Trust is a means through which we navigate the future. If, every time we left our house in the morning, entered a retailer’s premises or engaged in an online transaction, we were faced with a wall of unknowns, the state of uncertainty and fear it’d generate would paralyze us.
In the days when going online meant either staying home and staring at our desktop monitor or going to work and logging in at a desk machine search was the Google.com interface and its instantly recognizable “ten little blue links” format.
I’ve been writing about semantic search and ranking well on the web for so long that I forget that not everyone is on the same understanding when it comes to search.
There is the classic scenario where a customer brings in a faulty device just a day out of warrantee. Or a clearly worn item is being returned for a refund. Both of these cases usually result in the person in the role of Customer Service failing to live up to the title of the position.
When it comes to generating trust in a digital video environment, we frequently take into account factors such as appearance, setup, form, style, expertise, knowledge, and subject matter, which are all important elements. But none of these will work quite the way you expect them to if there is an ingredient missing from the equation. That ingredient is engagement.
The way the brain determines whether something is true or false is key to our understanding why something that is false may appear to be true, why we can still be conned despite being educated, smart and successful and why search and marketing are now wading in that grey zone where facts and advertising hyperbole create an uneasy mix.
Narrative is story-telling. Whether that story-telling is used to develop an individual’s sense of self or a brand’s identity the role is the same. It provides a set of attributes:
Remember the 80s? A time when a brand used to pay a six figure sum for some well-known actor to get on TV and tell us in 40 seconds or less how great the brand was?
What if I were to tell you that everything you do can be improved upon by you? That you can learn to do everything better. Nothing can exist if the mind cannot think it. Because in order for us to actually see something, much less understand it, our brain has to understand the component parts that make it possible and then compute the way that they behave in relation to each other, everything that occurs within our heads is the result of semantic connections.
News that “Bernard Madoff's victims will soon recoup another $252 million from the trustee unwinding the swindler's firm, boosting their total recovery to $9.72 billion.” raises the obvious question of how was it possible for him to dupe so many people for so long to such an extent?
