Richard Madden, Chief Strategy Officer at Kitcatt Nohr Digitas, has been reading my book and shares his thoughts on brand and business trust in his regular Marketing Week column.

Listen to this Engaging Brand podcast with me and Anna Farmery where we explore brands, trust, business and social capital, all subjects covered in my new book Why Should Anyone Buy From YOU?

Apple's Cupertino event today will raise more questions than answers. The pressure was immense - would they or wouldn't they announce an iPhone 5? The news was mixed and the signals this sends to customers, employees, the media and investors potentially indicate things may not be all well at this icon of our modern age.

Commanding higher fees and more loyalty from your clients is crucial to any freelancer. We all want people talking about our services and enough work to pick and choose. If you want to achieve this there is one thing that you should put at the heart of your relationship with your clients and that is trust.

Most corporate mission statements are full of stereo-typical and generic promises that mean little to anyone connected with them in anyway. They rarely tell you what the businesses does or what it cares about.Perhaps it is time to sit back and think up powerful mission statements that represent the truth and then ask whether this truth inspires you to get up in the morning and go to work.

The CRM relational database might be easier to manage, develop and measure, but it's the relationship quality that makes the difference. Where is the balance of effort and expense in your business - on the system or the people?

It's often the subtle, cheap to implement signals that you build into a product which break the price-value equation for the consumer giving your product an advantage in the competitive marketplace.

Gone are the days when brands were just guarantees of product quality assuring the consumer of safety and efficacy. Nowadays, given almost universally high product quality and often strong regulation to underwrite it, brands take on myriad other roles in consumers’ minds

Walking among strangers in an unfamiliar place has always had a certain piquancy to it…but these uneasy feelings are now more and more common even as we make our way around our own communities and countries.

More than half of all three-year-olds in America have a T.V. in their rooms, rising to two-thirds by age six, with the average hours watched daily as high as five. What responsibility does this put on marketing and marketers today?

Consumers today are becoming more empowered, demanding and raising the bar. As they peer behind the messages into the companies generating them they are rapidly concluding that they can’t trust businesses, their brands, their advertising and above all their motivations. Marketers in turn will have to take on the responsibility not just for driving sales but commit their brands to building positive social capital and through this finally regain trust.

He was fighting for a higher power over and above any personal gain and taking risks to deliver, these behaviours compelled people to trust Nelson in the most difficult of situations. And whilst the business landscape today is an altogether different battlefield, brands and businesses need a framework of beliefs and behaviours that can guide them through to trust.

Financial advertising has continued to be dominated by the ‘people dancing down the beach happily,’ or happy-go-lucky sort of creative. Focusing overly on the positive means that the realities of life are largely denied in marketing. The risk is that brands become even more fantastic and less about solving day-to-day issues.

Trust matters because it is trust that is at the heart of every brand. Here we give you 5 reasons on why trust matters in for an organization, business and brand.

Rory Sutherland, Chairman, Ogilvy and Mather on the value of consumers, employees and shareholders in the business and why trust takes a backseat in businesses today.

Toshio Yamagishi from the University of Japan created a series of experiments to examine the question: Are people who trust dumb?Through thousands of questions asked to students and several experiments conducted with them, he found that far from being an irrational thing to do, trust is in fact a skill honed by the highly intelligent.

“All institutions, but especially financial services ignore a lack of trust at their peril. There is often a dichotomy between what companies say they are about and what they actually do – their actions and their words are different. Organisations need to be more forensic about their activities, the impact of their actions and how they are perceived.”

The picture of who we trust: Over the 16 years between 1993 and 2009 Ipsos MORI in its ‘Trust in Doctor: Annual Survey of public trust in professions (2009)’ measured a 22% decrease in the trust held in business leaders and a 10% decline in the trust held in politicians. Even the trust ascribed to the ordinary man or woman in the street saw a 16% fall.

Watch Steve Jobs delivering an Apple presentation to witness a brand completely in control of the development and evolution of their narrative. Don’t fall into the short-sighted trap of focusing on one campaign at a time, especially when the pressure is to acquire new customers or drive volume. Any new communication must be seen within the context of past and future promises.