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Businesses focus on building their credibility and expertise in their industry. Such businesses look at clients as active agents who are primarily seeking information to make critical choices between several similar products. Rather than force products or services on customers, trust-based businesses invest in gaining trust through honesty, objectivity, responsiveness, and concern for client needs.
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Such an Approach May Seem Idealistic
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| Taken too far, perhaps it canbe. The results of trust-based marketing aren't always as immediate as other approaches because you have to spend a lot of time (but not a lot of money) on establishing yourself as an expert. However, the results are longer lasting and especially effective for businesses that rely on word-of-mouth and return customers. |
| Why Is It Practical? |
| Think of how much you are bothered by TV commercials or banner ads. Why contribute to the clutter? Instead of spending too much money-overloading people with advertisements they're bound to ignore, a trust-based marketing company might have a representative deliver a lecture to a targeted audience on a topic related to his/her industry. Or the company might answer questions on a newsgroup or online forum. Such methods are cost-efficient and go a long way towards showing that you are knowledgeable, trustworthy, and care about clients' concerns. |
| With the rise of the Internet, customers have lots of choices and lots of access to information. So push approaches don't work as well. Customers do lots of research before each purchase. Fancy websites, glittery ads and lots of bragging about how great your company is don't impress people because they are overloaded by similar claims. A trust-based approach takes this into account and says, it prove I'm better than the rest, I need
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to do everything I can to listen to my clients and give them honest, objective answers. Just saying trust me, I'm honest isn't enough. You need to show honesty in action “ in everything you do “ if you want to pull in and retain more clients. |
| A Fortune 500 Example |
| GM went as far as having a web page developed (not on the GM page) that analyzed peoples car needs and suggested the best car for them “ whether it was a GM car or another company's! The idea was that if GM has the best product, an objective analysis would show GM's cars more often than others. This is an extreme version of trust-based marketing. It might even advertise other companies' products. But the assumption of GM - which is right “ is that people already know about the competition. Plus, GM gains trust by showing themselves willing to go up against the competition and acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses. GM reported sales increases due to this website. |
| big blue whale makes it easy |
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