The trust economy: How peers, creators, and live audiences replaced the sales pitch

Just as e-commerce once represented an existential threat to the good old-fashioned shopping mall, the humble webpage is now competing for shoppers’ attention against the likes of TikTok Shop, ChatGPT, and an endless stream of creator content.

As new technologies and trends send buyers down different purchase pathways, an age-old principle is more relevant than ever: trust.

While the trust economy isn’t new, it’s adapting alongside the ways consumers are making purchase decisions—and brands and retailers have to do the same. As phenomena like AI slop sow distrust, experts said authenticity is more important than ever.

“What we’ve seen time and time again is, content that’s authentic performs best,” Vivien Garnès, co-CEO of influencer marketing platform Upfluence, told us. “And it’s not just a better look—I think it’s also a better use of your marketing dollars.”

The trust economy

Facets of the trust economy are all around us: an online review on a product page, a creator talking about an item on TikTok, or a conversation with a friend about a good or bad experience with a brand, according to Chris Ribeiro, founder of market research firm Starlight Analytics and a former customer analytics and insights leader at VF Corporation and PVH Corp.

Meanwhile, a flood of fake product reviews, bots, and AI-generated content is undercutting trust.

“There’s a whole cottage industry now of companies that are trying to buy their way into Reddit communities to talk about their product, to talk about their brand and their services,” Ribeiro told us. “So they plant comments, and then they plant people responding to those comments because they recognize that will help them show up on Google more favorably, or through search on ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude.”

“We’re entering a phase now where AI is making it more dangerous and giving less value to some elements of the trust economy, because now you don’t know what to trust,” he added.

Creators are the catalog

Influencer culture is nothing new, but the times are a-changin’: Driven by higher engagement rates and less marketing spend, brands are building out large, distributed networks of small-time creators rather than spending big on celebrity endorsements or influencers with massive followings.

This year, about 45% of brand spending on influencer marketing will go to creators with fewer than 20,000 followers, up from just 19.5% in 2021, Morning Brew recently reported, citing Emarketer research. And one-fifth of marketing spend will go to “nanoinfluencers” with fewer than 5,000 followers.

“It used to be that it was 10 times easier to work with one-tenth of the creators than 10x the creators,” Garnès said. “Now it’s, how do you maximize for ROI and not necessarily for time spent, and it is a lot more efficient and effective to work with large volumes of very small creators and target that long tail of the creator distribution.”

Spending smaller amounts on individual creator deals can also help build trust, according to Garnès, because those influencers may feel more empowered to give their honest take on a product.

This approach has its challenges, Ribeiro noted, because it requires more management. Brands have to vet each and every creator, ensure their content aligns with the brand’s values, and look for signs of fake content.

In terms of how brands are using influencers in their distribution strategies today, Garnès described a spectrum: On one end, brands use creators as a distribution channel, and on the other, brands go so far as to co-create products with influencers or give them equity ownership.

“That really contributes to creating content that’s authentic, that’s genuine,” he said, “and what we’ve seen is that time and time again, this outperforms content that is just being distributed basically as if the creator was a human billboard.”

While creators can provide one type of trust signal, retailers and brands can also build trust via strategies like offering robust customer support and a strong money-back guarantee.

“My recommendation usually is to go all-out on any trust signals you can rightfully put out to the world,” Garnès said.

Everyone’s a reviewer

To effectively leverage user-generated content, experts agreed: Be real. Don’t fake it.

Ribeiro recalled that when he worked for VF Corporation, a creator posted a video talking about getting drenched in a rain jacket from the apparel company’s North Face brand. Instead of ignoring or pushing back on the negative attention, the brand did a campaign to make things right and ended up getting positive attention for their response.

“Not trying to wash over some of the tarnish, I think, is good,” Ribeiro said. “Encourage people to be honest about things. Actually listening to what they have to say, responding in a way that’s real and not overly polished, I think you get credit for that stuff.”

Eli Goodman, president and co-founder of clickstream data provider Datos, cautioned brands against trying to game the system by, for example, having bots write reviews for their products.

Organically building trust is also important in an increasingly AI-driven retail environment, he noted: “It’s very important to have as many people talking about how trustworthy you are, or your product, or your service, or whatever it may be, so that AIs pick it up.”

“Where can I buy…?”

The rising popularity of LLMs is changing the buying journey for many consumers, and forcing brands and retailers to adapt to a world in which traditional search is competing against chatbots. According to a recent report from Datos, it’s now common for consumers to toggle between search engines, social sites, e-commerce platforms, AI assistants, online communities, and brand websites while they’re shopping.

AI is still a small, but growing, source of overall traffic, according to the report, with AI-generated visits representing about one-tenth the volume of traditional search and half the volume of e-commerce site visits.

The upshot? AI isn’t replacing traditional retail channels, but it’s playing an influential role in consumers’ purchase journeys.

The Datos report detailed strategies for brands seeking AI attention. It suggested they create pages and comparison tables targeting a competitor, including an explanation of why their brand is a better choice. It also encouraged brands to seek customer reviews on video, which can then be shared on social media with “detailed, searchable language” to attract AI attention.

“The brands that win are optimizing for high-intent language while still anticipating questions potential customers will face,” SEO and marketing expert Edward Sturm wrote in the report, “[and] ensuring positive reviews are distributed across platforms.”

Shopping the live feed

Retailers likely know that scroll shopping is at least as common as window shopping: More than 90 million US adults have been exposed to livestream shopping, according to market research company MRI-Simmons.

This presents an opportunity for brands, according to the firm. Livestream buyers are 60% more likely than the average US adult to click on video ads in apps for the displayed products, and are more receptive to scanning QR codes, reflecting “a clear call to pair video placements with frictionless checkout paths.”

Reducing friction is key when brands have just seconds to capitalize on limited attention spans.

“You gotta hook ’em and you gotta hook ’em fast,” Goodman said.

IRL shopping

As for those dire predictions about the fate of the shopping mall, some have proven correct. In other cases, retailers have evolved to offer compelling in-person shopping experiences.

Instead of prime real estate being the key element that makes a brick-and-mortar store stand out, “trust is now the differentiator,” Jessica Gangoso, VP of emerging brands at real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, wrote on LinkedIn.

Gangoso encouraged brands designing physical spaces to get customers’ attention “through atmosphere, energy, and cultural relevance, not just product”; find ways to hold their attention; and get them to share the experience “organically.”

“The most compelling retail environments are starting to behave less like static stores and more like platforms with calendars that have evolved beyond fashion seasonality and more toward frequent drops, collaborations, and community moments,” Gangoso wrote, “giving consumers a reason to return over and over again.”

Because many shoppers are starting the purchase process online, stores are seeing customers come in with a list in mind of what they want to look at, according to Ribeiro: “The store is playing a role as the channel to try/verify versus one that was primarily focused on discovery.”

The online shopping experience consumers have gotten used to has also forced some changes to in-store shopping, such as offering omni-pricing, as well as conveniences like buying online and picking up in-store, showing star ratings on certain products in the store, and showing real-time inventory levels.

“An effective experience is getting the basics right with the tech—being able to see inventory in that store before showing up, empowering associates with customer information so they can be effective at servicing them,” Ribeiro said, and “treating customer returns from online purchases as opportunities instead of burdens.”