Following up on our last post about trust being the real bottleneck in marketing now, the natural next question is – ok so how do you actually build that trust without doing shady stuff like spamming Reddit threads with your product? We went back and forth on this for a while and here’s basically where we landed.
First thing that comes to mind for most people is UGC ads – user generated content. You know the type, someone filming themselves like “omg I just got this in the mail” and going through the unboxing. Those ads perform really well, theyre basically the top dog format right now, along with influencer marketing in general. But heres the thing – even UGC is getting harder to trust. The second you clock that someone was paid to say something, the whole thing loses its shine. It’s hard to trust basically anything on the internet anymore honestly.
So then we started brainstorming what actually works. Someone jokingly said “partner with JonTron” and honestly that sparked a real conversation, because one of us legitimately bought a ton of Flex Tape after watching that JonTron interview years ago. Never actually used it, but a piece of Flex Tape has been holding the gas door on his car together for like 8 years now and it still works. Phil Swift built genuine trust through sheer personality and staying power, and that’s rare.
Another example – one of us got into Moist Critical (Charlie) as a creator, and when Charlie started a soap brand, that trust transferred straight over. Bought a box of 12 bars because the ingredients sounded clean and it seemed legit, and it turned out to actually be good. The purchase happened because of pre-existing trust in the person, not the product itself. That’s kind of the blueprint if you’re an indie brand – if you already have a genuine following that trusts you, that trust carries over into whatever you sell next.
But if we’re being real, the number one thing that builds trust more than any tactic is just… having a genuinely good product or service. Sounds obvious but its true. If your product is good and you market it honestly, that alone does more heavy lifting than any UGC campaign or influencer partnership. If your product is bad and you market it like its amazing, people catch on fast and it just puts you in the same pile as every other company doing the exact same thing (we’ve talked before about the whole “enshitification” trend and this ties right into that).
There’s also a market-fit piece to this. It’s genuinely hard to sell luxury goods right now when people are struggling to fill up their gas tank. If you want to build trust and actually convert, you need to be offering something people actually need in this economy, not just something that looks nice.
And beyond that, just show that you actually believe in what you’re selling. That authenticity bleeds through, even in small ways. UGC ads are hit or miss because there are just SO many of them now, and a lot of them clearly aren’t genuine. Raycon is a perfect example – every single podcast and YouTuber under the sun has done a Raycon ad read, and I would bet real money that almost none of them actually use the product outside of the 45 seconds they were contractually required to talk about it. People aren’t dumb, they notice that stuff eventually.
So I guess the real takeaway is trust isn’t something you can fully manufacture through tactics. You can accelerate it with good UGC or the right influencer partnership, but the foundation has to be an actual good product plus honesty about what it is. Everything else is just noise stacked on top of that.
