct Live. That was a confident move for a brand that knows it is good at service.