HONESTY- How does it impact your message?
The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2021 highlighted the emergence as business as the most trusted institution in the United States. The Trust index used traditional opinion polling methodologies to reach that conclusion. At that time, many media commentators shared this conclusion and widely reported what the polling result meant by making inferences of their own. But, they didn’t know why business was more trustworthy, nor did they know which businesses were more trustworthy than others. Opinion polling can measure opinion, but it does not measure the beliefs that shape the opinions people express. Veriphix saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate how Belief3, its unique and how its ethical AI technology, could determine this important “why” behind a widely reported opinion survey. Why do people believe something to be true? Belief cannot be found in an opinion poll – it must be surfaced in ways that eliminate bias and raise the unspoken drivers of opinion.
Why does this matter? To say that “business” has become most trusted may be an opinion held by a majority in a sample group, but how do business leaders and politicians act on that information? How does one business learn if it is more trusted than its peers, or how to positively influence what people believe about their business?
In 2021, Veriphix deployed Belief3 across the U.S. during the same period of measurement as the Trust Barometer. At that time, the Black Lives matter movement was in full force, George Floyd protests, #meetoo, and other movements were very active. It was a time of apparent polarization – widely reported in the media as a moment when Americans were acting tribal and seeking to cluster with people who were “like me.” Many observers directly attributed the favorable trust positioning of business versus government to this polarization: business marketed to individuals benefitted from the polarization of society by allowing individuals to make choices for consumption that reinforced polarization. Businesses could easily conclude therefore that their best path to positive brand equity and customer loyalty was to highlight marketing to narrow groups or individuals.
However, Veriphix used Belief3 to look behind opinions expressed in the Barometer Index to group belief. What it learned through its unique technology ran counter to the generally accepted views of social attitudes prevailing at that time.
What really was happening over the summer of 2021? Belief3 revealed that people were searching for ways to connect with “Fellow humans” and not people “like me.” Despite all the hatred and animosity on display, their unspoken bias was to look for ways to redefine groups beyond race and gender and believe in their “fellow humans.”
Belief3 revealed that group belief valuing “fellow humans” rather than “people like me” created favorable conditions for business to emerge as more trustworthy compared to government. This is because businesses employ groups of people who are identifiable to the individual – whether because of the individual’s personal experiences as an employee or consumer. By looking for connection to fellow humans, in 2021 Americans had a bias towards institutions where there was engagement with its people – the business’s employees. This is the WHY business was identified by the Trust Barometer as more trustworthy – business was about its people – its employees. The more “honest” the interactions with the employees of a business, or the more honestly in which a company handled its employees, the more likely individuals were to see a business as trustworthy. Single individual interactions aggregate into social belief. Simply put, Belief3 identified that as a group people felt that business was more trustworthy because in the aggregate there was more positive connection with business than other institutions. A poll and survey could not surface this insight – Belief3 did.
This insight was and is highly important to business leaders. If a business’s ability to connect and be trusted is based upon its people, then how it treats its employees becomes a strategically important consideration. It also becomes a way to measure a business’s trustworthiness against other businesses, because Belief3 can also be deployed to inform meaningful comparisons. Veriphix helps its customers learn the why behind how it customers act and respond, and how it can respond to what people actually believe – not what they say. This is not polling – it’s something new: actionable insights that can be measured and acted upon.