[Transcript]
Sarah VanDerHart (00:59):
Welcome everyone to today's Power of Brand Trust webinar experience. I'm Sarah VanDerHart, Customer Solutions Insights and Strategy Leader at ITA Group, and I'm excited to guide you through this session. My team at ITA Group, a global engagement agency focused on creating lasting connections with stakeholders, is proud to present this webinar featuring our insights and strategy group, CMB. If you haven't already, please type in the chat where you're coming from today. We love seeing the incredible diversity of our global community. Before we dive into the data, we want to hear about your top priorities. We're going to launch a quick poll now that helps us understand where you're currently focused on driving customer value. This is important to us and as it helps us tailor the content to you and it helps us plan our next research wave. You should see the poll pop up on your screen.
(01:59):
Please take a moment to answer this question to drive long-term customer value, which strategic area should be the highest priority for your organizations? Please click all the answers that you find to be important while that poll is running. Feel free to communicate with one another in the chat now or anytime throughout this session. This helps spark meaningful conversation and connection within this leadership community. Additionally, if you have any questions during this session, please add them to the q and a feature at the bottom of your screen, and now we'll go ahead and close the poll and share the results. With that, I'm excited to introduce your moderator, Amanda McMahan, who will guide us through today's conversation. Amanda, take it away.
Amanda McMahan (03:00):
Thanks Sarah. Welcome everyone. I'm Amanda McMahan, Insights Director at CMB, and I'm thrilled to drive into today's topic driving long-term growth through smart research that builds brand trust and turns it into loyalty. Brand loyalty doesn't just start with a punch card or promo. It begins with trust. Just like any great relationship, first impressions, lasting commitment and emotional connection all come from how well a brand builds and maintains trust. This type of knowledge is unlocking a new frontier for brand value and engagement. Our guests today are Julia Walker, Brand Trust Expert at CMB and Max Kenkle, Customer Solutions Manager at ITA Group. Julia will kick us off by sharing the results of our groundbreaking work on brand trust. Then she and Max will dig into what it all means in the real world, how we can use these learnings inside our organizations to sharpen brand strategy and supercharge loyalty initiatives. So let's dive in. Julia, tell us why should a C-suite leader care about brand trust today? What are the key business outcomes that trust directly predicts?
Julia Walker (04:18):
Thanks, Amanda. Yeah, I'm sure we can all recognize that trust is a foundation to any lasting customer relationship, but our research explicitly shows this connection between brand trust and a business's bottom line. When brand trust is strong, we see a correlates with critical engagement metrics like consideration, repeat, purchase, and long-term loyalty. And really, in other words, trust isn't just a nice to have, it's really a leading indicator of future revenue and brand health. On the flip side, when we see trust erodes, it can be really costly for a brand like in some of these recent headline examples where Spotify and Target are struggling with loyalty. That's why we believe that it's critical not just to measure trust, but to understand its underlying dimensions and managing it proactively.
Amanda McMahan (05:12):
Those headlines are a tough reminder that when trust slips, loyalty can unravel fast. Our CMB and ITA Group combined research data shows that trust isn't just correlated with loyalty, it's a prerequisite. And today's conversation, we're going to talk about the relationship between brand trust and loyalty. Max, I'd like for you to take us through the strategic context. Can you tell us why trust may come first and why traditional approaches to building loyalty aren't just cutting it anymore?
Max Kenkel (05:43):
Yeah, sure. Thanks Amanda. So I think it's easy for brands to jump straight to offers and promotions when you're thinking about building loyalty and activating customers. But underneath all that, there's a simpler question from the customer, which is, do I trust you as a brand and do I think you're going to act in my best interest? And so traditional loyalty and CX metrics, they were built for a world where it was really easy to just count enrollments, redemptions and survey scores and say that everything's checking the box and it's all looking good. And that worked really well when customers had fewer choices and lower expectations of the brands than they do today. But today, through some fault of the brands and a combination of social media and people being hyper aware of what brands are doing now, there's more products than ever. There's more options than ever.
(06:32):
When you go to the store, there's actually a great book you can read about that called the Paradox of Choice. So you have all this noise out there and all this choice and still customers are looking for this seamless omnichannel experience. They're looking for transparency from the brands for good products, any extra value they can get from a loyalty program and some sort of an emotional connection. They want to feel something. And so while it's true that you can have a very successful loyalty program on paper with pretty high enrollment and lots of offers, if the noise of the programs and offers and products and people that make up your brand or eroding trust in the background, then you're going to be in trouble sooner rather than later. So without that foundation of trust, loyalty initiatives are forced to work way harder for the brand than what they're probably designed to do. And because rather than it being an amplifier in that instance, then loyalty becomes more of a band aid. So you're going, you need to create this two-way street where you have trust, building loyalty and loyalty, helping to drive trust and the brands who are getting that right are really starting to win.
Amanda McMahan (07:39):
Yeah, that makes sense. Based on the brand trust measurement research that we've conducted at CMB, we know that trust isn't a single metric, it's multifaceted. Julia, could you walk us through the six pillars of brand trust we've revealed and highlight the significance of the dimensions and how they might differ across industries?
Julia Walker (08:00):
Yeah, absolutely. So we set out to better understand what truly defines trust, what it's made of and what levers leaders can actually pull to influence it. And through our research we identified that there are six core pillars of brand trust, each with a different level of impact. And together these pillars really capture the full depth of what drives trust today from meeting expectations and being transparent to showing responsiveness and aligning with consumer's values. So for instance, I'll look at two here today, dependability at the top here is one of the foundations of trust. It's about whether a brand delivers on its brand promises, and at its core it asks, do the products and services consistently meet expectations? In contrast, we have relevance at the bottom here, and this is about reflecting how well a brand aligns with consumer's values and priorities, including things like commitments to ESG or innovation, for example.
(09:07):
Now while these six dimensions do apply broadly, what's really interesting is that they're relative importance shifts by industry. So for example, if we double click into the airline industry within travel, being customer first and putting passengers at the center of their brand promise is a top driver of trust because we know that flying is often high stakes and high stress travelers are placing a lot of trust in an airline, not just to get them from point A to point B, but to handle disruptions and treat them with respect and make them feel safe and valued when things go wrong. In contrast, if we look at the retail industry, integrity becomes a much more critical pillar compared to other industries. Consumers want to feel confident that pricing is fair and return policies are honored and that brands are really standing behind what they sell. So as you can see, this framework stays consistent, but the weight of each dimension flexes depending on the category context, and that's where strategy comes into play.
Amanda McMahan (10:18):
Thanks Julia. That does bring it to life. I really like how this framework demonstrates trusses just a single metric, right? It's that mix of measurements across different signals. Brands offer customers dependability, integrity, reflecting customer values. Most especially in the retail sector. What really stands out to me in the loyalty research we've done with ITA Group is how directly trust pillars map to these emotional cues that drive loyalty programs. We've shown that it's not enough for a program just to be easy to use and offer high quality rewards. Members need to feel both functional benefit and emotional connection with the brand for loyalty to really take hold and underpinning all of that is brand trust, these important dimensions that drive different elements differently across verticals. So I think the question is how do we take these six pillars of trust and build them into program and customer experience design? Max, I'll pass it over to you to talk about what trust activation looks like within a loyalty context.
Max Kenkel (11:25):
Sure. Thanks Amanda. So I hate to break the news to everybody, but there's no magic bullet for any of this, right? You have to do all of these things in a pretty meaningful way if you want to capture as much share of wallet spend and maximize your visits from customers. So as I mentioned earlier that loyalty is very much a two way street with trust. Strong trust is going to lead to stronger loyalty and strong loyalty when it's managed really well is going to be delivering both the functional and emotional, continually reinforcing that trust in the mind of your customers and members in the loyalty program. So when customers feel both of the loyalty benefits the functional value earned through the program, they're three times more likely to visit, spend and give share. So basically, is the program worth it for me to get out of bed in the morning and participate in on a regular basis?
(12:14):
And if they feel that way, they're more likely to participate and give you the visit, spend and share and don't lose sight of redemption. That's a very critical part of this value flywheel as we try to get people going through it more times going down the customer journey more times and that psychology that tied to redemption to the brand, that's super important. Then if we flip to the next one here, so then if customers feel emotionally connected through the loyalty program, they're four times more likely to visit, spend and give share. So questions like, does the brand know who I am? Do I feel like I matter to the brand? Does the brand care about me as a person? And when the answer to these questions is positive, it drives a material impact to the bottom line. And then finally, if customers feel both the value and the connection, they're eight times more likely to visit, eight times more likely to visit, spend and give share to the brand.
(13:09):
And that's the loyalty program in action, right? It's trying to drive the future purchases from engaged customers and to create those customers who feel both benefited and connected. Brands need to deliver value through the loyalty program and they need to deliver personalization that matters to the customer and they need to, in most cases a strong frontline experience to deliver that winning customer experience every time that customers walk into the store. But it's all underpinned by trust. And if members don't trust the brand, then the loyalty program simply won't. I mean it won't maximize what the brand's trying to do. And eventually that program's only going to cater to a small percentage of customers leaving the majority of 'em just kind of languishing in an inactivity status. And so that program will feel very stagnant to those members.
(13:58):
So if we bring this all together, when you overlay Julia's six pillars on our value and connection formula, then you can see how these fuel a loyalty loop. So you have dependability and transparency helping to create trust, help trust, create loyalty, and the program does what it promises with no hidden catches, right? No strings attached customer first behavior and shared values help to feed that, help loyalty, feed that back into the trust that members see repeatedly and then the brand shows up for them in the moments that matter and nothing's left at chance. And so when we can design loyalty and customer engagement strategies through that lens, a true trust and loyalty loop, you're not just driving short-term engagement, you're setting yourself up for that two-way system where trust earns loyalty, loyalty keeps proving that trust is well placed and that's how brands can bank positive equity in the minds of the customers, which is, well, I like to say that loyalty is not a point in time concept, right? It's an ongoing outcome that brands are trying to get by putting in the work to build a relationship with their customers and it's how brands can retain customers through some of those rough patches.
Amanda McMahan (15:07):
So it makes a lot of sense. I mean, seeing the underpinning of trust elements beneath the framework that we've emerged through our ITA Group loyalty research, the flywheel is evident in how those pieces work together. Alright, so let's talk about real world examples. What does our loyalty research tell us about what happens when trust and loyalty erode? What are the biggest barriers that those leaders are facing when trying to implement trust building solutions in their programs?
Max Kenkel (15:34):
Yeah, when trust breaks down, I mean you can quickly see it in the numbers if we just look at some of the research that we did for a big box retailer in our study. So we look at Target, which Julia will unpack here in a little more detail in a moment, but we can just see in our research a pattern monthly active use dropped from 60% in 2024 to 45% in 2025, promoters fell off from 37% of the audience to 32%, and past year spend declined from about a thousand, over a thousand to just over $900. So on top of that, in 20 25, 4 in 10 customers told us through the research that they did not feel an emotional connection to the brand. And that's not just a perception problem, that's trust erosion showing up as fewer visits, softer advocacy, less share a wallet even for a hugely recognized brand.
(16:28):
And I think I can explain some of that with our research. So we uncovered that the two biggest drivers of emotional connection are feeling motivated to engage with the brand, which I'm going to say is an active and intrinsic bucket and then feeling appreciated by the brand, which is passive and extrinsic. And so what does that mean in plain terms? When customers have a foundation of trust and feel motivated to engage and then they continually feel appreciated during and after that engagement, then a brand really ups its chances of forging that emotional connection. So let's look at those building blocks for motivation and appreciation in this chart here that's on the screen. The bars to the left that we see on average, brands are doing these things pretty well actually, at least according to their loyalty members through our survey. But what was super interesting to me and what should be concerning to a lot of brands is that customers say brands are missing the mark on the five drivers on the right, which ironically are the five most important things to customers.
(17:29):
So this is creating a huge opportunity for brands who want to form a stronger emotional connection and want to differentiate from their competitors. It's giving them a way that they can do that and every brand should want that stronger emotional connection as we've already covered. It leads to increased customer value four times increased customer value, and more valuable customer relationships. So when a brand makes a decision that erodes the emotional connection, it starts to erode and impact trust, and that starts to create what we'll call a negative flywheel that can quickly spiral out of control and cause customers to look for another brand or another option. And so I think the challenge for brand leaders isn't believing that trust matters, it's overcoming these blockers and there's constant pressure to chase this with short-term promotion to get a quick fix out there. But really you kind of got to figure out what the root cause is.
(18:24):
Brand CX and loyalty teams are often in silos. They're not always necessarily working from a shared trust framework. And I think too many programs are so complex or opaque that they're actually undermining transparency, which is one of the core pillars of trust that Julia talked about. And so there's where understanding trust and loyalty at your organization using this clear framework and common metrics becomes so important because the brand, the loyalty team, your CX teams are often in these silos not necessarily working across the enterprise with that shared framework. And I think brands have to remember that customers do not care about your silos to them you're just the brand and too many programs are missing the interconnectivity that's required to truly orchestrate a great loyalty program that builds value for the customer, builds emotional connection in those loyalty members and reinforces trust at every step of the game. And conversely, when brands get it right, it can really pay off.
Amanda McMahan (19:25):
I mean absolutely measuring and assessing program effectiveness, comparing your brand trust scores and how you situate within the market, it's key to informing next steps. Julia, could you take us a bit deeper into target as a case study example, where do you see trust gaps across pillars for this brand in our CMV research and how can a brand rebuild trust and loyalty in practice?
Julia Walker (19:49):
Yeah, so just building on what Max just shared, target is such a clear example of how trust gaps show up not only in attitudes but in behaviors as well. And despite being one of the most recognizable retailers in the country, target's trust scores are among the lowest in the retail category. And I think the data that Max walked us through really underscores what erosion looks like in practice. And this is all happening at a time when with inflation still high, you'd expect that value oriented brands like Target and Walmart would be in a strong position. But I think it's a little bit more complicated than that. Target continues to underperform based on some of the latest earnings and our data shows that there are three core trust pillars where the brand is struggling the most. So number one is transparency. There seems to be this uncertainty around pricing and policies and key business decisions leaving customers feeling out of the loop.
(20:53):
The second is customer first. Many shoppers don't feel prioritized or genuinely cared for in their day-to-day experiences. And the third here is relevance. Consumers aren't feeling a strong alignment with target's values or how the brand shows up culturally today. So when you pair these trust gaps with the behavioral signals that Max highlighted, it creates this reinforcing cycle. And we know there are several real world factors that likely are contributing to this, right? Like the backlash tied to cultural and DEI issues in-store friction around inventory and cleanliness, and questions about whether target is still delivering strong quality for its prices from a trust perspective. These are all really linked, but the good news is that focusing on these pillars where trust is the weakest, so transparency customer first and relevance with that target has an opportunity to rebuild that emotional connection and reestablish loyalty in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Amanda McMahan (22:02):
Alright, so we've made the case trust is foundational, it shapes loyalty and we've seen what happens when it breaks down. Now I think let's talk more about the blueprint for repair for realignment. Julia, starting with you, what are the most actionable strategies that leaders can use right now to measure and strengthen trust in their organization?
Julia Walker (22:24):
Yeah, I mean I think a few things come to mind. First and foremost, it's really important to define what trust means in your organization for really across teams and roles and levels because misalignment is one of the biggest blockers. So aligning on what trust is and how it shows up is a critical first step in getting everyone going in the right direction. Two is gaining clarity on where you stand today, right? So tracking brand trust and benchmarking that against competitors gives you that clearer picture of where are your gaps and where are your opportunities today? And finally, I'd say connecting signals across consumers market and business data to help guide action because we've talked about this a lot today, trust is not just a single metric, it's more of a story, right? So when you're connecting behavioral data market forces and operational realities, you get this clearer picture, not just of where you stand but why trust is rising or falling. So these integrated signals point you towards the moments that matter the most together. I'd say these three steps form a nice blueprint for some actionable strategies for organizations today. But Max, I'd love to hear from your perspective, what are some of the actual strategies that you recommend?
Max Kenkel (23:51):
When I think about it from a loyalty perspective, once you know where you stand on trust, then the next move is to make sure that your employees and your partners can actually deliver that experience for your and deliver your program promises. So customers don't experience your loyalty strategy on a slide, right? They experience it through the in-store experience with people and touch points with store associates, call centers, the digital experience, any partner channels that you sell through. And if those teams aren't informed and aren't excited and aren't empowered, then even the best design program is going to fall flat with 'em. I will say customers can see through, right? They can see through things that are disingenuous or that aren't all the way there to the place where they need to be. And so you can't pull the wool over their eyes. And so a few practical things we see working.
(24:45):
So first, give that frontline team some simple concrete guidelines on how the program should feel for members, what appreciation looks like for your brand and how to handle any issues that come up and how to answer questions about the program. Because a lot of times they're the face of the brand for you and they need to know where to bend a rule to keep a high value member. Second, I would align incentives for those teams so that they're rewarded not just for signups but for quality engagement, things that matter for from a repeat visit standpoint, higher active usage or successful problem resolution for customers because those are the things that are going to have a direct impact on your loyalty members. And then third, closing the loop with partners, franchisees, channel partners, agencies, so they understand the role the program plays in driving visit frequency, driving spend and capturing share of wallet, and they can co-own that success rather than seeing it as, oh, the head office is making more rules for us. Again, get their take two and let them feel empowered to make some decisions. They own that local relationship with the customer. So when you get the employee and the partner side, right, then your loyalty program stops being just a points engine and it starts to behave more like a relationship engine showing up consistently in ways that keep members excited and keep 'em coming back and helps deepen their connection with that brand.
Amanda McMahan (26:08):
Thank you both through your perspectives. As we wind down on our conversation today, I want to leave our viewers with some key takeaways. So Julia Max, could each of you share a short summary of what you hope leaders carry forward from this conversation?
Julia Walker (26:23):
Yeah, so to pull this all together, the way that CMB and ITA Group look at brand trust is as a foundation of loyalty, driving value and connection and ultimately leading to greater brand engagement. When trust is strong, customers see more value in what you offer, they feel a deeper connection to your brand and they're more willing to engage, whether that's through loyalty programs, foot traffic or advocacy.
Max Kenkel (26:54):
Yeah, I agree with that totally and trust, it's what makes people feel comfortable choosing you again and again and again and again. And so trying something new or forgiving a misstep with your brand and without that trust foundation loyalty initiatives are forced to work way too hard and you just create an opportunity for them to fall short. So on the value side, we know that trust and loyalty are maintain one, customers believe they're getting a good deal and they're getting some unexpected value from you and that you'll stand behind your products and services that makes 'em more open to trying new things with you, including coming in more frequently and upping their spend with your brand. I think from an emotional connection standpoint and the shared of like or the sense of shared value fuels both trust and loyalty, it's what keeps people with you when there's a bump in the road like we discussed earlier or when a competitor's waving a coupon in their face. And so you need both to generate greater brand engagement since that's what reflects all the behaviors we've been talking about. More visits, more participation in loyalty or membership program and more share of wallet. And I think in our joint work here, we treat trust as something you can deconstruct and manage, not just something that you can sit back and admire. And so CMB can help measure the specific dimensions, things like transparency, reliability, and fairness, and ITA Group can help tie those directly to behaviors like trial repeat behaviors and loyal program engagement.
Amanda McMahan (28:24):
Thank you both. I think this has been a really rich conversation. It's clear we've told you that brand trust and loyalty are deeply linked. I hope that has come through. Both are also manageable so you can measure where you stand, align your teams and design these programs and experiences and messaging that strengthen the relationships over time. CMB and ITA Group have captured the frameworks, what we've talked about today, including the six pillars of brand trust and it's perspective on why feelings not just features, fuel customer engagement and digital guides and eBooks that you can download after the today's session. These materials are designed to help you bring today's discussion back to your teams and start making moves right away. We'll be making these resources available to you via a QR code that will be visible on your screen before we wrap up. If you happen to miss it, don't worry. We'll be glad to follow up directly with every leader in this community with the full materials and takeaways. On behalf of CMBA and ITA Group, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. We'd love to continue the conversation whether that's about your category or your loyalty program or how to get started with trust and loyalty measurement. Shortly we'll move into q and a, but first I'll pass it back to you Sarah.
Sarah VanDerHart (29:42):
Thanks Amanda. Now it's time to hear from you. As a reminder, please use the q and a feature at the bottom of your screen to submit your questions and feel free to keep communicating and connecting with other members of this community in the chat. We will get to as many submitted questions as we can during the live segment and for anything we don't get to, we promise to follow up afterwards. In anticipation of our discussion, we did receive a few questions ahead of time that we'll weave in with the live questions. With that said, I'll task it back to Amanda to moderate the q and a portion should.
Amanda McMahan (30:19):
Thank you so much. So we have a good first question, Julia, that I'd like to pass to you. It's a precursor to how we determine the weight of each dimension for each individual industry. Could you talk to us a little bit about how we measure that and how we determine that it's different across the industry before we maybe go into a couple more areas of consultation?
Julia Walker (30:44):
Yeah, absolutely. So these different factors were we use driver models in each of these industries to understand the weight of each of these dimensions, how much that drove trust for those individual industries. And so that's where we noticed that there were differences within the industries in terms of what was rising to the top of that driver model and what was having the biggest impact on moving the trust needle.
Amanda McMahan (31:13):
Thanks for going over those advanced analytics pieces. We had a question about whether it's more important to fix areas where you score the lowest on trust or areas that are most important to customers. How would you respond?
Julia Walker (31:29):
Yeah, I think that in that case it's really about looking at the intersection between how your brand is performing and the importance within your category. So just because there's a low score that might not necessarily be urgent depending on how highly valued that is by your particular audience, but if you're scoring low in a high impact pillar, then that really matters. So that's definitely an area where you want to pull your attention to. So I think it's just sort of looking at within that specific situation, what's the intersection of performance and importance
Amanda McMahan (32:07):
That makes sense. That's helpful. Once a team has identified a pillar that's both high impact and low scoring, what's the next step and Max, how might that show up specifically in a loyalty or customer solutions program?
Max Kenkel (32:22):
Yeah, so I mean it'll show up different for every brand first, like you said, identifying where the problem is. There's probably some you could put on it by using a loyalty program, but brands still have to fix those issues, especially if that issue is product or service oriented because the worst thing you can do is get another chance with a customer and then fall flat again. Conversely though, I do know that if you make it right with that customer and you help them get over whatever that road bump is, they're they're way more loyal to you after that. So I think use your loyalty levers as a tool to help get through whatever your biggest hurdles are. But I think there's, like I said earlier, there's just no magic bullet. You kind of have to do a little bit of all of it, but you certainly with a good loyalty program and a good cohesive team working on it, you've got the levers that you can pull to get through that situation, rectify any issues that you are dealing with and then move forward with that customer at a different level.
Amanda McMahan (33:33):
Let's say a customer has only measured trust as a single question, can they easily add new questions to replace that old approach? Or what kind of methodological recommendation would you give them, Julia?
Julia Walker (33:50):
Yeah, I think that's a great question because a lot of our clients do have a brand tracker where they measure as a single item is a brand I trust. That's pretty common and I think that's really a great starting point. It gives you a high level snapshot of where your brand is, but the challenge that is that it's sort of lacking that diagnostic value. So your trust is low. Well, what do we do now? So I think that what's our recommendation is where you can building in these different trust pillars into either an existing brand tracker or periodically measuring those pillars for your brands and some competitor brands so that you can get that deeper level of information on what levers you might be able to move to actually have an impact on trust.
Amanda McMahan (34:48):
Well, we have a question that relates to how a big brand halo effect might be at play in trust. And so I think the question might be what's our perspective on measuring and understanding brand trust when maybe brand halo effects are at play? And that might have to do with benchmarking against main competitors in the industry. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Julia Walker (35:13):
Yeah, absolutely. So sure, the brand halo effects could definitely play a role. One of the things we recommend is sort of tracking over time to understand where is your brand sitting point in time against other competitors in your similar industry? And then also, so over time, as there are external, how is your brand moving up or down with trust? So of course that doesn't necessarily remove that halo effect, but there might be halo effects for other competitors too. So it's just sort of looking at that comparison and understanding where it moves based on what's going on in the marketplace.
Amanda McMahan (35:59):
There's also interesting research that CMB does on habits, and so we might also be able to understand the habitual behaviors of customers related to a brand engagement and that would also feed into max the loyalty measurements that you could offer. And so understanding not only the brand trust foundation, but some habitual data and some loyalty programmatic telemetry data would really create, I would think a really nice holistic view for a brand.
Max Kenkel (36:28):
And I think just to kind of tack onto what Julia said there, what we saw in our research was that there was a pretty even split between promoters and detractors for each of the brands. I mean there were a few that had quite a bit more promoters, a few that had quite a few more detractors, but I think overall it was pretty even. And so what that tells me is that there's different needs from different audience members. And so even if you are scoring relatively high on trust scores or any other metric that you're tracking, when you think about how that applies to your loyalty program, with as much data as brands are able to capture today, and as we continue to enhance just broadly across the loyalty spectrum and industry, how personalization is delivered to those customers, it may be worth exploring for the ones who are identifying as detractors or are scoring lower, maybe they need a different experience.
(37:20):
Because what we would hate to see is a brand say, yeah, we've got pretty good trust scores, but there's anywhere from 20 to 40% of the audience that still just doesn't feel the love. And so I think as tools get better and as brands have more data that they can act on this idea that you could orchestrate different experiences for different customer types, especially when you relate it back to trust or to advocacy, there's an opportunity there for brands to get more people to engage with their products, with their services and just in general with their brand by creating this different experience. And so I'd just say maybe if you feel like you're scoring pretty high and things are cooking right along now, maybe it's time to explore how we get these other audiences to engage.
Amanda McMahan (38:03):
I like that We have another question that I think segues well speaking about new technologies and the wealth of data that I think brands can tap into. Consumers are increasingly relying on AI for shopping preferences and product reviews. So what new strategies should brands do or employ to ensure that their trust scores or brand consideration scores aren't suffering when they're not in the room?
Max Kenkel (38:29):
I can start. I think they need to still look for ways to have in-person touchpoints and non-AI touchpoints to hear back from them, to hear back from customers. I think AI is great. I think it speeds up a lot of things. I think there are still a lot of customers who do not like it and they still want that human experience and brands are going to have to figure out a way to blend it. They're going to have to make people's lives easier with AI without sacrificing the relationship and the emotional connection. So I think that's the trick and that's what everyone's trying to figure out right now. So if you're starting with AI and you've got some of those tools out there, I would say you still want to find ways to make that emotional connection. Like we said, that drives more share, more visits and more spend just as much as delivering value through the program does.
(39:23):
And so I think, I know that might feel like kind of a soft answer, but I think the creative part of it is figuring out how to perfectly blend AI and human interaction and when brands are going to get that piece, that's where you'll really start to see some people, some brands leapfrogging others because they'll have the speed and the agility with the AI, but they'll still have that emotional connection and it'll just feel really good to customers. It'll feel like a great omnichannel experience, but I still think that we're, as an industry and as across a broad spectrum of brands, I think people are still trying to ease into that a little bit, which I think is good.
Julia Walker (40:02):
Yeah, I couldn't agree more Max. And I think the other piece just wanted to mention from the brand trust perspective is transparency is really linked to brands' use of ai and in particular, if a consumer is expecting to call and reach a human and they reach AI instead, I think that's really important to just be really clear about setting their expectations and the usage that brands have of AI just so that you aren't sort of disappointing consumers. So that's definitely very strongly tied to the brand trust pillars.
Amanda McMahan (40:43):
Before we wrap up today, I'd love a quick lightning round. So if we could have leaders remember just one sentence about the link between brand trust and loyalty, what would that be? I see Max thinking very
Max Kenkel (40:57):
Hard one sentence, right? I mean it's a circular calculation and so you need both and both trust and the loyalty program can reinforce each other. You just got to be smart about which levers to pull. That's certainly something that between CMB and ITA Group, we can help you figure out.
Julia Walker (41:18):
I love it. Yeah, I would just second that. Trust is the engine of loyalty. You really need both and they are a two-way street.
Amanda McMahan (41:30):
Julia, Max. Thank you so much and thanks all of you for the great questions and the engagement today. We really appreciate your time and we'd love to hear more from you. Sarah, I'll send it back to you to take us home.
Sarah VanDerHart (41:42):
All right, that's all the time we have today. Thank you for the questions and engagement throughout this session, and a huge thank you to Julia Walker and Max Kenkel. Further insights into Amanda McMahan for guiding our conversation today. And to all of you for being engaged members of this leadership community, we look forward to future opportunities to get together with all of you. If you're curious about leveraging the power of brand trust to drive value and engagement with your customers or how your brand scores, we invite you to reach out to us by scanning the QR code on the screen. Thanks again for joining us and we'll see you next time.