All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Why do some people go to Ogilvie’s and not Home Depot or Lowe’s? What is it about any retail store that draws more attention than its competitors?
One could argue that it’s about price. People go to one store over another when the prices are lower (which could also account for the growth of giants like Amazon and Walmart). But the flip side exists as well—some people will pay more money for a product even though it is relatively the same. It’s clear that price is not the only deciding factor.
According to James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II in their book Authenticity, it’s how authentic the business is that brings people to it (and even fuels their willingness to pay more money for a product). The authenticity of a business (versus the authenticity of its associates in their dealings with customers) is comprised of a variety of factors, one of which is credibility.
When people think about going to one store over another (or one website over another), it’s partly because they feel that the business knows what it’s doing. They can trust that the sales associates have the requisite product knowledge. They can trust that the website has the content they need and works as expected. They believe that the business has the expertise to answer questions and provide information.
The business, in the consumer’s eye, is credible. Of course, a need for credibility is directly related to the buying decision. Consumers who are buying fishhooks may not need the kind of credibility from an associate or an organization as, say, consumers who are buying a car. It’s all about uncertainty in the decision-making process. When the decision is complicated, there’s a lot of uncertainty . . . and a bigger need for credibility.1
Regardless of need, all organizations should strive for credibility. Breaking down credibility into its two component parts allows us to see that credibility is at the heart of establishing relationships.
Credibility is a combination of two factors—expertise and trust. We’ve talked before about the role of trust in many of these relationship factors. People simply want to feel they can trust a business before opting-in to a relationship. In order for any relationship to happen, a trust-bond must form between trustor and trustee. But the question is how does that trust form? Some of that is based on intangibles, like reading body language (i.e., facial expressions). Another factor that impacts trust is authenticity. If the customer doesn’t feel like the salesperson is authentic (i.e., they are either “fake” or lying), trust can’t form. But trust is also influenced by expertise. Consumers want to form relationships with organizations that demonstrate they “know what they are talking about.” Expertise, then, is a representative’s perceived level of knowledge that is relevant to the buyer-seller relationship.2
Expertise and trust are deeply intertwined as “credibility” when it comes to relationships between buyers and sellers.3 And there is definitely a tangible impact when credibility isn’t there—in many instances a communication is only deemed credible if the sender is perceived as credible.4 Imagine having a sales floor full of inauthentic, uncredible associates. It would be a disaster for trying to build relationships!
According to recent studies by the Stanford Persuasive Technology lab,5 there are four types of credibility associated with how people perceive information they access through computer systems like the Internet:
Most organizations employ a variety of different kinds of credibility, sometimes reflecting the kind of service they provide to consumers. But it’s necessary to figure out what kind of credibility our audience expects of us. For example, a company selling widgets may have the foremost expert on widget science. Having this employee develop (or coauthor) content provides both reputed and surface credibility that could, over time, develop into experienced credibility.
Regardless of the kind of credibility that we want to create, generating credibility implies that we engender trust and demonstrate expertise with our audiences. Trust, we’ve already established, is about authenticity. It is about giving a “face” to the organization (perhaps a reflection of presumed, reputed, and surface credibility). Expertise, on the other hand, is all about the information we provide to our customers (a combination of surface and experienced credibility).
At Ogilvie’s, Kevin Whittemore and his associates are the “experts” of home improvement, painting, tools, plumbing, gardening, and everything else down the aisles of their store. What Ogilvie’s did very well was transition. As consumer expectations moved from cost to quality and from quality to service (or experience),a Ogilvie’s has changed with them. People who walk into their store aren’t there just because they stock the best quality screwdrivers at competitive prices. People are there because Ogilvie’s provides an experience built upon service and expertise.
To put it colloquially, “Those guys really know their stuff!”
Ogilvie’s demonstrates all four forms of credibility:
The result? Ogilvie’s appears authentic, thereby trustworthy, and relationships result, which are based on history and context. Are you starting to see how all of these fit together?
Creating the appearance of expertise requires an organization and its associates to not only to understand its products, but also its competitor’s products. Moreover, it must understand the challenges that people face who need its products. You can’t fake expertise.
And digital exposes that even more.
What information can’t we find on the Internet today? It seems that there is information on everything, from how-to videos on taking apart a garbage disposal to price transparency for buying a car. And the amount of available information continues to grow. It’s not uncommon for consumers to come into a retail environment, manila folder in hand, filled with printouts from various websites (although perhaps more savvy consumers simply put all that content into applications like Evernote6 or Pocket7 and bring in their tablet).
The problems with ubiquitous access to information are twofold. First, not all the information on the Internet is true. There are occasions when consumers will come into the retail environment with the wrong information. This can create a contentious interaction and actually undermine the potential relationship as the associate must try to invalidate the erroneous information. The second issue is that because of the raw quantity of information, associates cannot fake expertise (which goes back to the issue of authenticity—fake being an expert and you will be exposed).
The fact that the Internet can make anyone with some time to search an “expert” can actually help an organization develop credibility through a simple strategy—content marketing.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience—with the object of driving profitable customer action.”10
The difference between content marketing and what you might have been doing (by sending targeted emails) is that it’s noninterrupting. Content marketing is intended to foster communication with your audience without selling. For example, Limelight Networks worked with Wiley (the publishers of this book) on a corporate-sponsored Dummies title called Digital Presence For Dummies.11 Limelight intended this book to foster conversation with its audience, not sell services. As such, there is really no mention of Limelight in the content. Its content is intended to educate and inform the audience about their digital presence (which is also why it’s completely free in either print or electronic format).
The key with content marketing, though, is that it’s about owning media, not renting it. Many organizations leverage content that is already produced (say, a report by Gartner or Forrester) in demand-generation programs. This is not content marketing because the organization doesn’t own that report and its ultimate purpose is not to educate the audience but to support an organization’s point. One of the best examples of content marketing (from a small company) can be found in the Foreword to Jay Baer’s book Youtility—River Pools and Spas (which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 15). Content marketing is ultimately about helping your audience become smarter. It’s about educating them (to help develop expertise), thereby building trust upon which a relationship can be formed.
So, as organizations develop content marketing strategies and begin to publish helpful content, they also begin to establish their “experienced” credibility—consumers looking for information as part of the decision-making process (and before they go into the store) find the organization’s content and recognize the expertise. Of course, it helps to put a face on the content (it’s Bob from IT), especially when that face has a reputation (Bob’s known industry-wide for his IT awesomeness).
At the core of an organization’s digital-world credibility is content. Whether it is on our website or a third-party site (like YouTube or Slideshare), content is like the digital face of our organization. Each article, each word is like our virtual salesperson. It is like having an endless supply of associates out in the market, waiting to interact with customers who find them.
But it’s also the process of developing the content that creates expertise. As the organization huddles around the content creation process (i.e., sharing drafts, sharing information, etc.), valuable information surfaces—how the company’s products help overcome key challenges, what the challenges even are, how the products stack up against competitor products, and so on.
Just remember, though, as we have talked about before, content must be engaging as well as demonstrate expertise, which is why a lot of the content that an organization can develop should be story-based (and in video format).
On a brief side note, if the importance of creating great content was not obvious enough, it appears that Google and other search engines are making rapid strides to obliterate the notion of search engine optimization. In the near future, it likely will not be possible to optimize a website based on the number of times a string of terms is used. The search engines will be looking at the quality of the content itself, and at the way in which visitors are interacting with it. Better get that content marketing strategy kicked into gear now . . . before it is too late.
There are lots of ways that organizations can generate credibility—presumed, reputed, surface, and experienced. But regardless of the method by which an organization generates credibility, it all comes down to two things: trust and expertise. It’s pretty obvious that our audience will trust us more if they perceive we are experts. (Who wants to buy from the organization that doesn’t know what it’s talking about?) And, in the digital world, that expertise is generated through content—the face of the organization in the online world. Which means that we have to take content production seriously. It can’t be a little here, or a little there. It has to be a fundamental commitment by our organization. Because once we stop, our credibility can plummet, and getting back is, well, a Herculean task.
You want credibility. No, you need credibility. Why? Because from it flows the trust upon which you can build relationships. And, like we keep saying, these relationships are what will drive the success of your organization. Not only will they generate more long-term incremental sales, but they will also insulate you from your competitors. It’s hard to lose customers when they have a great relationship with you! Here are some helpful tips, tricks, techniques, and things you can do today. Note that these aren’t in any particular order.
Notes
1. Joseph J. Belonax Jr., Stephen J. Newell, and Richard E. Plank, “The Role of Purchase Importance on Buyer Perceptions of the Trust and Expertise Components of Supplier and Salesperson Credibility in Business-to-Business Relationships,” Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management 27, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 247–258.
2. Arun Sharma, “The Persuasive Effects of Salesperson Credibility: Conceptual and Empirical Examination,” Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management 10, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 71–80.
3. Galen R. Rarick, “Effects of Two Components of Communicator Prestige.” (PhD dissertation, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 1963).
4. Carl I. Hovland, Irving L. Janis, and Harold H. Kelley, Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Opinion Change (New Haven: Yale University Press).
5. Shawn Tseng and B. J. Fogg, “Credibility and Computing Technology,” Communications of the ACM 42, no. 5 (May 1999), www-bcf.usc.edu/~kwanminl/courses/comm631/readings/Tseng_Fogg(1999)_Credibility%20and%20computing%20technology_CACM.pdf.
9. www.kbb.com.
10. Content Marketing Institute, “What is Content Marketing?,” http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/.
11. This is a free book offered by Limelight Networks: http://dpm4dummies.limelight.com/.
12. We reference John Neeson in a number of chapters throughout this book. These references are from an interview conducted with John on September 17, 2013. You can find more information about John at www.siriusdecisions.com/live/home/document.php?dA=about&FID=Marketing.
13. We reference Nigel Dessau in a number of chapters throughout this book. These references are from an interview conducted with Nigel on September 16, 2013. You can find more information about Nigel at www.nigeldessau.com/.
aJames H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, in their book Authenticity, do an excellent job of explaining at a high-level the transition of the U.S. economy from agrarian to industrial to experience-based, and the corresponding business shift from competing on price to competing on availability to competing on service.
bFake reviews are a serious business, and state agencies have begun to crack down on them: www.huffingtonpost.com/alison-winter/weve-been-duped-the-fake-reviews-that-caused-you-to-dine-here-and-buy-that_b_3996870.html.