Benefits for a Company in Being Associated with Trust

A company would wish to be trusted for a number of reasons, including the following:

Trust is a better strategy than power games. Kumar argues that the power balance between manufacturers and retailers has shifted over the last few years and has introduced new trust relationships [Kumar 1996]. The traditional model of fear and intimidation, resulting in powerless but resisting victims, is held to be a poor long-term strategy that is unsustainable. Indeed, trying to build a position of power is incompatible with the approach of building trust. Alternatively, if companies decide to try to build trust with customers, both parties are likely to be more committed to the relationship and less likely to seek an alternative. In addition, they can both be more open and collaborative, exchanging more information and even sharing confidential information.

Brand image is associated with trust. Reputation is perhaps a company's most valuable asset [Nissenbaum 1999]. Yet brand image suffers if a breach of trust or privacy occurs. For example, banks may lose their reputation and the trust of their customers by denying that phantom Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) withdrawals happen, and the situation is made worse if they sue in court the customers who have been affected by such withdrawals. Indeed, marketing seems to be an exercise of establishing trust. Cases have been noted in which a different brand has been created to protect the trustworthiness of an existing one (for example, Audi/VW/SEAT/Skoda and Disney/Touchstone Pictures). Furthermore, reputation may be inherited from the “real world” into the online world, as with the Financial Times online service.

Brand image can be leveraged to sell trusted systems. The willingness of a third party to interact with a Trusted Platform will depend on the intended use and on the level of trust in the platform and in the owner of the platform. For the first time, the manufacturer of a platform is visible to a third party communicating with that platform. For example, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can exploit their reputation for quality to make their platforms the preferred solution for business-critical services.

Note, however, that a company's reputation may not be justified. It is possible to build a bogus reputation. For example, a company can select a large number of potential customers and give half of them one stock tip and give an opposing stock tip to the other half. Then the company can ignore the half who were given the wrong tip. If the company repeats the process several times, the company ends up with a number of people who have been given tips that were right many times in a row. The company then tells these people “Beat the market! Our tips work every time! Send us $1,000, and we will invest it for you in an enterprise that will definitely make money!”