The Power of Personal

Trust is a basic building block of business.  Despite signing countless contracts, each of which was negotiated down to the last dotted i and crossed t, I’ve rarely if ever found myself in dispute with any of them.  That’s because contracts are essentially just the written record of an agreement and in business those agreements are normally reached through conversation, discussion and negotiation.  They involve building a relationship with another party. Unless that relationship creates trust there’s no contact to sign – you walk away.

It’s the same with brands. Whenever you buy anything you effectively enter into a contract; in return for your money, the seller provides you with the product, it will be of the quality described, and delivered on time to the right place. Trusted brands are those that you’ve already built a relationship with – that you trust to deliver.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the ‘power of personal’ - the importance of human interaction in an increasingly digitised world – but what exactly is this power?  Why does it matter? What difference does it make?

If you stop and think, trust is only required when there’s a risk; without risk there is no need for trust.  Put into our travel world, unless there’s a possibility that something is going to go wrong there’s no need to trust the brand you’re booking with. Customer perceptions of risk shift over time, sometimes in response to short term events - for example, in the aftermath of an airline failure or a natural disaster – and sometimes over a long period of time.  Booking online, initially perceived as risky is now perceived to be safer, so the need for trust is lower.

Broadly speaking, the cheaper and simpler the product, the lower the perceived risk for the customer; at a most basic level they have less to lose so the need for trust is diminished.  At Kuoni, the complexity of our product, the higher price point and very often the specialness of the occasion, mean that the consequences for the customer of something going wrong are high, so the level of trust placed in our brand is higher too.

We can point to our heritage, our long track record of getting things right and our passion for detail, but experience tells us that real trust is something that grows organically between people.  Of course customers will sometimes trust brands without any human interaction – just look at Google, Amazon and e-bay – but only when the risk of doing so is low.  When the risk is high, they want to build a relationship with the seller; to establish for themselves their trustworthiness.

And that’s the power of personal.  It’s why no one ever married someone they only ever chatted to on Facebook, and why speed dating has become the national sport of the unattached. When the time comes to take the big risks, you want to look someone in the eye and absolutely believe that you can trust them.