Chapter 14

Maintaining Credibility

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.

What Is Credibility?

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!

Four Types of Credibility

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:

1. Presumed: This kind of credibility is based on general assumptions in the perceiver’s mind, mostly from preconceived notions, making this kind of credibility very difficult to manipulate.
2. Reputed: This kind of credibility stems from third parties. For example, people will generally assign credibility to a Nobel Prize winner.
3. Surface: This kind of credibility is based on inspection and initial judgments. This has a lot to do with perceptions and consistency. If our digital presence looks like a monkey with a box of crayons created it, it will impact the perception of our credibility even if our content is awesome and helpful. As they say, appearance matters.
4. Experienced: This kind of credibility is built over time and is a reflection of good, quality content. The simplest way to maintain it is to keep producing good, quality content.

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.

Creating 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:

1. Presumed: People who walk in off the street and see the inside of the store (or encounter an associate) presume expertise (it may start with the store name).
2. Reputed: Some people come in at the recommendation from a friend, so there is already reputed credibility.
3. Surface: The layout of the store and the behavior of the associates might generate immediate surface credibility (especially if the associate handling the paint counter is covered in swatch colors).
4. Experienced: Repeat customers swear by Ogilvie’s expertise, claiming that no one knows their products better.

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.

In the Digital World, Everybody Is an Expert

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).

How Information Availability Transformed Retail Automotive
Before the Internet, the retail automotive industry was neck deep in horrible sales culture. Salespeople were skilled in deceptive tactics (like throwing keys on the roof and “losing” someone’s license). Through an anxiety-filled process that could have the consumer at the store for 10 hours, buying a car was often considered a worse experience than getting a root canal. But all that changed with the Internet. With companies like Edmunds8 and Kelley Blue Book,9 a breakdown of cost soon became available to any consumer—the “invoice price” of the vehicle, shipping costs, dealer holdback, marketing, and advertising. Everything was laid bare by digital. Today, you can even get black book pricing on the Internet.
It wasn’t long before consumers began marching into showrooms with their manila folders stuffed full of printouts from various websites tucked underneath their arms. Although it didn’t happen overnight, dealerships soon began to recognize that if they were going to “move the steel,” they needed to accept that their position of power through obfuscation was at an end (much of the dealer revenue is folded into Finance and Insurance (F&I) and Service rather than the car itself). Departments like “Internet sales” began to spring up in dealerships across the United States to deal with these new consumers, and even manufacturers, like General Motors, got on board with the first manufacturer-sponsored online automotive buying site, GM BuyPower.

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.

What Is 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.

Content Marketing Needs a Content Strategy
Content marketing is one of those buzzwords that every organization can get behind because of its simplicity:
  • Make good content.
  • Publish it in as many places on the Internet as you can.
  • People will come to you.
Reminds us a little of Field of Dreams. Unfortunately, that’s how a lot of marketers feel and although it’s good in theory, it’s not necessarily true in practice, which can lead to a big problem down the road.
“A lot of digital marketing can manifest itself into a huge content mess,” says John Neeson, managing director and cofounder of SiriusDecisions. “That’s where those who are pretty smart have begun to realize that they have to think this through, about how they are going to design the content, manage the content, and figure out where it’s going to be. Content marketing needs a strategy.”12
Organizations need a strategy even before they put that first pencil to paper (think of it like this—content for organizations is a coin; on one side is marketing and on the other side is strategy). But a strategy for content marketing isn’t just about what kind of content to write or at whom to target it. It’s also about the why—Why is the organization going to benefit from each piece of content they publish (and why are they publishing it in the first place)? Below are some common questions that an organization might ask itself as it develops a strategy for its content marketing:
  • How do we want to help people? How can we develop a voice?
  • How will we engage with our audience and who will be in charge of that conversation?
  • Where, and how often, are we going to publish the content?
  • In what part of the buyer’s journey will our content be most helpful? Will it solve decision-making challenges? Or will it solve consideration challenges?
  • How do all the content elements fit together to create a cohesive picture of organizational credibility? Does the content tell a story (of the consumer solving his or her problem)?
By answering questions such as these, an organization can avoid that “huge content mess”—lots of content elements posted in a lot of different channels without a lot of connection between them.

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).

Great Content = Digital Credibility

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.

Good Content Means Knowing Your Audience
Nigel Dessau, the CMO at Stratus (and former CMO at AMD), believes that all organizations can establish digital credibility through the “Three Cs”: communities, conversations, and content.
“At AMD, we founded our core theme around the importance of graphics to the total user experience,” says Nigel. “Rather than trying to tell that story to enough people hoping that somebody would eventually buy, we researched the market and discovered we actually had two very distinct audiences.”13
What Nigel did at AMD was first to understand his community—recognizing that it was dividing into two distinct audiences. Once he accomplished that, the next step was to figure out the right conversations to have with those two audiences.
“One of the audiences we dubbed ‘processor aware,’” he says. “These were a small group of 25 million gamers, DIY computer builders, and technology aficionados. The second group of over 6 billion, we dubbed ‘processor unaware,’ and basically represented everyone else.”
Rather than try to have a conversation with everyone (i.e., be everything to everyone), Nigel got focused as he executed on the last C: content.
“We chose to focus on the first audience, with its distinct communities, water coolers, beliefs, mores. We appealed to their interest in the gaming and graphical user experience by offering them facts and solid test results that let them convince themselves that raw processor speed was not the key to great user experience. We engaged them when and where they were ready. Our theme was appreciate the power of the graphics processors, something we were distinctly good at delivering.”

Summing It Up

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.

Helpful Takeaways

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.

  • Include attribution in your content. Who wrote what? And not even just your blog posts, but your web pages as well. Give everything an identity. Generally speaking, people are more likely to trust other people than to trust a computer, so presumed credibility can be heightened by stressing the human nature of the posts. For example, including a picture or some background information about bloggers might make it easier for readers to see the people behind the posts.
  • Create a network of content. Especially with Google’s recent changes in how they rank sites and pages, you need to demonstrate to both your audience (and the search engines) that your content is relevant and meaningful. The best way to do that is by having other websites link to your content. When you do this, you not only extend your credibility into the far reaches of the web, but you demonstrate to your audience that other sites trust your content.
  • Don’t try to manipulate credibility. It’s easy to do so with fake reviews, fake names, and so on. But, like we said in Chapter 13, all secrets get “outed.” Many a reputation has been destroyed after discovering fake reviews were at the heart of an organization’s success.b
  • Keep producing content. Developing credibility can’t be a six-month project or a yearlong endeavor. You have to commit to it. You have to keep producing credible content. And that shouldn’t come as a surprise if you are committed to cultivating relationships (remember, in the digital world, your content is your sales associate). Once credibility has been lost, it is almost impossible to get it back as visitors simply stop coming to the site.

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.

6. www.evernote.com.

7. http://getpocket.com.

8. www.edmunds.com.

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.

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